Digital Digressions

Lives in-between and the importance of Flow

Recently my life as become to resemble what I call my life in-between, rather than life proper. What do I mean? Life in-between is what happens between all the work, deadlines, travel and to-dos, which is also aggravated by the fact that my partner is in exactly the same situation. We meet at home in the evening, both tired and exhausted by the various things preoccupying our minds and life in general seems to be on hold. This weekend is a prime example. Both of us are trying to squeeze life in between all the work we have to do as well.

So what are the consequences? A sense of 'floating', a disconnect, a desire to grab hold of things and make meaning out of them as a reaction to the things neither one of us are in control of. Talk about life balance, currently it seems that we just rush from one deliverable to the next. It is surreal in many ways, and I've noticed I tend to counter this avalanche of expectations by obsessively immersing myself in things I do have some level of control over, such as cycling, fettling with the set-up of my bike or other technical interests. It's really a knee-jerk reaction to a sense of frustration of not being able to grasp hold of the things that influence my life. In fact, fettling with my bike is really a deliberate quest for Flow.

What is Flow? Flow is a phenomenon first described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which refers to the notion of ideal experiences, a sense of self-absorption where one is deeply engaged in an activity where one is learning, exercising one's creativity and altering one's sense of time. These are the moments in life that give us our fondest memories, where we truly find meaning and a sense of progression as individuals and when Flow is missing from our lives, we feel out-of-sync, frustrated and have a sense of our lives lacking meaning. Csikszentmihalyi lists a set of characteristics that define flow as follows:

1. There is a heightened concentration and focus, involving all one's senses
2. One's sense of time is altered
3. One is touched emotionally
4. The process is unique for the individual and has intrinsic value
5. There is contact with the 'raw' stuff, the real thing
6. One does something and undergoes something
7. There is a sense of playfulness
8. One has a feeling of having control of the situation
9. There is a balance between the challenge and one's own capacities
10. There is a clear goal

Every meaningful experience must satisfy all of these criteria and that is no easy task. This is where I believe many companies fail and many jobs are inherently in conflict with the above, because of how jobs are divided between departments, the reporting structures, the politics and whatnot. It is simply hard to find a task with the appropriate amount of scope, depth and progression to match an individual's needs all the time. This is no excuse for companies not trying to achieve a greater sense of flow in the jobs they offer, because flow leads to greater productivity, a more satisfied workforce and a more healthy, transparent and successful organisation, where passion is high among employees.
In the meantime, we must also realise as individuals that Flow is so important in our lives, we cannot leave it to bosses, companies or co-workers alone to find the perfect framework for it, we need to actively participate in this process ourselves.

Moreover, as reality will have it our working lives will not be a 100% perfect a 100% of the time and  that is why it is so important for us to have our hobbies and interests beside the work we do too. These interests help define us as individuals, they are an opportunity for us to engage in satisfying the criteria above on our own terms, rather than rendering control of all the opportunities for the creation of Flow to a third party, such as our employers, partners, family or friends. I'm not saying it is impossible for a company, partner, friend etc. to be part of creating a moment of Flow with us, what I am saying is that Flow is so important we must assume responsibility ourselves for making sure we have an opportunity to experience it on our own terms in an area we are interested in.

People call it many different things, whether it is 'me-time', having your own shed, staking out your independence, ultimately these are steps towards creating the mental and physical space for us to make it possible to engage in moments of Flow around the interest we are passionate about. That is something no partner, family or employer should take away from us and those who do not have it, it is an open challenge to find it. You will need it, sooner or later. Life is more than just the in-between.

The Irony of Perception

Last week I attended the annual Marketing Forum, which is a 3-day event out on a cruise ship -  a match-making exercise of sorts where clients and suppliers meet for a good shindig and hopefully come away with tons of lucrative business and plenty of useful contacts. This was a first for me so I didn't know quite what to expect - part of me was quite wary at the prospect of people pitching at me for three solid days with no obvious escape in sight - you are pretty trapped in a cruise ship. Equally the three days were peppered with seminars and various key-note speeches, some more interesting than others.

The worst seminar I attended was by a lady who calls herself an image consultant. This I regretted almost immediately after walking into the room, but being a good citizen and a representative of my company I had to be polite and sat down. Why did I choose this subject? Good question. The blurb explaining the seminar talked a lot about the people being the real brand of an organisation, the advocates, if you like and this I agree with. A lot of business is conducted primarily by people with people so how your staff is perceived has a big impact on how your company is perceived. In my opinion a lot of this has to do with motivation and people genuinely believing they are doing something worth while - so mistakenly I assumed this is what the seminar would be about. How to breathe fire into your colleagues and co-workers to stop the fait accompli and get people passionate about companies and the strategy ahead.

How wrong was I. Unfortunately the seminar was all about telling people how to dress, classifying people into 'clowns', 'hermit crabs' and 'wet lettuces' and promoting your own 'personal brand'. Ok there are things to be said about dressing well and dealing with issues of personal hygiene, but once you have polished the surface you are still stuck with the person within. Shallow personality make-overs won't fix the fact that if you aren't happy, productive and feeling empowered and fulfilled - your company won't exactly reach to the stars either. What was particularly grating to sit through was her way of skimming through issues of personality: you should APPEAR to have honesty, integrity and knowledge - what's wrong with BEING honest and knowledgeable I wonder. Talking about people, personalities and perception in terms of personal branding makes it sound like you apply a veneer of polish on top of a dysfunctional product where what you see is actually not what you get at all - the inflated 'advertising campaign' is nothing but hot air. I can see how this is popular with companies though - send your people on a course like this to polish off the rough edges and avoid dealing with the bigger issues of motivation, silo-like structures that promote herd-like behaviour and antique command-and-control culture. Organisational transformation is infinitely more difficult (but ultimately more rewarding both for people and for profit margins) than simply telling people what type of collar best compliments their face.

Perception can in fact work against you completely as I learnt today accidentally reading the news. The BBC reports of a study carried out by Dr. Ian Walker of Bath University, which proves that people who wear a bicycle helmet are in fact more accident prone than those who don't. Sounds completely contrary doesn't it? The explanation seems to lie in perception - if you wear a helmet, motorists feel more confident passing you closer than they would when you don't wear one. And better still, if you wear a wig and look like a woman, they give you the biggest space of all on the road. Why? Because female cyclists are rarer on the roads and are perceived as more 'erratic' riders than lycra-clad road warriors. How ironic. So forget my racing kit and cycle shorts, next time I'm going out in a skirt and wig with a wicker basket on the front.

Joking aside, I have actually found that once I invested in a racing bike I get more 'respect' on the road from motorists who are less inclined to cut me up because they reckon I'm going faster than your average Sunday cyclist. This is good, and also they give me way rather than squeezing me to the side of the road. On a race bike I have no problems whatsoever keeping up with traffic and often being a  lot faster than it because of all the traffic jams, but I must say that this finding about helmets does make me laugh. Dr. Watson does point out though that for low-speed impacts, helmets are very useful and thus kids should definitely be wearing them - but then I think any motorist or even pedestrian is paranoid about hurting anybody's children.

7 Free Software LifeSavers

Having spent an unreasonable amount of time recently fiddling around with editing video, dealing with ridiculously large files and trying to convert one thing into another I thought I'd break with the norm on this blog and share with you what have become my software life savers recently. The Internet is awash with useful utilities for nearly everything and the kitchen sink - some free and some not free, some truly lifesaving, some moderately useful and eventually quite useless, when you discover that the one thing you REALLY needed to do - this nifty app won't handle. So the criteria for my list of lifesavers?

1. They have to be FREE. Free is good. Free builds good Karma. More things in life should be free. Some lifesavers are - so anybody charging money, take heed!
2. They have to be truly USEFUL - no one-trick ponies here. Just because they are free they shouldn't be useless, just the opposite in fact.

Sound simple enough? Well, you will be surprised to know that most programs that are truly useful aren't free and those that are free stop being free when they begin to be truly useful, so this paradox will make my list fairly short. And as I'm only a mere mortal, I would like to tap into the hive of knowledge out there amongst you readers - please let me know of other truly USEFUL applications out there that are also FREE. Love is there to be shared.

So here comes list in no particular order.

1. SUPER
   Super is a small program with lifesaver written all over it. It hosts an impressive list of formats, both audio and video and it is a very capable converter between virtually anything. Bonus is that it is free. So stuck not getting any sound from your MPG files once you bring them into Premiere? Look no further. Want video on your phone? Again, Super will come to the rescue. Fancy seeing films on your Video Ipod? Convert anything and everything to Ipodformat right here. Simply fantastic, but sadly PC only.
2. YouSendIt
   Having to share big files? Tired of trying to figure out where to deposit files for others to download? This nifty (and again free) web-based application allows you to register, upload your chunky file (up to 100 MB) and send your friend the link in an email. What could be simpler? And this one I particularly like, because it is cross-platform.
3. FIREFOX
   FireFox is not new, but it is arguably the most flexible and user-friendly web-browser out there. Why? Because of its continuously expanding library of extensions and plug-ins which allow you to do anything from downloading Youtube videos right to your desktop, to hiding your tracks while surfing to many more handy features. These extensions keep growing on a daily basis and one of my favourites is Down-Them-All, a great extension to help you download stuff faster. Needless to say, FireFox is cross-platform.
   
4. NETVOUZ
   Is your favourites list on the computer beginning to resemble a study in chaos theory? Moreover - are you surfing the web on different computers, one at work, one at home? Or have you ever inadvertently lost all your favourites in a system re-install? Netvouz is one example of a very handy little web application that allows you to import all your favourites from any and every browser you use, regardless of platform, grade your links on a scale of 1 to 5, describe them - share them (if you want to) or just have them as a private link-log for your own backup. Another great detail is the fact that you can search the links to find what you are after, instead pf trawling the hundreds of links you may have logged. Browser-independent and cross-platform.
5. MOONEDIT
   Want to take live meeting notes, but struggle to both take dictation, edit the content, remove errors and insert comments? Why not use a little help from your friends and this little tool that allows you to share the chore of live note taking amongst a group and collaborate on the same file in real-time. Sadly only for PCs at the moment.
   
6. TIDDLYSPOT
   Fancy your very own Wikipedia page on a subject you adore? Or even a way of capturing information and collaborating on it with your friends? Or a digital notebook that can grow to contain both links, images, quotes and content of your choice? What about keeping a live to-do list of everything on your mind, regardless of computer platform? TiddlySpot offers a wide range of different spins on TiddlyWikis (personal Wikis), that you can store both on and offline as well as some hybrid solutions incorporating David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology in a tidy electronic solution, such as MonkeyGTD. Again free, cross-platform and REALLY useful. Start logging all that information now!
7. VYEW
   Vyew is a browser-based online collaboration platform that allows you to share presentations, visuals, text, whatever your mind can dream up, right from your desktop, without having to download a single thing. You can annotate things, have a live text chat and even busy yourself with a telephone conference all at the same time. Did I mention it was free? And cross-platform?

So there we are - my 5 pence on the subject of useful programs. Please feel free to share what you deem as Software Lifesavers!

Brickfest 2006 High-lights

LEGO is not just for kids - it's a creative medium capturing the imagination of people regardless of age and background and a means of showcasing some true talent and ingenuity - just check out these MOCs (my own creations) from Brickfest 2006, a recent gathering of LEGO enthusiasts in Vienna, Virginia, USA.

What made this event so memorable for me was how warmly and kindly we LEGO people were greeted by all and how everyone was so open and willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences, suggestions for improvement etc. This was enormously inspiring and has injected all of us with bags of enthusiasm and passion to do more to support the amazing talent, creativity, skill and ingenuity that frankly had me humbled.

 

Recognising The True Face of the Community

A brilliant article this morning discusses Who Writes Wikipedia - who are the people behind this wonderful on-line resource of free, continuously growing information on everything and the kitchen sink.

..The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia," Jimbo Wales notes, "is that it's some emergent phenomenon -- the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing -- thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work. But, he insists, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization.

Wales presents these claims as comforting. Don't worry, he tells the world, Wikipedia isn't as shocking as you think. In fact, it's just like any other project: a small group of colleagues working together toward a common goal. But if you think about it, Wales's view of things is actually much more shocking: around a thousand people wrote the world's largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this really be true?

Aaron Swartz continues with a brilliant investigation into the true workings of Wikipedia, only to find that Wales' theories of who really are the heavy-weights behind Wikipedia don't hold water:

..I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version. Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article. .. When you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.

...When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

...Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to meet-ups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the back-burner, assuming they're even proposed. Out of sight is out of mind, so it's a short hop to thinking these invisible people aren't particularly important. Thus Wales's belief that 500 people wrote half an encyclopedia. Thus his assumption that outsiders contribute mostly vandalism and nonsense.

This article brings up a dangerous side to communities and working with the perceived 'elite' - a gradually growing convenience of associating only with the people you 'know' and dealing with them above and beyond those who also hold great potential, but are less fanatic in keeping in touch with you. How do you make sure you don't substitute quality for quantity, but make sure people can choose the intensity of the interaction themselves and not be ignored as a result?

How to get around it? An effort like Wikipedia could be called a co-creation experience - people who are part of submitting information to Wikipedia are co-creating its contents with the people who, as Aaron Swartz found, are mainly editing the submissions. Recognising both means recognising that Wikipedia is like any community - an 'experience environment' where people together influence the experience they have of it. The challenge is improving the act of co-creation, enabling more of it and making it more rewarding. The following can be seen as levers for experience innovation, or principles to use when growing, improving and extending a co-creation experience:

Granularity
People should be able to interact with a community or experience environment at any desired level of specificity, immersing themselves in experiences over time and in what ever way they choose. From an organisation perspective it is about the ability to design an experience environment, or community where interactions can occur at different levels of aggregation and richness - and not one favoured above the other.

Extensibility
How can technologies, channels or modes of delivery allow people to experience established functions in new ways, as well as create new functionality. In the case of Wikipedia - how can the process of creating and accessing content on Wikipedia be improved to enable a broader, more rewarding experience for all those whose voice isn't currently heard?

Linkage
Events connect in multiple ways from a user point of view. Therefore a collection of related events and not just a single event affects the quality of a co-creation experience. From the Wikipedia point of view: what makes you want to come back and do more - how can Wikipedia encourage its community to grow beyond the 500 recognised die-hards, that Jimbo Wales so enthuses about? What are the links that will enable that?

Evolvability
Can the learning be captured from the co-creation experience and used to develop better environments that shape themselves to people's needs and preferences, not the other way around. Aron Swartz' program was a tell-tale illustration of the blinkered view held by Jimbo Wales and his current 'elite' community - what are the tools to capture learning which is less skewed, more accurate and will help the likes of Wales to direct his attention not just to those he likes to hang out with, but also all those whose input isn't recognised by a skewed award system?

Looking at the points above, things aren't looking great for Wikipedia. Jimbo Wales needs to get out of the 'elitist' mindset and start thinking about how to make things more rewarding for individuals, regardless of whether they are in his 'in-crowd' or not. The 'in-crowd' may provide the intensity of interaction, but not necessarily the longevity and for sustainability, you need both.

The Power of the Community

Just back on the Red-Eye from Vienna, Virginia, US - the location for the 2006 Brickfest, an annual gathering of LEGO enthusiasts and an absolutely superb event tying together the LEGO Group with its vast community. Three full-on days of awe-inspiring models, jaw-dropping functionality and ingenious contraptions to name but a few types of creations on display, accompanied by a group of individuals from vastly different backgrounds, each with amazing stories to tell and all joined together in an ability to create stunning things from LEGO. Creativity is a language. It is a mission as well as a calling and it connects people as a mind-set, a view of the world underpinned by optimism, kindness, a willingness to help and share, together making things better. It is this warmth and positivity that greeted all of us LEGO employees when joining the party and became the foundation of so many discussions and meetings throughout the three days.

Things are truly changing. We are all becoming infected with the ideas, the enthusiasm, the spirit of the community - as a company we are also getting better at understanding and listening to our enthusiasts, engaging them in dialogue as equals and doing our share to improve the things that still need work. It is hard not to get swept away by the excitement as our CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, is revolutionalising the way both fans and employees relate to the head of the company, by being so open, taking the time to talk to anyone and everyone, regardless of rank or background - his warmth has infused the Company with confidence and an openness that is now extending out to the community and embracing them in ways we never did before.

It's not that community building is a new thing for us, it's that before we could have done more to support it and to understand that we simply can't do it on our own - these people are our lifeblood, they keep us on the straight and narrow, they push us when we get complacent, they inspire us when we feel down, they are our family and all of us are joined in the pursuit of creating meaning through creativity. In this LEGO is more of a medium than simply a product, it is the platform for realising your imagination.

Guy Kawasaki writes a great piece about creating a community and it highlights many of the things we have already been doing, but also a few things I believe we should do more of. In so many ways we are fortunate, the LEGO brick, which inherently has many of the criteria for creating a meaningful community - namely the open-endedness where kids, adults and enthusiasts alike can create anything from it and very little is predetermined or cannot be customised. This very fact means there are literally millions if not billions of creations out there, more can be made, shared and discussed and all of them are testaments to the creativity, ingenuity and talent of the people behind the creations.

Quoting Guy's excellent post:

1. Create something worth building a community around. This is a repeated theme in my writing: the key to evangelism, sales, demoing, and building a community is a great product. Frankly, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried. By contrast, it’s hard to build a community around mundane and mediocre crap no matter how hard you try.
2. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately! Most companies are stupid: they go for months and then are surprised: “Never heard of them. You mean there are groups of people forming around our products?” If you have a great product, then pro-act: find the thunderlizards and ask them to build a community. (Indeed, if you cannot find self-appointed evangelists for your product, you may not have created a great product.) If it is a great product, however, just the act of asking these customers to help you is so astoundingly flattering that they’ll help you.
3. Assign one person the task of building a community. Sure, many employees would like to build a community, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if she doesn’t build a community?” A community needs a champion—an identifiable hero and inspiration—from within the company to carry the flag for the community. Therefore, hire one less MBA and allocate this headcount to a community champion. This is a twofer: one less MBA and one great community.
4. Give people something concrete to chew on. Communities can’t just sit around composing love letters to your CEO about how great she is. This means your product has to be “customizable,” “extensible,” and “malleable.” Think about Adobe Photoshop: if it weren’t for the company's plug-in architecture, do you think its community would have developed so quickly? However, giving people something to chew on requires killing corporate hubris and admitting that your engineers did not create the perfect product. Nevertheless, the payoff is huge because once you get people chewing on a product, it’s hard to wrest it away from them.
5. Create an open system. There are two requirements of an open system first, a “SDK” (software development kit). This is software-weenie talk for documentation and tools to supplement a product; second, APIs (application programming interfaces). This is more software-weenie talk for an explanation of how to access the various functions of a product, and it’s typically part of a good SDK. I’m using software terminology here, but the point is that you need to provide people with the tools and information to tweak your product whether it is Photoshop, an iPod, or a Harley-Davidson. Here's a non-tech example: An open system school would enable parents to teach courses and provide a manual (SDK) for parents to understand how to do so.
6. Welcome criticism. Most companies feel warm and fuzzy towards their communities as long as these communities toe the line by continuing to say nice things, buying their products, and never complaining. The minute that the community says anything negative, however, companies freak out and pull back their community efforts. This is a dumb-ass thing to do. A company cannot control its community. This is a long-term relationship, so the company shouldn’t file for divorce at the first sign of possible infidelity. Indeed, the more a company welcomes—even celebrates criticism—the stronger its bonds to its community.
7. Foster discourse. The definition of “discourse” is a verbal exchange. The key word here is “exchange.” Any company that fosters community building should also participate in the exchange of ideas and opinions. At the basic level of community building, your website should provide a forum where customers can engage in discourse with one another as well as with the company's employees. At the bleeding edge of community building, your CEO participates in community events too. This doesn't mean that you let the community run your company, but you should listen to what they have to say.
8. Publicize the existence of the community. If you’re going to all the trouble of catalyzing a community, don’t hide it under a bushel. Your community should be an integral part of your sales and marketing efforts. Check out, for instance, this part of the Harley-Davidson web site dedicated to the HOG (Harley Owners Group). If you search for “user group” (with quotes) at Apple’s site, you get 112 matches. (The same search at Microsoft’s site yields 16,925 matches—I’m still pondering what this means!)

The Challenge of Finding Balance

As you may have noticed my posts have been rather scarce recently and I would like to apologise. My new job has swept me up completely with travel, meetings, writing proposals, trying to do about a million things all at once. It's great, enjoying myself hugely and the challenges ahead of me, but equally there is a nagging thought in the back of my mind trying to remind me about balance. Balance in the sense of finding the time to do the things that keep us sane, the things that form part of our identity other than work, things that give us respite and allow us to remain ourselves despite the growing demand on our time and energy. I like to call it soul-food myself, but perhaps you could also talk about me-time, or hobbies, or whatever you like to call it that signifies time off-duty.

The trouble with finding balance is that work invariably has cunning ways of reminding you of your responsibilities and deliverables, your in-box overflows with requests, people ring you up, come over to your desk to ask -"have you done it yet?' and the things you need for balancing all this out are invariably silent. The need for 'me-time' doesn't ring you up in the middle of the night to tell you that by eight o'clock the following morning you need to attend a 'me-time' meeting, nor do emails pop into your in-box with 'urgent' priority telling you to go cycling or whatever pastime you really enjoy - so what happens? We forget, we are swept up in the whirl-wind of activity and it's simply hard to just stop and press pause, step outside the madness for a while (and not feel guilty) and devote time to ourselves away from all the demands.

I suppose once you have a family, this becomes even harder - because not only are you having to balance work and family life, you also have to try to stick some 'me-time' into that equation of previously two variables, becoming three variables. The trick is that work and family will both remind you of their requirements, but will you remind yourself of your own requirements? It is really a balancing act, just because you have managed to do it so well weeks or days in a row, every day is a new challenge and ignore the balancing too long and things will start to suck, even when they are going great. In the beginning you can't put your finger on it, but your enthusiasm isn't what it once felt like, soon getting up in the morning and the usual routines become a drag, grumpiness is not far behind and before long everything feels claustrophobic and you are tired all the time.

It's like walking a tightrope - you must think of every step, yet never look down - and just because you have taken 5 successful consecutive steps doesn't mean that the sixth will automatically be fine. You have to concentrate for every step and deliberately stop yourself from the natural instinct of trying to look where you are going. So too with balancing time - it is far too easy to just do what we are asked, all the time, without question - it is much harder to continuously keep balancing the demands on us with the needs we have ourselves, but we have to, for the sake of sanity. I say this sitting here with a cold again - that is my body telling me that I have ignored it a little too long and devoted too much of my time to doing the things I have to do, not the things I want to do. Sooner or later reality has an uncanny way of catching up with us.