The Internet is an energy management system

"My friends, family and acquaintances are all on Facebook, where they add up to a bustling community I enjoy being part of. More than any particular feature that Mark Zuckerberg and company have cooked up, it’s the people in my life that make Facebook, well, Facebook.

Over on Google+, I find some worthwhile material to peruse, but in far smaller quantities. The smattering of people I encounter hardly replicates my real-world social connections. The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting. As a social experience, it often feels perfunctory."

This post by Harry McCracken about the differences between Facebook and Google+ made me realise once again that the Internet is all about energy. Finding energy and sharing energy. Finding smart people whose conversations increase your energy and hopefully sharing your energy with others to help them do more, understand more, appreciate more, love more.

Life is too short for perfunctory exchanges. It is too short to spend time, and energy, where you think you should be spending it. Spend it where it makes you feel more alive.

"Most people"

I love the ability the Internet has given us to share what we think with others around the world or around our organisation. Yet you would be amazed how often I get the reaction "Most people don't want to have to think too much, especially at work".

While walking the streets of Warsaw last week, learning of the four years of suffering it took before the Jews rose up against the Nazis, I realised that most people would have convinced themselves that things couldn't be as bad as they seemed; that if they just did what they were told and kept their heads down then they and their families would be safe. 

In Saudi Arabia earlier that same week, looking out on an audience in which the women were separated by the men with a screen, and for which the organisers had to have a special mixed audience licence, most people went along with the rules, covered their heads, sat separately from each other - despite many of them not sharing the fundamental beliefs of their rulers. 

Most people want to be safe, most people want to care for their loved ones, most people don't want to think too hard if it gets them into trouble. 

What would I have done in Nazi occupied Poland? What would I do if I had been born in Saudi Arabia?

Am I like most people?

Are you?

I don't get the iPad

I bought the first generation iPad as soon as it came out. Couldn't wait to own one. But three years later I still don't get it! 

My problem is not so much the old argument about the iPad being a consumption rather than a production device. There are so many really effective tools that you can use on an iPad these days to do really useful work. In fact it was various podcasters' enthusiasm for those tools that made me go back and have a second try at using the iPad seriously. That and the fact that we are in need of moving tools around in the family again and I was interested to see if I could survive without my laptop. I can't.

My MacBook air is just too useful. I have it tricked out with all sorts of app launchers, text expanders, macros, productivity apps, and other apps that make it much easier for me to get more done faster and better. The combination of the best computer I have ever owned and my iPhone 5 is still impossible to beat. In contrast using the iPad was, for me, like wading through treacle.

To say I don't get it is perhaps unfair. I do get it, in the sense that it is an amazing device that is clearly useful to a lot of people. One day when I am feeling particularly flush I may get an iPad mini, but otherwise the iPad is not for me. 

Maybe if my only other experience of computing was a work PC…

Musing about difference

One of the things that most appeals to me about the Internet is its potential to cross political, geographical and cultural boundaries and make us feel more part of a connected whole than ever before. 

Having said that I work around the world with people from widely varying cultures who have different perspectives on the Internet and its opportunities. In fact it is usually unproductive to assume that we are all the same and have the same expectations. 

Maybe we need to celebrate, and possibly even reinforce, the differences before we start assuming too much about similarities? Maybe we can have both? Maybe we can feel more comfortable about the ways that we are different while at the same time growing to appreciate more the ways that we are the same?

The perils of projection

It is interesting thinking back to the Thatcher era and how polarised we became. You can see it happening now online with the news of her death. You can see the same thing watching the current conservative government demonising people. Whether it is immigrants, skivers, it is always "them". 

We fall into the same trap in organisations. Management are always dealing with "them" - employees, time wasters, even antagonistic customers. We distance ourselves from these others yet we define them on the basis of our worst fears - whether these fears are justified or not. We make sweeping generalisations and write off whole sections of society. 

If we do this for long enough "they" get used to it and expect it. We allow "them" to wait for "us" to sort things and then we resent their dependence on us. We create a dependence culture both in society at large and in our organisations. But this allows us all to stay comfortable, to project our worries onto those around us, to stay stuck.

We need go grow up. We need to understand our projections and take responsibility for them. We need to stop thinking in terms of "us" and "them" and think more of "us". We need to think for ourselves and think of each other rather than for each other. We need to help each other to grow up. 

Organisational anarchist or corporate jester?

Phillipe Borrowmans just posted a great post about the possibilities of truly social business which he titled "We need more Corporate Anarchists". Please go and read the whole thing but hopefully Phillipe will excuse this extensive snip:

Immanuel Kant describes anarchy as "Law and Freedom without Force" - this idea combined with one school of thought of anarchism - where the focus is on non-hierarchical organizations - was to me a kind of ultimate long term result.

But today I see more and more "social business" projects that tend to have "better control" as an objective. Some of these project are just about adding a social layer to already flawed business processes and models.

Why not use social media to truly open up an organization ?

Use it as a huge magnifying glass to see why people are not sharing information and helping each other out. And then from there change the system from within to make something better...

A true "social business" will eat titles on business cards for breakfast. But it will allow anyone in the company to become project leader based on his/her true skills and not based on the amount of projects managed.

A social business will not be afraid to completely change its business model to continue (or start) to create true value for society. And yes this means making money but also employing people, taking care of resources and creating real innovation.

I just believe we can do more with "social" than we're doing now. And we all know that we need drastic change to be able to face our current challenges; 12% unemployment in Europe, a dramatic state of inertia when it comes to our environment and social unrest around the corner. 

It occurred to me that maybe there is a role for an "official" corporate anarchist, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. Someone who radically questions things, who prompts people to pick apart things that aren't working, who keeps pushing decision making to as wide a network as possible. They would have to be senior enough and have enough clout to push against the inevitable resistance but if enough people bought into the need for the role it should be possible. I remember British Airways being mocked years ago for having a corporate jester with a similar brief. Maybe it is not such a daft idea after all. 

Love at The Commission

This wonderful article, reproduced with her permission, by Maria Podlasek-Ziegler at The European Commission totally nails why social matters in organisations.

‘Love’ at the Commission By Maria (DG EAC)

I was rather sceptical when somebody told me about using Facebook, Twitter and so on. I considered I did not have time for such ‘toys’, it was enough to manage two e-mail accounts, the business and private one, to combine work at the Commission with raising children, keeping the household going on. And I simply did not have interest in the social web knowing well from the media how exhibitionistic the people can be talking to the entire world what they have had for breakfast or how bad they feel at the moment. And I was also alarmed by warnings how the data could be manipulated or misused.

But I had to show interest since I deal with EU programmes for young people being implemented by a network of national agencies. I have even encouraged colleagues ‘yes indeed it is something for young people, so we need to use social tools when we communicate with them’.

Everything changed after my last meeting with the colleagues form national agencies in October last year. As usual we raised the question of social media and listened to an external expert, Euan Semple. I expected some explanations about vimeo and Google+, instagram and hashtags. But suddenly I heard words like ‘leaving a trace’, ‘writing yourself into existence’, ‘growing up’, ‘the more you give, the more you get’ and … ‘love’ .

These unexpected words were so weird in the context I found myself at that moment that they provoked my curiosity. Two days later, after coming back from the mission, the first thing I saw on my PC’s screen was the message: Yammer at the Commission! I knew already this was an ‘internal Facebook’ for organisations. And I thought ‘this time you cannot escape’.

And I started discovering this new world. First of all I discovered an immense source of information related to so many areas in our work. I could read amazing articles, watch videos that I normally would not have found. And it was so easy to access all the people involved by simply asking questions. Although posting the first one took me some time: I hesitated, I was not sure about how to ask, if to ask… I had to learn that this was a new way of communication, which follows its own rules: it is so easy und natural as if you would speak to your colleague next door. At the same time you speak in public and each word you write down is being recorded and „observed” by maybe hundreds of colleagues.

Once you have overcome this initial fears to speak online, you discover that there are so many people that think in the same way you do, that you are not alone in this big organisation with 38 000 people. You start building up your networks, you recognise some names and other people start recognising yours. And so many colleagues simply listen to what you say. This gives you the courage to continue reflecting and expressing your views and provides you with an inner power.

The adventure started when a colleague from DG HR posted an announcement and encouraged everybody to contribute to the programme of the Digital Competence Day training. An avalanche of comments on a draft version started rolling, as if we were sitting in a meeting room and talking to each other. Nobody asked us to contribute; nobody supervised and controlled the progress of the work. We were driven neither by internal competition nor by expectation to gain some extra points in the carrier. And we had such a fun when simple creating something together. The results of this Yammer meeting you can see today.

But what all this does have in common with ‘love’? It does a lot. Thanks to the „meetings” and „conversations” on Yammer you see this institution opening up, you see all the individuals it is composed of: thoughtful, helpful colleagues with all the richness of their cultures they originate from, with all their expertise and human qualities. Suddenly you feel you are part of such a great unique community and you have the privilege to share with this community a common goal: to make a difference, change a bit the surrounding world and help building up a better Europe.

Better the devil you know

Organisations fear the apparent messiness of internal use of social tools. They fear the possibility that people will waste their time. They fear the risk of dissent and disruption. These fears are raised and articulated in this article from Oliver Marks.

I would refer, yet again, to the wise words I once heard Vint Cerf utter about the Internet, namely that it is just a thing. If you don't like what you are doing with it is a reflection of you as an individual, an organisation, or a society and those are the things you have to deal with. The same is true of intranets.

Isn't it better to see our problems and disfunctions and be able to deal with them rather than have them hidden and festering? Isn't it better to find out who your corporate morons are than have them sneak up on you unawares? Isn't it better to be able to see, quantify, and deal with your time-wasting and manage it. Isn't it likely that these tools can make the job of management easier rather than harder if we just embrace them and understand them?

When being interested feels dangerous

As I surfed Facebook and Twitter this morning I was struck yet again how powerful the process of finding things interesting is. All these people pointing to things they have found interesting. Sifting the web for me. Finding the good stuff. Making me more aware of things I wouldn't be otherwise. Getting collectively smarter.

Why, oh why, is it so hard to transfer this principle into the workplace. Why can't we see that being interested and learning faster makes us more effective both as individuals and organisations? Why have we suppressed our natural curiosity and made being interested feel dangerous?

Why blogging still matters

"Most of what we inherit is so clearly correct it goes unseen. It fits the world seamlessly. It is the world. But despite its richness and variability, the well-defined world we inherit doesn't quite fit each one of us, individually. Most of us spend most of our time in other people's worlds -- working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment -- and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn't quite ring true.

And so you make your place in the world by making part of it -- by contributing some new part to the set. And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done."

David Bayles and Ted Orland

Art & Fear

The passing of time

Robert Paterson wrote a moving blog post this week about his dog Jay who he had to have put down a couple of years ago. In it he writes of the inevitability of things coming to an end.

We all act as if life was a blank cheque that we never have to cash. We'll try next time. It'll be alright when x,y or z has happened. I won't bother saying the thing I know I need to say now because I can always put it off until the next time. Ongoing attempts to "live in the moment" and "be present" get swept away in a constant stream of regrets about the past or fears for the future.

I remember reading a story many years ago by Thich Nhat Hanh in which he describes eating a mandarin orange. He carefully removes the skin and then peels the fronds from the first segment. But he doesn't taste that segment as he pops it into his mouth because he is already anticipating peeling the next one. We truly experience so little of our lives even while we are living them.

I spent this Easter weekend with my parents. They are both around 80 and getting more and more frail. Despite them being game for their age and keen to keep doing things, life is getting harder. A lot of their circle of friends have died and in this, and so many other ways, their lives are contracting around them.

The inevitability of all of this still comes as a jolt. Suddenly time becomes precious in a way it should have been all the time. We can't get back the moments we have sleep walked our way through but can only try to be more awake for those still left to us.

Supping with the devil

Big Data is the latest wave of oversold and under-understood hype to buffet people. "Social Media", "The Cloud", "Big Data". They get wielded aggressively like blunt instruments.

Big Data is the worst. As I said in my earlier post on patterns there is nothing wrong in us collectively being better informed as a result of the patterns we leave on the web but so much of Big Data is about people who don't contribute to those patterns making money from them.

Doc Searls posts this morning about rising resistance to the way marketing is using our patterns. Worth following the links in his post and if you haven't already caught up on what he is doing with VRM you really should.

VOST

I have just had a fascinating Skype call with Marlita Reddy-Hjelmfelt about VOST (Virtual Operations Support Teams) - groups of online volunteers who help the emergency services monitor and curate social activity around things like forest fires and hurricanes. For instance they use Tweetgrid to capture tweets based on geo tags in concentric rings around the centre of the incident. They also curate information from diverse related agencies and news feeds along with Facebook, Twitter, even Pinterest, to give an overall picture of what is happening and people's reactions to what is happening. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for to Garret Vreeland for the connection.

2.0 on the outside but 1.0 on the inside

When I came up with the caption on the slide in the photo above I was thinking about organisations but it occurred to me tonight that it applies at least as much to us as individuals.

I have just finished Jamie Smart's excellent book Clarity in which, to paraphrase the whole book, he contrasts "outside in" thinking - where we allow ourselves to be steered by what we perceive as the "real world" outside ourselves - with "inside out" thinking - where we realise that our experience of the world is 100% conditioned by our thinking. We see the world through our own filters and this leads to being buffeted by increasingly complex influences rather than accessing our own innate wisdom and achieving clarity.

In the last chapters of the book he talks of collective clarity, societies where enough people see the world this way working together more effectively to cope with our increasing challenges. This is what I was getting at in the chapters "We all need to grow up", "The ultimate in democracy" and "Evolution on steroids" in my book.

In order for us to make the most of the networked world, that we are beginning to get to grips with, each of the nodes in the network, each of the cells in the organism, have to be healthy, fully functioning, and clear about their purpose. This takes real work that we are only beginning to understand. 

Rising to the challenge

Walking around Utrecht tonight I found myself wondering yet again at the fragility of civilisation - how in this part of the world 70 years ago people's lives were turned upside down by Nazi invasion and not everyone reacted well to that. I also thought about how stretched our food supply chains are these days and how a few days of power cuts affecting the logistics computers and we will be fighting each other for the remaining food supplies. I even began thinking about how little an increase in sea level it would take to literally wash away all of the refined, cute, brick built civilisation I was walking through. 

I am usually a half full sort of a guy, preferring to see the best in people and situations and not wanting to be drawn into catastrophic predictions for our planet. But things could go horribly wrong. We really could find ourselves having blown it and with millions suffering and dying as a result of our decisions. We arrogantly talk about saving the planet but the planet won't care. It will be glad to see the back of us and will carry on fine once we have gone. 

But then… could the worst that could happen be the best that could happen? Could being tested to a severe degree bring out the best in us? Could a severe enough jolt shake us out of our complacency? Could a big enough, imminent enough threat force us to pull together, work together, share our resources enough to really change for the better? Instead of sharing pictures of cats could we use the internet, the most significant advance in our collective ability to deal with challenges since the printing press, to work things out?

We might just get to find out.

Churches and TVC

I don't like organised religion but I do like churches and worry about their closure. I have little affection these days for the BBC but I am sad that Television Centre is closing. 

Both are about shared human experiences. TVC was like a collection of west end theatres changing their shows every day. Amazing amounts of effort and vast numbers of people experiencing often moving events together. 

Like old churches the place is soaked with those experiences and no matter what is done with the building those memories will linger.

Farming the meatware

When I am asked what the next big thing on the web will be I say patterns. We have increasingly been opening up and sharing stuff, which is in itself useful and interesting, but the real benefits start to come when we make sense of the patterns that this activity shows us. We know that Facebook makes its money out of the information we share and the patterns that that information makes. To varying degrees we are uneasy with that trade with the devil that we all indulge in to get "free" functionality depending on how Facebook treats us and our information. 

I am currently loving Waze, a car navigation app that makes use of users patterns and traffic patterns to make intelligent decisions about routes. It is able to do so because I leave it running all the time and the system can track my movements. The benefit to the individual is significant but, based on this self interested willingness to share, Waze is clearly going to make its real money by selling these accurate patterns of travel to people planning infrastructure or designing cars.

The Quantified Self is a whole movement of people interested in measuring things like fitness activity, diet and even mood. The tools are used for your own interest but increasingly have the ability to share the data more widely and produce patterns. Again of interest to governments, or those designing food products - or even insurance companies. 

Recently I was shown a tool for monitoring internal social tools and producing patterns of activity. Who is contributing the most, where are tensions arising, what topics prevail and when? It is obvious that there will be benefit from these patterns being visible but it really matters how those benefits manifest themselves. If the data is being collected to be fed back into the network to allow those in the network to make better decisions and use it more effectively I can't wait. If it is being collected for a group of managers who don't take part in the network but are wanting to take decisions based on the activities of those in it then I wouldn't want anything to do with it. 

There is clearly huge benefit in seeing these patterns but huge risks as well. If the patterns are made visible to users in the various networks they will help us to navigate and use them more effectively. If we end as factory farmed meatware being used to benefit others at our expense we will have created a dystopian future not out of place in A Brave New World. We will also have missed a wonderful opportunity to get collectively smarter and make better decisions about some of the complex and pressing issues that currently face us. This is a choice that matters.

Mind your carrots

"The day is coming, when a single carrot freshly observed, will set off a revolution" Paul Cézanne

This is the power of the social web. The intensity of the mundane. Really observing what is happening around us and conveying it in ways that truly impacts others. Not grand gestures or strategic plans but little things. Trojan mice. Single carrots freshly observed. 

Mufti Day

‎"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes" - Henry David Thoreau.

It is Mufti Day today at my daughters' school. The rest of the time they are forced to wear school uniforms, even down to being penalised for wearing anything other than black scarves, not tying their ties properly, or having their skirts too short. I sort of understand the argument that having a school uniform levels the students and protects less fortunate kids from sartorial pressure. But I rant on a regular basis about the perceived need to inculcate conformity. My biggest rant is about the sixth formers who are "allowed" to wear business suits and end up looking like low paid corporate IT staff!

And talking of IT staff… At the BBC there wasn't really a dress code and everyone, even the managers (mostly) wore whatever they wanted to work. However, in the eighties, when we decided we needed to import IT expertise from the city, the place suddenly filled with guys in cheap suits. They stood out like sore thumbs and could be spotted a mile away. Then, much to our amusement, they started to have a dress down Friday when they looked like us, then reverted to looking like aliens on the next Monday!! What was that all about!?

Back to the school mufti day. The problem with all that bottled up individuality being unleashed one particular day is that it is a cue for a sort of manic fashion parade with pressure to look smart/classy/tarty (delete as appropriate). If you are going to have uniforms and aspire to the pretence of standardisation then I reckon you should keep the pretence up rather than letting it slip occasionally and revealing the full horrors of real life.

Whittling

I am currently reading Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Originally published in the thirties it contiains many quaint anachronisms. One that appeared today I thought worthy of comment. She writes about the benefits to a writer of doing nothing. Of not filling every available moments with words, either your own or other people's. She lists a number of ways of spending time without thinking too much and one of them was whittling. Whittling@! Who does whittling any more? Has the ubiquity of smartphones, with their interruptive delights, dealt whittling a death blow?

I am also currently reading Story Of A Secret State in which the narrator Jan Karski has just spent time in Nazi control being tortured by The Gestapo. Spookily the two books come together in the image above which is of a bird, whittled out of a single block of wood by my Serbian uncle who refined the skill while being held in Nazi prison camps during the second world war. 

Now, where can I buy a pen knife!