A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

July 26, 2010 By

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.  The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”

States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.

Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading. Continuing my series on complex and dense books that I cite often, but are too difficult to review or summarize, here is a quick introduction to the main idea.

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The Right Question, Review of Shallows, Insight vs. Mind-Candy

July 22, 2010 By

I have three off-ribbonfarm posts this week that should interest you guys.

Is the Internet Making us Smart or Stupid?

A guest post on VentureBeat, my review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows (a book-length build on his Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making us Stupid.”

The Dangerous Art of the Right Question

On the Trailmeme blog. This post seems to have gone somewhat viral via Hacker News, Lifehacker and a couple of other significant mentions. Slightly lighter fare than you guys are used to here, but should still be of interest.

My Remarkable, Famous Graph

Also on the Trailmeme blog, this one is a sort of follow-up to the previous one, examining the emerging world of infographics, using 3 of my own ribbonfarm graphics to examine the difference between mind-candy and true insight graphics.

Head on over, comment etc.

The Happy Company

July 20, 2010 By

I rarely read biographies or autobiographies of individuals or groups. This is because I rarely find accounts of success or failure by the people involved, or hired hagiographers, very believable. I usually wait for somebody to tell the story more critically, within a broader context, such as the history of a sector. But I made an exception for Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness for three reasons. First, I wanted to steal concrete ideas from the Zappos playbook about customer-centeredness. Second, I was puzzled by the apparent cultural mismatch in Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos. And finally, I was curious about what a genuinely happiness-centric approach to business looks like. Deconstructing the Zappos story seemed like a good idea. This post is mainly about the last question, as well as some general thoughts about “corporate culture.”

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The Eight Metaphors of Organization

July 13, 2010 By

Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization is a must-read for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Though I’ve cited the book lots of times, it is one of those dense, complex books that I am never going to attempt to review or summarize. You’ll just have to read it. But I figured since I refer to it so much, I need at least a simple anchor post about it. So I thought I’d summarize the main idea with a picture, and point out some quick connections to things I have written/plan to write.

(For once, the picture was complex enough that I chose to draw it and scan it in, instead of doing one of my ugly MS-Paint sketches). Here’s the main idea of the book — [Read more…]

Becalmed in the Summer Doldrums

July 7, 2010 By

In the early eighties, after lunch, around 1 PM on hot — and I mean Indian hot — summer days, I’d step out onto the verandah, push two straight-backed chairs together to create a sort of bench, and take a nap. There were ceiling fans inside, and even one room with an air-conditioner, but I preferred the verandah with its still, hot air. It was a natural sauna and sensory deprivation chamber. It induced a sort of death-sleep and occasionally, mild hallucinations.  Reflecting on these memories and the 100 degree days we’ve been experiencing here in the DC area this week, it struck me that I am a very seasonal kind of guy. Which is why I dread being forced to move to California. Something about sharply marked seasons fits very well with my personality. At least when I am able to harmonize my own manic-depressive mood swings with the local seasons. In my winter post from exactly 6 months ago, I noted that I like bouts of extreme, deathly cold because they represent rebirth and renewal. Deathly summer heat on the other hand, feels like suddenly hitting the pause button in the middle of the most exciting action in a movie.

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The Philosopher’s Abacus

June 30, 2010 By

July 4th will be the three-year anniversary of Ribbonfarm. I normally celebrate with a retrospective-plus-roundup, but this year, I thought I’d do something different. I am not entirely sure what you guys get out of my writing, but for me, the act of writing this blog has clarified, reinforced and (for better or worse) hardened a certain philosophy of life. This philosophy is a set of coupled choices on a set of either/or spectra. The best visualization I could come up with is something I call the philosopher’s abacus. Here’s a picture (feel free to share, pass along etc.)

I believe the abacus represents fundamental genetic constraints that define a life-philosophy design space. I believe it is nearly impossible for humans to transcend the abacus. Let me explain how it works.

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WOM, Broadcast and the Classical Marketing Contract

June 24, 2010 By

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) vs. Broadcast is the emerging Mac vs. PC debate in marketing. There are relevant facts, but they don’t matter, because battles inevitably turn ideological. If you did the Mac-vs-PC ads for WOM vs. Broadcast, an episode might go as follows:

WOM: Hey Broadcast, how are you doing?

Broadcast: Great, I just finished a multi-million dollar Master Marketing Plan for my Fortune 100 client, with a textbook positioning strategy, a great branding theme and 3 superbowl ad concepts. All in just 3 weeks.

WOM: Oh wow! That’s impressive. How did the customers respond?

Broadcast: Very funny WOM. We both know it takes months of stakeholder conversations and focus groups before you can roll out a marketing campaign. If all goes as planned, 50% of our marketing will work; we just won’t know which 50% of course, ha ha. Even someone as good as me can’t break the Golden Rule of Marketing after all.

WOM: Well actually Broadcast, I just finished a 3-week concept-to-execution campaign for a small business, for just $800, where we used a Facebook page to talk to customers. And I know exactly which pieces worked, and why.

Broadcast: Oh I have a social media component in my master plan too. We’ll have a Facebook page AND a Twitter feed AND a blog AND a YouTube Channel. And we’ve already sourced the first 50 professionally written blog posts. So looks like I am  a little ahead of you there, WOM. You really should try more planning instead of just jumping in. You’ve got to maximize reach and optimize your channel mix; it’s all about eyeballs baby.

WOM: You do know that Twitter is not always best for all types of conversational marke….

Broadcast: Tweet Tweet Tweet Tweet TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET. I can’t hear you. TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET

The WOM-vs.-Broadcast debate, which is currently at this level, is incredibly shallow and juvenile (though sometimes entertaining). The WOM camp is getting prematurely smug, and the Broadcast camp is defending the wrong parts of classical marketing. So let’s try to take the conversation up a notch.

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The Missing Folkways of Globalization

June 16, 2010 By

Between individual life scripts and civilization-scale Grand Narratives, there is an interesting unit of social analysis called the folkway. Historian David Hackett Fischer came up with the modern definition in 1989, in his classic, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:

…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.

Ever since I first encountered Fischer’s ideas, I’ve wondered whether folkways might help us understand the  social landscape of globalization. As I started thinking the idea through, it struck me that the notion of the folkway actually does the opposite. It helps explain why a force as powerful as globalization hasn’t had the social impact you would expect. The phrase “global citizen” rings hollow in a way that even the officially defunct “Yugoslavian” does not. Globalization has created a good deal of  industrial and financial infrastructure, but no real “social landscape,” Friedman-flat or otherwise. Why? I think the answer is that we are missing some folkways. Why should you care? Let me explain. [Read more…]

Digital Security, the Red Queen, and Sexual Computing

June 9, 2010 By

There is a technology trend which even the determinedly non-technical should care about. The bad guys are winning. And even though I am only talking about the bad guys in computing — writers of viruses, malware and the like — they are actually the bad guys of all technology, since computing is now central to every aspect of technology. They might even be the bad guys of civilization in general, since computing-driven technology is central to our attacks on all sorts of other global problems ranging from global poverty to AIDS, cancer, renewable energy and Al Qaeda. So turning around and winning this war might even be the single most important challenge facing humanity today. Even that bastion of the liberal arts and humanities, The Atlantic Monthly, has taken note, with this excellent feature on how the best security researchers in the world are losing the battle against the Conficker worm. Simple-minded solutions, ranging from “everybody should get a Mac” to “just stick to Web-based apps and netbooks” to “practice better digital hygeine” are all temporary tactical defenses against an adversary that is gradually gaining the upper hand on many fronts. I have concluded that there is only one major good-guy weapon that has not yet been tried: sexual computing. And it hasn’t been tried because major conceptual advances in computer science are needed. I’ll explain what I mean by the term (it is a fairly obvious idea for those who know the background, so there may be more accepted existing terms for the vision), but I’ll need to lay some groundwork first.

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Three Off-Ribbonfarm Posts

June 3, 2010 By

You may have noticed that in the last few weeks, I haven’t exactly been posting spectacular original content on this blog. A vacation and the simultaneous bootstrapping of two new writing outlets (the Trailmeme blog and the Be Slightly Evil email list), are part of the reason. The other part of the reason is that all my current ribbonfarmesque ideas are currently in the form of several rather demanding drafts (reading Gibbon’s 6-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” doesn’t exactly catalyze tweet-sized ideas). So rather than post hasty dreck, I figured I’d just point you to some of my posts on the Trailmeme blog that might interest you.

  • In Rent vs. Buy and Digital Lifestyle Design I looked at what’s happening to an age-old decision due to the impact of future-of-work forces
  • In The Marcus Aurelius School of Curation, I argue that information curation (an emerging new profession) is less like being a librarian, and more like being a stoic emperor. And yeah, this post is partly inspired by my current obsession with the history of Rome. Expect a lot of Rome references from me in upcoming writing. The fact that I was actually vacationing in Italy, and wandering around Pompeii, while reading the thing, probably helped burn the book into my head a lot more vividly.
  • In The Eight Belts of Information Ninja-Hood I have one of my usual overworked metaphors.

These are just a sampling. There’s more stuff there. Between me and a colleague, that blog sees about 4 new posts a week. Subscribe to that blog if this vein of writing interests you. The Be Slightly Evil email list is turning into an interesting project as well, and after 4 experimental mailings, I am finally beginning to get a sense of how and what to write there. All you sociopath wannabes — subscribe if you haven’t already.

And oh yeah, the book is coming along nicely. I had some writer’s block going for a while, but things are back on track.

Lots of balls to juggle, but I am making my writing processes more aerodynamic all along, so you should see things back to normal here in a week or two. I have a couple of really interesting (to me at least) posts shaping up.