The Interesting Times Triangle

August 9, 2012 By

You’ve probably heard of the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. The line apparently isn’t really Chinese in origin, but it certainly seems very Chinese in spirit, so I’ll stick to calling it that. I’ll let you ponder why it is appropriate to call it a curse rather than a blessing (hint: try the Future Nausea post from a few weeks back).

Anyhow, you and I, we certainly live in interesting times in the sense of the curse.  So in lieu of a proper long post this week, I offer you this pick-two (at most) triangle for your lifestyle designing pleasure.

I first posted this as an unqualified pick-two type bon mot on Facebook, and a lot of friends seemed to find it thought provoking. Then I thought some more, and realized that the 2-out-of-3 nature really reflects environmental conditions during interesting periods in history, when it is hard or impossible for anybody to do all three. I used the triangle in this form during a recent talk, to get at how different people adopt different strategies to either survive or thrive in interesting times.

Then it struck me that even picking two out of three is pretty hard. Many people manage to do only one, or none at all. I mapped those to the Gervais Principle taxonomy of Sociopaths, Losers and Clueless, and came up with the legend you see alongside the triangle now.

I won’t attempt to supply or defend examples of people who’ve made each of the 7 possible choices, since that tends to excite controversy. I’ll leave you to do that yourself. But I’ll offer these archetype labels:

  1. Money+Beauty: Sell-Out Artist
  2. Money+Sense: Soulless Arbitrager
  3. Beauty+Sense: Intellectual Dictator
  4. Only Beauty: Self-Absorbed Artist
  5. Only Sense: Armchair Intellectual
  6. Only Money: Dull Douchebag
  7. Nothing: Drowning Person

You can of course, also add an intensity knob between “drowning” and “thriving” where drowning is 0 and thriving is 0.67.  And if times get much tougher than they are today, we’ll all be demoted to Losers, and eventually to Clueless.

The Guerilla Guide to Social Business

July 31, 2012 By

I don’t quite recall how it happened anymore, but in September 2008, I wrote a post for the Enterprise 2.0 blog titled Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War.  The post — probably the purest piece of deliberate flamebait I’ve ever written — went viral. Many of you found ribbonfarm via that post.

I continued writing about the Enterprise 2.0 theme irregularly after that, first on the E 2.0 blog and then on Information Week. I recently decided to wrap up my thoughts on the theme and close out this thread of blogging with a final post: The Enterprise 2.0 Backlog: 100 Ideas.

This close-out post is about as close as I’ve ever gotten to outright prescription. It is also the only significant list post I’ve done in my life (list blogging is the lowest kind of blogging there is of course, but there is some redemption to be found in epic-sized lists that cross 100 items).

Anyway, I figured I’d put together the essays into a convenient PDF collection. So here you go: about 29,000 words and 104 pages worth of slightly evil thoughts on social business: The Guerilla Guide to Social Business.

Read it, share it, print it out and leave it lying around, pass it along to friends, bosses, unsuspecting VPs with budget money to run through before year-end who might hire a consultant in an unguarded moment, etc.

It was a fun ride, the first bandwagon I rode from start to finish, through the ups and downs of the hype cycle. The ride also helped kick off my consulting business.

I think it is safe to say now that the ride is mostly over. The conversation has matured. Andrew McAfee’s well-timed phrase heralding the trend, “Enterprise 2.0,” has been replaced by the more permanent-sounding (ominously so?) “Social Business.”  The Enterprise 2.0 conference has rebranded itself (rather cryptically) as E2 and settled in as steward of a long-haul conversation.

Thanks are due to Rob Preston, Steve Wylie and Paige Finkelman at TechWeb for providing a platform and tolerating my grumpy, dystopian blogging through the hype cycle. Also thanks to Mark Masterson and Doug Neal at CSC and Daniel Pritchett, for many interesting conversations on E 2.0/Social Business. Apologies if I missed anyone.

For those of you who follow me primarily on Information Week, I’ll be taking a sabbatical from that site, until I find another suitable theme for which that’s the appropriate channel. If and when I start a new theme there, I’ll do a heads-up here.

Literary Darwinism

July 30, 2012 By

Spotted this interesting piece on the evolutionary origins of literature, and its potential purposes via John Hagel.  Here’s a brief extract:

The real mystery is not just the evolutionary origins of literature, but movements and attitudes such as modernism that insist on transcending the traditional plot lines that Booker diagnoses. If Booker is right and all stories fall into seven basic templates, then writers who strive for complete originality might be out of luck. The human mind, it appears, has its limits on literature. This is supported by several cross-cultural studies clearly demonstrating that all humans gravitate towards similar literary theme. As Hume said, “the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature… the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousands years ago, is still admired at Paris and London.”

Of course, the fact that humans share certain literary hot buttons didn’t stop Joyce from throwing out plots altogether in Finnegan’s Wake. Nor did Virginia Woolf hesitate when crafting the free-flowing Mrs. Dalloway. For various reasons, writers in the 20th century were motivated to create stories that don’t appeal to the senses. Pinker explains that a “compelling story may simulate juicy gossip about desirable or powerful people, put us in an exciting time or place, tickle our language instincts with well-chosen words, and teach us something new about the entanglements of families, politics, or love.” Why, then, were so many authors in the 20th century obsessed with disjointed narration, bewildering characters and exhausting prose? And why did they (and do they) look down on the mainstream?

The piece is agnostic about the Big Question here: whether narrative-making/reading is merely some sort of pleasure-seeking behavior pattern or whether it  serves a utilitarian purpose in decision-making.

Obviously, I am personally inclined to the latter view. The big mistake anti-narrative types make is in inferring from the existence of a handful of dominant narrative patterns that they cannot process information. In this post for example, the author notes that Jaws is like Beowulf and both are examples of the “defeat the monster” pattern in Booker’s taxonomy of 7 basic narrative patterns.  Booker’s is one of many taxonomies and there are others with dozens to hundreds of “types.” But this does not mean each instance of a story is identical in the role it plays in cognition.

I haven’t made up my own mind about how narratives process information, but my basic theory is that they are patterns that help us organize our understanding of boundary conditions, which obviously differ from context to context. In Beowulf, one boundary of human civilization is an unknown ocean with a dangerous monster. In Jaws, it is a known ocean, with a known beast. But in each case, we understand something about the boundary conditions within which human lives play out. This is one reason why narratives so often involve extreme or improbable or corner-case scenarios: they are not about characterizing normal, but about characterizing the limits of normal.

Read the whole post here: The Literary Darwinists: The Evolutionary Origins of Storytelling

Happily Almost Ever After: Towards a Romantic Account of Détente

July 24, 2012 By

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of détente. I am fairly certain it is going to play a big role in my next book, but I haven’t figured out the precise details.

A détente is a general easing of tensions within an adversarial relationship before underlying conflicts have been resolved (otherwise you would call it “peace”). I think of détente as a “happily almost ever after” narrative pattern. Unlike a truce though, a détente is a sort of indefinite cessation or slowing down of conflict without specific expectations of alternative approaches towards resolution, or specified time limits. You know a decisive drive towards an outcome will be resumed, but you don’t know when, why, how or where for sure. You just collectively agree that now is not the time or place.

I’ll sketch out in general terms why the concept is interesting, but I am going to wander quite a bit along the way and use this post as an excuse to philosophize about game theory and academic culture, and share an interesting anecdote. You’ve been warned.

[Read more…]

Positioning Moves versus Melee Moves

July 16, 2012 By

My general philosophy of decision-making de-emphasizes the planning/execution distinction. But I am not an agility purist. Nobody is. You can think of the Agility Purist archetype as a useful abstraction. This mythical kind of decision-maker believes that a mind and personality that is sufficiently prepared for a particular domain (say programming or war or biochemistry) needs no preparation for specific situations or contingencies. This magical being can jump into any active situation in that particular domain and immediately start acting effectively.

At the other extreme you have an equally mythical Planning Purist archetype who has thought through every possible contingency all the way through the end and can basically hit “Start” and reach a successful outcome without further thinking. In fiction, this is best represented by jewelry heist capers based on long, involved and improbably robust sequences of moves, as in Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job. A few token things go wrong, but overall, these narratives play out like Rube Goldberg machines.

Clearly, reality lives somewhere in the middle. But planning vs. execution is not always a good pair of trade-off variables to create reality out of these two asymptotic myths. That distinction only works when there are a lot of known, hard temporal constraints  or formal logical constraints (socks before shoes) in play. These actually help simplify things and make planning/execution a useful model.

When there is none of this temporal structure (what David Allen calls “a hard landscape”) and everything is rather fluid and chaotic, I find it useful to think in terms of a different distinction: positioning moves vs. melee moves. I learned of this distinction from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Here’s a brief primer.

[Read more…]

The Generalized Hawthorne Effect

July 13, 2012 By

The Hawthorne Effect is a basic idea in social science research that I first encountered in William Whyte’s Organization Man. I remember making a note of it at the time but never got around to thinking more about it, until it came up again in a recent conversation.

It is a sort of Heisenberg Principle for social science. The effect hypothesizes that the changes in participants’ behavior during a study may be mostly caused by the special social situation and treatment they receive from management.

I think the principle has far greater significance than people realize.

[Read more…]

My New Book Project, Upcoming Talks in Los Angeles and Malmö, Sweden

July 10, 2012 By

A few quick announcements before we get back to regular programming later this week.

First up: after several months of exploring various themes and ideas, I’ve finally figured out what I want to do for my next book project. The book will be titled Game of Pickaxes and I expect it to be done by mid 2014. You can sign up for email updates at the book website. Thanks Adam Hogan for whipping up a quickie draft cover on short notice. Makes the whole thing feel more tangible, even though I don’t even have a rough outline at the moment. Just a germ of a high concept and a set of themes that seem to fit together in an interesting way.

I won’t reveal more right now,  since the plan for the book is still coming together, but if you happen to be in the Los Angeles next week, I’ll be doing a first-look preview of the themes and ideas in the book at the Lean LA meetup in Santa Monica, on Wednesday, July 18 at 7:00 PM.

You can register here ($15). Thanks to host Patrick Vlaskovits for agreeing to let me air some very preliminary thoughts in public.

Also, next month I will be speaking at the Media Evolution conference in Malmö, Sweden, August 22-23 on “Public Computing” (this too, will be loosely related to the book). I know there are at least a couple of readers in the region, so it would be great to meet up. I plan to stay on for a few days after the conference to explore a bit, since I’ve never been to Scandinavia. I will be in Copenhagen for sure, and am wondering whether to check out Stockholm, Oslo or something else altogether. Email me if you are in the area and would like to meet up.

Stress Failures versus Decay Failures

July 9, 2012 By

There is a rich history to the idea that the state of your personal environment reflects the state of your mind. So a cluttered office reflects a cluttered mind, for instance. This is why I made the connection explicit and foundational in Tempo by assuming that designed environments are primarily projections of mental models, created via codification and embedding into fields-flow complexes (the big brother of systems and processes).

Clutter is the most obvious manifestation of the mind-environment mapping, but I want to comment on a less-appreciated one: brokenness. 

There are environments where things are in a constant state of disrepair and brokeness. What do such broken environments reveal about the mental models that created them?

Brokenness implies a physical failure in the past.

There are two major sources of failure: operational stress and decay.

Operational stress failure happens when a heavily used system is subjected to a rare loading condition that breaks it.

Decay failure on the other hand, happens when a rarely used system is degenerating internally through disuse, until a common loading condition is enough to break it.

An environment that is in a constant state of brokenness because operational failures are coming in faster than repairs can be made is a state of war. One that is in a constant state of brokenness because things are decaying and collapsing is in a state of atrophy.

Neither is sustainable. A state of war must eventually lead on to victory or defeat. This kind of brokenness requires stepping back to rethink mental models and modification of field-flow complexes. If the rare loading condition is truly rare (example, Katrina), you might need to rethink your insurance model. If a once-rare loading condition is suddenly common, you need to redesign the whole thing operationally.

Atrophy happens either because nothing is happening in your life (so you need to get some action going) or because you built useless/non-functional environments. A state of atrophy is also not sustainable. It can turn into gangrene. You must either excise the decaying portions to protect the healthy portions, or start subjecting them to stress so that they start to regenerate.

Healthy environments aren’t unbroken ones. They are environments where different things get broken as time progresses, repair is mostly able to keep up and the brokenness does not spiral out of control.  The variety in what breaks down suggests that your mental models as well as the environment are evolving in a healthy way. If the same thing keeps breaking down, there is something stupid in your thinking.

Repair must also be able to keep up. If it overtakes to the point that your environment is routinely in a state of perfection, you are not doing enough. If on the other hand, brokenness accumulates to the point where you are constantly fighting fires, you need to upgrade capabilities all around.

Five Years of Blogging

July 3, 2012 By

July 4th, 2012 will mark the fifth anniversary of ribbonfarm. Now that I’ve completed a retrospective of five years worth of writing through the last month, I figured it was time to step back and put the whole thing together. Here’s the picture I came up with.

Before I give you a tour of SES Ribbonfarm (that’s “Slightly Evil Ship”), some housekeeping matters. I now have a glossary, which many of you asked for, and a For New Readers page. Links to both are on the menu bar. The latter contains links to the four roundups I did in June, as well as downloadable epubs and links to reading lists of the posts on readlists.com (you can use their app or send the lists to your Kindle or iPad).

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for more than a couple of years or two, and have useful thoughts for new readers, please post them as a comment on that page. This should also be a good page to point people to if you want to introduce them to ribbonfarm.

Now for the ship.

[Read more…]

Not Important, Not Urgent

July 2, 2012 By

In Stephen Covey’s famous important/urgent 2×2 diagram, why is the not important/not urgent quadrant even there (other than for geometric completeness)? If you’ve always got things going on, the other three quadrants always trump the NI/NU quadrant after all, so do things in it every get done? Do they need to?

I claim that the critical NI/NU stuff is stuff that usually only gets done when it moves to one of the other quadrants. When it isn’t being done, it exists in a state of brokenness. This is okay. Wanting to eliminate all brokenness from your life is practically the definition of OCD.

Most of us live in a state of constant semi-brokenness due to things in the NI/NU quadrant that we never seem to get around to.

Here’s how this quadrant works.

[Read more…]