Digital Digressions

Hello world... and a new book: Groundswell

No, contrary to popular belief i have not fallen off the edge of the planet (just yet) although my silence recently could have given you that impression. Things have just been bonkers, I have been travelling too much and at times been so tired I have had absolutely nothing to add, which knowing my ability to talk may actually come as a blessing to my colleagues..

Things are looking up though - for those of you who followed my efforts to use this blog to recruit someone to join me, the news is: it worked! Surprisingly social networks and namely Facebook came to my rescue in that a friend came across the blog post and thought of a friend who would be perfect for the job (and he is!) and told me to get in touch (via Facebook). Sounds serendipitous and it was - but it turned out to be the best bit of sideways recruitment I've ever done. Now we both owe him a beer so Alex, when you do stop twittering and feel the onset of a beer, let us know.

Apart from that many things are afoot, which I need to share with you in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I wanted to build on the topic of communities, social networking and the lot and introduce you to a new book, Groundswell where my colleague, Tormod Askildsen, head of community development at LEGO has been interviewed too. read a little here on the topic of AFOLs or Adult Fans of LEGO:

Groundswell on Social Media Today

Why Some of Us Give Up and Others Try Harder

How you react to adversity is really telling - some of us throw in the towel and simply give up, and others, facing almost insurmountable obstacles, don't think twice about continuing. What makes us strong on and how do people find the strength within themselves to carry on in the hardest of times?

As an avid cyclist, reading Lance Armstrong's 'It's Not About the Bike' is of course an amazing illustration of how he turned his life around, being diagnosed with cancer, battled four cycles of agonising chemotherapy enough to make the best of us curl up in agony and came back to win a total of 7 Tour de France victories. As he puts it in his consecutive book 'Every Second Counts'

"The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you  find the outermost thresholds of pain, of fear, or uncertainty, what you experience afterwards is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities.

Pain is good because it teaches your body and your soul to improve. It's almost as though your unconscious says "I'm going to remember this, remember how it hurt and I'll increase my capacities so that next time, it doesn't hurt as much". The body literally builds on your experiences and a physique and temperament that have gone through a Tour de France one year will be better the next year, because it has the memory to build upon. Maybe the same is true for living too.

If you lead a largely unexamined life, you will eventually hit a wall. Some barriers can be invisible until you smack into them. The key then is to investigate the wall inside yourself, so you can go beyond it. The only way to do that is to ask yourself painful questions - just as you try to stretch yourself physically."

Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford examines exactly this. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

[from Stanford Magazine] "Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine—and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn. Dweck’s insight launched a new field of educational psychology—achievement goal theory.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete (see diagram).

To me this approach is really interesting, because not only can it influence the way we approach life, career and learning, but through the quote from Lance Armstrong - it can also be applied to physical performance. And to great result, as proven. So what does this all mean? Milton Chen talks about how children can be taught to "feed their own brains" through understanding that their brains and intelligence can be grown and how this mind-set actually improves their academic performance.

As Chen explains: "I asked Dweck about the implications of her research -- what teachers and parents should do, for instance. In an email interview, she recommended the following strategies:

 

• Teach students to think of their brain as a muscle that strengthens with use, and have them visualize the brain forming new connections every time they learn.
• When they teach study skills, convey to students that using these methods will help their brains learn better.
• Discourage use of labels ("smart," "dumb," and so on) that convey intelligence as a fixed entity.
• Praise students' effort, strategies, and progress, not their intelligence. Praising intelligence leads to students to fear challenges and makes them feel stupid and discouraged when they have difficulty.
• Give students challenging work. Teach them that challenging activities are fun and that mistakes help them learn."

Funnily enough - my own voracious appetite for reading anything and everything is very much in line with the same thinking. I believe we can learn anything we set our minds to and it is those moments that feel a little like vertigo, when new horizons of discovery open up in front of your mind's eye, that keeps me going and motivated. A full life isn't one without a continous expansion of our mind, abilities and  wisdom.

Understanding what makes your consumers and employees tick

Here's an excellent interview of Chip Conley, author of Peak - How companies get their mojo from Maslow by Mark Hurst of the GoodExperience blog, a treasure trove of articles on experiences and the thinking behind the design of them. Check him out at the GoodExperience Blog.

Chip Conley is CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the world's second- largest boutique hotel company. After a severe downturn in his business after 9/11, Conley read Abraham Maslow's works as inspiration for his turnaround plan. It worked: Joie de Vivre is again thriving, and Conley has written a book about what he learned - not only from Maslow, but from companies like Nike, Apple, and Harley-Davidson, which follow Maslow's thinking. Chip's book is

Chip will also speak at Gel 2008 in April in New York:

Q - What's the main idea of "Peak"?

The main idea is that we're all humans in the workplace - whether employees, customers, or investors - and those companies that succeed and become peak performers touch us as people in the workplace, by focusing on higher needs, as opposed to base needs.

Q - How is Abraham Maslow significant?

Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of needs in the mid-20th century. There's no psychologist or psychiatrist quoted more in business schools or corporations than Maslow. Drucker, Covey, Bennis, and Collins all write about him in their books - they mention him in two or three pages, mostly talking about the hierarchy of needs.

What's interesting is that the psychology profession - including Freud, Skinner, and others - commonly looked at the worst practices in behavior in defining the human condition. Maslow says, let's look at *best* practices - people who are fulfilled or self-actualized, who can "be all you can be" and have clicked in to doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Q - Describe the pyramid containing the hierarchy of needs.

There are five levels in Maslow's pyramid. At the base are physiological needs. Then come safety, social belonging, and esteem, and at the top, self-actualization, which is where people are more likely to have peak experiences - what ought to be, is, and life feels great. Reading Maslow woke me up to the idea that if there are self-actualized people in the world, then maybe there could be self- actualized *companies*, since companies are just collections of people.

So in "Peak" I break down Maslow's pyramid and apply it to key relationships - employees, customers, and investors. I took Maslow's five levels and turned them into three levels: the first two levels, physical and safety needs, are just survival. Levels 3 and 4, social and esteem, are just success needs, how the world sees you. At the top of the pyramid, self-actualization, is a transformative state, where you've moved beyond your own ego. So I created the "transformation pyramid": survival on the bottom, then success, and transformation at the top. I then applied those three levels to the motivations of employees, customers, and investors.

Q - OK, what do you say about employees?

For employees, what's the survival need? Money, compensation. Sure, some CEOs are almost exclusively motivated by money. But for most people, it's just a base need. Every survey I've seen shows that money is not the primary motivator for employees. As nonprofits will tell you, the base foundational need is important, but the differential from one company to the next is not huge. Money as a differentiator isn't important.

The success need is being recognized. Marcus Buckingham's book "First Break All the Rules" showed that the number one reason people leave their job is their relationship with their direct supervisor. People join companies, but they leave their bosses.

The top of pyramid is something different, intangible - in the pyramid we're moving from the tangible, to the physiological, to the very intangible. For an employee, it's meaning. This is somewhat blasphemous for companies; it's hard to measure what's intangible. Yet MasterCard says what's true, that what's most important is "priceless," and that's intangible.

How do you put your attention on the top of the pyramid? The three levels represent money, recognition, and meaning: let's translate each to a word that describes a person's relationship with their
work: a "job", a "career", or a "calling." Employers that move their employees up the pyramid get more happy and fulfilled and productive employees, who are much likelier to stay longer, and a positive spirit in that workplace. The fact is, I have 3,000 employees, and 1,200 of them clean toilets for a living. So it's a challenge for me to create that with my employees.

Q - What's the customer pyramid?

For a customer, the survival need equates to having one's expectations met. If you don't meet their expectations, you haven't met their survival needs; you've created buyer's remorse. It comes down to the difference between expectation and reality. Most companies get very focused on the base; that's what customer satisfaction surveys are about. "Was your check-in process efficient?" Well, sure it was, but I hated this and that other thing, which the survey won't ask me about. We most notice the intangible. Pure customer satisfaction is at the base of the pyramid.

The success need is having desires met, which companies deliver either via technology or training. Good examples of using technology are Amazon and Netflix, which use mass-customized technology. The more I use them, the better they know me and my desires. Similarly, Four Seasons hotels are more high-touch. Through great training, the people there know my desires. That creates customer loyalty - and this second level is where it builds, not at the bottom of the pyramid.

Now for the top of the pyramid. Henry Ford said, "If I listened to my customers, they'd tell me to get a faster horse." By meeting the unrecognized needs of a customer, which the customer may not be able to articulate themselves, you create a customer evangelist. So there's customer loyalty in the middle, and *evangelism* at the top. A self-actualized customer is so thrilled you've met a need they didn't know they had, that they become believer. Companies that do this include Apple, Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue. You get on a JetBlue flight and find your own TV at your seat. More importantly, you have some control at a time you'd otherwise feel out of control. Companies that do this well create not just loyalty but a marketing machine.

Q - What are some best practices of companies that use the customer pyramid to great effect?

There are four qualities that define companies that are creating these customer evangelists. First, they help their customers meet their highest goals - allowing a customer to achieve their ideal goals from using the product. Apple enables its customers to go out and exercise their minds. Nike encourages customers to "just do it." Google gives you exactly what you're looking for. These companies are helping customers meet their highest goals.

Second is giving your customers the ability to truly express themselves. By buying a Harley-Davidson, a middle-aged accountant from the Midwest can feel like a rebel. In the case of boutique hotels, you might say, "You are where you sleep." If a hotel has a personality that represents an aspiration for you, then hopefully when you check out it will have rubbed off on you a little bit. Similarly, there's a halo effect of being an Apple user; and Starbucks has tried to become a curator for a lifestyle for its customers. These are customers who feel like they can express themselves through the purchase of a product or service.

Third is making customers feel like they're part of a bigger cause. Hummer buyers may feel that connection, but most people would say that it's lacking a socially responsible element. Patagonia - the company, not the region in Argentina - runs its "1% for the planet" campaign, and its loyal customers are "Patagoniacs." They love being associated with Patagonia because it's part of a bigger cause. For people who buy from Apple, it's not just "I'm an iconoclastic rebel," but "I'm part of a bigger cause," the anti-Microsoft attitude. At Whole Foods Market, you may go there because you love the product, but lots of people buy there because they love the sustainability cause. People like buying a Toyota Prius because it makes them feel good about both buying a car *and* doing something for the planet, even though that's a rather oxymoronic thought.

The fourth quality is offering customers something of real value they hadn't even imagined. That's what JetBlue did with the TV screen. That's what FedEx did when they created overnight delivery. It was a remarkable thought, 25 years ago, that you could send something overnight. But that innovation became a commodity over time. A lot of people entered FedEx's market, and Fred Smith, the founder, said, "I thought I was in the transporting goods, and then I realized that I was in the business of creating peace of mind." So he created a logistics program to allow customers to track packages. Now the innovation, what people wanted, an almost unrecognized desired, was: if I'm sending it overnight, the person on either end wants to know where it is. FedEx went from being an also-ran to going to the top of the pyramid again and taking market share away from its competitors. FedEx's innovation in terms of tracking was addressing that peace of mind that customers were looking for.

Q - How can any company start to put these principles into practice?

The easiest way is to consider how Maslow's hierarchy can be applied to your customer. For example, for a hotel customer, the physical level is a clean and comfortable bed. Safety might be offering an electric card-key instead of a regular key, and making sure there's good lighting in the parking lot. And so on. Just remember that there is a hierarchy of needs of employees, customers, and investors, and you can help people around you understand that.
See also:

- More Good Experience interviews: where this interview originally came from! 

Why Innovation Cannot Remain in the Realm of the Few

Last week a long-standing dream of mine finally came true when I had a chance to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Even back in the day of studying product design at Central Saint Martins I was always intrigued by the level of experimentation, technical prowess and simply outright genre-busting design and thinking that was going on at the MIT Media Lab and I always wished I could have studied there too. As some of you know, the LEGO Group is a Consortia Research Sponsor and thus chance and fortune collided and enabled me to take part in both the fascinating H20 or Human 2.0 event last Wednesday and the Sponsor day on the Thursday. Both events gave me a unique insight into what it means to be human in the 21st century and how innovation is fuelled on a large scale, seemingly infecting all that enter the Media Lab premises.

Seeing all this made me think of innovation yet again and how the Media Lab was different from many other places I have visited in its attitude and relation to innovation. What strikes you when entering the premises is that innovation is seen a bit like oxygen - it's there, people don't even question it, everybody breathes it and moreover, everybody CAN breathe it, because it is natural. Too often, whether you are in a company or even browsing a bookstore for that matter - innovation seems like the new buzz word, something of a dark art that most people are mystified by, only few people master and more over, a billion-dollar industry exists to tell us how we can become better at it. Of course you will be amused to know that innovation is also part of my job-title, but rather than make me feel special or privileged I feel a strong, sometimes even daunting, responsibility in trying to engender it in everyone around me, empowering people to come with solutions themselves, acting more like a facilitator than some lone genius in an ivory tower.

A book I'm currently reading, called The Upside by Adrian Slywotzky delves into depth explaining what companies do to minimise risk when innovating. He very convincingly points out that not only is it a matter of identifying an opportunity and ceasing it, but how in fact most innovations are likely to fail, even when they are 90% right for the purpose they were developed. Slywotzky goes through a series of examples, including the development of the Prius, the Ipod and others, highlighting just how many steps were required to create these successes and how innovation was present in each and every one of those steps - proving conclusively that innovation has to happen at every level in a company to make such successes as the Ipod to really take off. A product innovation alone wouldn't have gotten Apple to where they are today, but instead a deliberate strategic application of innovation at successive steps of the process, towards the end involving over 50 people, a large project by Apple's standards, but essential in making sure that all parts of the business were optimised to deliver what we now know to have become a legendary example of innovation: the Ipod.

Slywotsky in fact lists a number of principles in his book, which seem to crop up again and again as an approach that works, a formula that ensures that Innovation doesn't remain in the realm of the few, but instead permeates an entire company and ensures that even the tiniest chances of success are systematically increased over time, step by step, by consistently and continuously involving everyone and ensuring that innovation is something everyone contributes to and is part of, rather than a select few.

1. Work fast to pre-empt competition - crazy deadlines mean you get people's undivided attention rather than the phenomenon of mission creep - when deadlines get drawn out, because people get involved in other things in the meantime
2. Share information freely, openly, between all - set up an email sphere in line with what the fifteenth-century mystic Nicolas of Cusa described as 'something whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere. Everyone on the mailing list stands equally close to the centre of the action and everyone is capable of being the centre at a particular moment in time - able to draw energy from everyone else in the group to solve today's most pressing problem
3. Encourage young, flexible minds who like to challenge the norm and think in new ways - sometimes this is the only way to stop things being done the way we always have done them. In fact, encourage people to think this way whether they are young or old!
4. Always take pride in asking the toughest questions -about customers, their needs and interests, and the ways the company's business processes can serve those customers better.
5. Plan for version 2.0 - i.e learn from your mistakes and put the learning back in the organisation!
6. Design your business model (distribution, communication etc.) as shrewdly as you design your product!

Now these are very generic bits of advice and the really interesting thing is reading all the case studies and seeing what combination of general advice (above) was mixed in with strategic measures to address the specific weaknesses of the company mentioned. It's always a mix of both - but interestingly, in each of the successes mentioned, it was the deliberate involvement of all parties to the solution, early on in the process that created the necessary momentum to deal with everything else. Thus innovation should be, much like it is at the MIT, like the oxygen in an organisation - we all need to breathe it and we all CAN and SHOULD, because only then can breakthroughs happen!

The Rules of Creativity According to Kids

Recently I had the pleasure to meet Mitchel Resnick, a professor at the MIT, and listen to his presentation of the Lifelong Kindergarten project. Resnick is famous for his book Turtles Termites and Traffic Jams where he outlines how control emerges from apparently independent behaviour. Another book, by Kevin Kelly, called Out of Control also touches on the same topic and the central thesis in both works is the notion that you cannot know in advance every possible permutation of situations that can happen and subsequently devise centralised solutions for it, instead you can create adaptive intelligence by building seemingly simple layers of sensing and functionality on top of each other, enabling complex intelligence to emerge.

To put it more simply: How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can help people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems--and help them move beyond the centralized mindset.

His Lifelong Kindergarten project is a tribute to the value of the iterative (design) process - the power of such processes in enabling learning, creativity and innovation to take place. He explains this powerful notion in very simple terms, but they resonate across all spectrums, because of their inherent power to foster new thinking. Resnick argues that more of life should be like Kindergarten, not in the sense that it's all primary colours and very basic, but that we should strive to create more working environments, projects and creative spaces open to exploration, discovery and learning as opposed to those fixed mindset-inducing situations where people are measured as opposed to encouraged to grow, as I talk about in my previous post.

His take on the creative process is very simple, yet powerful:

1. Imagine - open your mind to possibilities, imagine, be creative - if you don't know how below are some great suggestions by kids who are part of the Computer Clubhouse project in how to come up with great ideas.
2. Create - Based on your ideas, create something!
3. Play with it, try it out, experiment with it, does it work like you intended, why? or why not?
4. Share it with others, find out what they think?
5. Reflect - what does it all mean, the experiences playing with it, sharing it, maybe something can be improved?
6. Imagine how it could be improved, what else could be done, start a new cycle of ideas.

This leads me to a great definition I came across recently - the difference between Creativity and Innovation:

• Creativity - the capacity to generate ideas

• Innovation - the capacity to generate ideas of value to others

This to me is pivotal and explains succinctly what makes great products, experiences, services and what are simply creative ways of approaching those subjects.

Now back to imagination - it can be daunting sometimes, but Resnick provides a great checklist, as developed by kids, on how to get you started:

1. Start Simple
2. Work on things you like
3. If you have no idea, fiddle around
4. Find a friend to work with, share ideas
5. It's OK to copy stuff (to give you ideas)
6. Build, take apart, rebuild
7. Lots of things can go wrong - stick with it.

Now that list of advice beautiful in its simplicity - no need to embellish it with fancy words and explanations, it is there, fair and square and totally valid whatever you are trying to get your head around!

Success is a Mindset

Why is it that some individuals become geniuses, others retire as millionaires, business empires get built seemingly from scratch and in other cases talented individuals never rise beyond mediocrity, regardless of their field or profession? Some attribute this to luck, others claim it is down to what talent we are born with or that we are either smart or not, but in all cases people are wrong. Success is not down to what you are born with, it's about what you make of the things you are born with. In other words, it's down to whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset.

A fascinating series of studies by Stanford Professor Carol S. Dweck have been collected in a newly released book titled Mindset - The New Psychology of Success   capturing the intricate, but crucial differences in how people with these mindsets look at the world and what effect that subsequently has on their lives, their chances to succeed and ultimately their happiness.

The Fixed Mindset
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone - the fixed mindset - creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. So many people are stuck with this all-consuming goal of proving themselves - in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships: every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality or character: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? These aren't just things we pick up as we enter adulthood, but Dweck delicately points out that as a parent, you can have a profound impact on whether your child falls into the fixed or growth mindset, same in schools - in fact society at large seems to have conditioned us to think that talented people always get ahead and those smart enough don't have to work hard - they just do it. The truth is no one just does it - but how can learning even be fun when your whole being is at stake every time there is a test, a competition or a deadline?

The Growth Mindset
The people with a growth mindset have a far more open way of looking at the world and themselves in it - traits are not simply a hand you have been dealt and have to learn to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you are secretly worried it is a pair of tens. In the growth mindset, the hand you are dealt is just the starting point for development. It is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way - in their initial talents, and aptitudes, interests and temperaments - everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people in this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person's true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it is impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil and training.

Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually every list of the most important artists of the twentieth century - failed her first photography course? That Geraldine Page, a great actress was advised to give it up for lack of talent?

You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it is not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

Who has accurate views of their assets and limitations?
Interestingly, studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities. Professor Dweck and her students recently did a study to find out who most likely to have inflated views of their abilities and try for things they are not capable of? It turns out that those with the fixed mindset accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.

When you think about it, this makes sense. If, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you are open to accurate information about your current abilities, even if it is unflattering. What's more, if you are oriented toward learning, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively. However, if everything is either good news or bad news about your precious traits - as it is with fixed-mindset people - distortion almost inevitably enters the picture. Some outcomes are magnified, others are explained away, and before you know it you don't know yourself at all. Howard Gardner, in his book Extraordinary Minds, concluded that exceptional individuals have 'a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses'. It's interesting that those with the growth mindset seem to have that talent.

The book
Rather than merely going over the differences between the two mindsets, Professor Dweck does an excellent job of also explaining the background to these mindsets, that we may in fact be riddled with both of them, but in different areas or parts of our lives. She further takes a very hands-on approach to explaining how to spot when you are in fixed mindset thinking and then how to move yourself in to the growth mindset thinking instead. The book is littered with case studies of people from all walks of life, explaining how people have conquered their fears of failure to become successful individuals. Despite Professor Dweck being an academic, the book is surprisingly straight-forward, even chatty in places, but ultimately a very approachable book and one of the most useful I have read in a long time. Not only do you learn to examine yourself and your own behaviour as a result of reading this, you also learn to be supportive to your friends, loved ones and partner, and moreover, how to turn your workplace into a positive environment where people thrive. I find my coaching skills have improved dramatically too - highly recommend reading this book!

The Curious Subject of Incentives

Started reading Levitt & Dubner: Freakonomics - a great book that despite its cheesy cover has a capacity to pull together facts and figures to reveal many of the truths hidden under such phenomena like why high-school teachers cheat, why prostitutes earn more than architects, why drug dealers still live with their mothers, why your name matters more than you think and why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life. If you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which explains how little things make a big difference this will certainly be up your street. A little edgier and snappier than Gladwell's book, Freakonomics pulls together all sorts of curious facts to reveal astonishing logic to often complicated social phenomena.

Take incentives for instance. Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need especially when other people want or need the same thing. Ironically, the founder of classical economics, Adam Smith, was first and foremost a philosopher. Smith was entranced by the sweeping changes brought about by modern capitalism sweeping the nation at the time of the publication of his book, 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' in 1759 and particularly the way icapitalism was influencing how a person thought and behaved in a particular situation. Smith's true subject was the friction between individual desire and societal norms and how economic incentives influence how we behave in a particular situation.

We all learn to respond to incentives, negative and positive, from the outset of life. An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. But most incentives don't come about organically. Someone - an economist or a politician or a parent - has to invent them. There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral. Sometimes social incentives work better than economic ones and in other cases it is a combination of all three. A good example is the naming and shaming of prostitutes - that works better than simply a $500 fine as nobody wants to be singled out by their friends, parents or neighbours as pimps or prostitutes.

In other cases incentives, although intended to work to deter undesirable behaviour, actually end up encouraging it. Take the recent World Cup match between the Netherlands and Portugal. Here are two countries pretty well balanced in terms of skill and ability and potentially the ideal ingredients to make the beautiful game truly come alive. What happens? Due to the card(trigger)-happy referee this match collected a total of 16 yellow cards and 4 red ones - an all time record, because rather than deter players from fouls, they quickly realised that if they could frame the opponents by diving and falling, they stood to benefit. The frequent ditching out of cards broke up the game, removed difficult opponents from the pitch, opened up the possibility of a penalty shot or were a small price for injuring the opponents, preventing them from playing properly. The opposing team quickly realised the same and thus the competition was more about who they could take out than the goals they could score. A sad day in football history.

Another subject frequently on the agenda these days is the environment. All of us are aware of the effects of global warming and the primary cause of it: fossil fuels. Plenty of moral incentives to change our ways, yet we do nothing. The sales of 4x4s and gaz-guzzlers are continuing their march of triumph, regardless of the environmental damage they cause. We know what's wrong, yet we can't help ourselves. The economic incentives to change our ways are simply too lame to make us do anything and socially it is still aspirational to have a big car, so the reasons to change aren't really that big - personally we are not willing to trade the convenience of a big car with the greater good of saving the environment - if everyone else is doing it why can't I?

In some cases the incentives don't even have to be grounded in reality: an illusion is enough. The promise of glamorous lives associated with sporting heroes, movie stars and drug dealers to name but a few make people form a queue right around the block just to have a chance, forgetting how intense the competition is and the fact that only a fraction of all the willing will ever make it. That is not what we get told. Drug lords apparently revel in money, cars and women, yet we are not told of the countless footsoldiers they rely on, with a 1 in 4 chance of getting killed (which is higher than sitting on death row in Texas), peddling the drugs for less than the minimum wage per hour with no prospects of ever making it large. Nor all the countless hopefuls moving to Hollywood to try to become moviestars, ending up waiting tables and never making a decent living. The 'Cinderella' stories are more attractive than the stories of struggling through college, working one's way up the ladder and maybe making a decent living at the end of the day - the perceived economic incentives are so strong, yet bear little or no relation to the actual ones and due to culture, media and communication they have entrenched themselves in our imagination and are enough for us to keep deluding ourselves even in the face of harsh reality telling us the opposite.

Interesting book, definitely recommend for all those of you who want to uncover the reality beneath the myths we are sold.

 

Surefire Innovation Killer - the Devil's Advocate

Just began reading a fascinating new book by IDEO, Ten Faces of Innovation - an in-depth look into the roles people can play in an organisation to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers.

The thing is, we've all been there. That crucial meeting where you present an idea you are passionate about. A ground-swell of support and suddenly a dreadful end to the optimism when someone opens up with the words: 'Let's just play the Devil's Advocate for a moment..'

' Having invoked the awesome protective power of that seemingly innocuous phrase, the speaker feels entirely free to take potshots at your idea, and does so with complete impunity. Because they are not really your harshest critic. They are essentially saying, 'The Devil made me do it'. They are removing themselves from the equation and sidestepping individual responsibility for the verbal attack. But before they are done they've torched your fledgling concept.'

The Devil's Advocate gambit is extraordinary but certainly not uncommon, since it strikes so regularly in the project rooms and board rooms all across the world. What's both sad and astonishing is how much punch is packed into that simple phrase, and how much people have to struggle to pull their idea from the ground when someone has finished. It seems it is perfectly legitimate to criticise, without offering any solutions to the problems highlighted. I would often like to say that "if you can't make the idea better by what you are going to say - then keep quiet", but you can seldom say that to more senior people and even if you would, it still struggles to pack as much punch as a Devil's Advocate statement.

So why do they do it? The Devil's Advocate role, as it is really a role, like any other - encourages idea-wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that only sees the downside, the problems, the disasters-in-waiting. Once those floodgates open, they can drown a new initiative in negativity.

Interestingly, a Harvard Business Review article on Level 5 Leadership, mentions the Stockdale paradox as one of the ingredients that make truly innovative leadership happen. The Stockdale paradox is named after James Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honour, who survived seven years in a Vietcong POW camp by hanging on to two contradictory beliefs: His life couldn't be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever. Like Stockdale, people who are able to confront the most brutal facts in their current reality, yet simultaneously maintain absolute faith that they would prevail in the end - the ability to hold both disciplines -faith and facts - at the same time, all the time are the ones who overcome the hardest of challenges. In this context, being a Devil's Advocate would not have done anybody any favours, but when the survival of ideas are at stake, people are willing to not accept any responsibility for potentially bury the greatest money-earner ever.

Why should you care? Because innovation is the lifeblood of all organisations, and the Devil's Advocate is toxic to your cause. This is no trivial matter. There is no longer any serious debate about the primacy of innovation to the health and future strength of a corporation. Even the staid British publication The Economist recently claimed, 'Innovation is now recognised as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy'.

There is a growing recognition that fostering a culture of innovation is critical to success, as important as mapping out competitive strategies or maintaining good margins. And while acquisitions can yield synergy, and re-engineering can streamline operations, a culture of innovation may be the ultimate fuel for long-term growth and brand development. Having optimised operations and finances, many companies are now recognising that growth through innovation is their best strategy to compete in a world marketplace in which some of the players may have lower-cost resources.

The Ten Faces of Innovation is a book about innovation with a human face. It's about the individuals and teams that fuel innovation inside great organisations. Because all great movements are ultimately human-powered. Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I can move the world." The book goes on to describe ten innovation personas, each bringing its own lever, its own tools, its own skills, its own point of view. And when someone combines energy and intelligence with the right lever, they can generate a remarkably powerful force.

It is a book about people, or more specifically, it is about the roles people can play, the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt. It is not about the luminaries of innovation like Thomas Edison, or even celebrity CEOs like Steve Jobs and Jeffrey Immelt. It is about the unsung heroes who work on  the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out.

The ten core chapters of the book highlight ten people-centric tools developed at IDEO that you might call talents or roles or personas for innovation. By developing some of these innovation personas, you'll have a chance to put the Devil's Advocate in his place. The concerns about the Devil's Advocate should not be interpreted as some sort of endorsement for a 'yes-man culture'. It is about encouraging constructive debate rather than the stand of the Devil's Advocate, who prefers to tear an idea down with clever criticism and often exhibiting the mean-spirited negativity associated with that role. Meanwhile , the innovation roles are intended to encourage people to stand up for what they believe in.

New Book: A Self Made Man

Recent weeks have seen the publication of Self Made Man by Norah Vincent, a fascinating look into what life is like for the opposite sex. As a woman I find this extremely interesting, and as a tomboy myself (not lesbian though) I've always had men as close friends. To me some of the issues raised by Norah are ones I've come across too, but are topics men are mostly quiet about, as the preconception is that men are the stoics society expects them to be.

More about the book though - Norah Vincent has lived as a man, but didn't undergo a sex change or radical hormone treatments. She simply went undercover. In an extraordinary feat of acting, disguise and guts, Vincent lived among men — as a man — for 18 months to see what life was like on the other side of the gender divide.

At 5 feet, 10 inches and 155 pounds, Vincent passed as a medium-build man she called Ned. Her transformation began with a buzz cut, baggy men's clothes, and a too-small sports bra to flatten her breasts. She even wore a little padding in a jock strap. For the rest, she enlisted the help of makeup artist Ryan McWilliams, who created Ned's five-o'-clock shadow. Then there was the theatrical component. Vincent underwent months of training with Juilliard voice teacher Kate Maré to learn how to sound like a man. "Women have much stronger nasal resonances as a rule," Maré explained. When all the pieces were put together — hair, makeup, voice, posture and style — the transformation was complete, and Norah Vincent became Ned Vincent.

Vincent, a journalist, didn't take the project lightly. She estimates she put on Ned's whiskers and clothes about 150 times during her 18-month experiment. "I wanted to enter males' spheres of interest and … see how men are with each other. I wanted to make friends with men. I wanted to know how male friendships work from the inside out," she told ABC's "20/20."

Cracking the mystery of a "boys' night out" is one thing, but understanding the explicit world of a man's sexuality is quite another. To gain an understanding of what some might consider the quintessential male experience, Vincent went to several strip clubs with a male friend. She describes the experience as hellish — demeaning for the strippers and even worse for the men.

"I saw the men there. I saw the looks on their faces. This is not about appreciation of women, of course. It's not about appreciation of their own sexuality. It's about an urge and … that's not always that pleasurable, really," she said. Vincent said strip joints are about pure sex drive — completely empty of any meaningful interaction, even when a woman is gyrating on your lap.

Even though Vincent is attracted to women, she said she was never aroused during her visits to the clubs. "I really ran smack up against the difference between male and female sexuality. It's that female sexuality is mental. … For a man, it's an urge," she said.

She was quickly reminded that in this arena, it's women who have the power, she said. "In fact, we sit there and we just with one word, 'no,' will crush someone," she said. "We don't have to do the part where you cross the room and you go up to a stranger that you've never met in the middle of a room full of people and say the first words. And those first words are so hard to say without sounding like a cheeseball or sounding like a jerk."

Vincent encountered some pretty cold shoulders in her attempts at the bar, but she did manage to go on about 30 dates with women as "Ned," mostly arranging them on the Internet. Vincent said the dates were rarely fun and that the pressure of "Ned" having to prove himself was grueling. She was surprised that many women had no interest in a soft, vulnerable man.

"My prejudice was that the ideal man is a woman in a man's body. And I learned, no, that's really not. There are a lot of women out there who really want a manly man, and they want his stoicism," she said.

Vincent thought the perfect end to her 18-month saga would be to join a men-only therapy group, a place where guys tried to bond and show their emotions instead of hiding them. Again, Vincent saw the men struggle with vulnerability. "They don't get to show the weakness, they don't get to show the affection, especially with each other. And so often all their emotions are shown in rage," she said.

Instead, Vincent said, the men talked about rage, often their rage toward women, and what they would do physically and violently toward women. "A lot of this was blowing off steam. …They would talk about fantasizing about chopping up their wives or something. It's not that they would ever do that, but it was a way to get out the blackest thoughts," she said. Norah began to empathize with the fear and stress men feel for having to always be the strong provider.

Vincent says she's glad to be rid of Ned.  But her views about men have changed forever.

"Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better," she said. "They need our sympathy. They need our love, and maybe they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

Ironically, Vincent said, it took experiencing life as a man for her to appreciate being a woman. "I really like being a woman. … I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege."

Book Review: Things That Make Us Smart

Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine

This book, by Donald Norman, was originally published in 1993, and I came across it four years later when writing my thesis on user experiences bridging the virtual and digital realms. It has stuck with me ever since as it provides a profound and timeless insight into how technology then, as now still doesn't make the best use of our abilities.

The good news is that technology can make us smart. The human mind is limited in capability. There is only so much we can remember, only so much we can learn. But among our abilities is that of devising artificial devices – artifacts – that expand our capabilities. We invent things that make us smart. Through technology we can think better and more clearly. We have access to accurate information. We can work effectively with others, whether together in the same place or separate in space or time.

The bad news is that technology can make us stupid. The technology for creating things has far outstripped our understanding of them. Things that can make us smart can also make us dumb. Technology has not been planned, it just happened and what this book focuses on is what is wrong with the design of technology that requires people to behave in machine-centred ways for which people are not well suited. What does that mean? When technology is not designed from a human-centred point of view, it doesn't reduce the incidence of human error nor minimise the impact when errors do occur. Yes, people do indeed err. Therefore the technology should be designed to take this well-known fact into account. Instead the tendency is to blame the person who errs, even though the fault might lie with the technology, even though to err is indeed very human.

We are in the middle of what some people call “the information explosion”, but there is too much information for anyone to assimilate, the information is of doubtful quality, and perhaps most important, the things we collect statistics about are primarily those things that are easiest to identify and count or measure – which may have little or no connection with those factors of greatest importance. It is easy to collect statistics on number of hours worked, on cost of equipment, and on such statistical indexes as “productivity of labour”. It is much more difficult to collect statistics on the quality of a product or its effect on the quality of life.

We humans are thinking, interpreting creatures. The mind tends to seek explanations, to interpret, to make suggestions. We are active, creative social beings. We seek interaction with others. Unlike machines, we change our behaviour as we attempt to understand what others expect from us. All of these natural tendencies are thwarted by the engineering approach to efficiency. The machine-centred view is concerned primarily with operations per second.