Evolving Web

Focus and Finish

Be like Mark: Ignore Facebook.

Today I have three things to do: write this blog post, format a follow up package for our classes in Iowa last week, and get my cleaning to the cleaners so I have clothes for New York next week.  Oh, and get a ticket to New York.  Okay ... four things.  Five if you count being available for a client call if they schedule it today and not Wednesday.

So .. five things.

Anyway, I sat down about an hour ago to write the blog post. It went all over the place and was deleted ... in about 15 minutes. Then I went for a second to see what reply happened on Facebook and now it is an hour later.

I didn't follow my own rule of not touching an open social media channel until I was done with my focused work.

One thing needs to be clear here ... we give Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and that picture thing too much credit - the social media most people are distracted by first thing in the morning is e-mail.  I think most people have given up on inbox zero, but that's not the point ... the point is actually when to inbox at all.

So, your brain starts each day with a certain amount of creative energy.  If you start each day in e-mail or social media, you are likely sending that creative energy (cognitive capacity) in the wrong direction. Yes, sometimes my first task is writing an email or responding to one - but it is a directed task with one recipient for a specific purpose (like a proposal or other "deliverable").

E-mail, Facebook, etc. aren't a problem because of their structure, they are a problem because they are streams of context switching. From personal to political to project A to planning to project B to spam to cats to cats to cats to cats.  Streams are context switching and our brains love it because we are saying "New New New New New!!!"

But what your brain is not doing is creating something of value that will make someone happy, you money, or solve some problem - maybe even all three. 

That stuff ... the good stuff ... comes actually completing things and focusing on them. We don't get sucked into social media and email holes because they build anything ... we get sucked into them because they are high-yield distraction.

So, this pomodoro is done.  Blog post is delivered. Now going to get some coffee and jump into that formatting.  Where is that Illustrator icon?

Collaboration and Clarity Make Us Greater than the Sum of Our Parts

A year-end retrospective.

Imagine Yo-Yo Ma performing a solo.

Now imagine him performing a duet with Hai-Ye Ni.

Now imagine him performing the duet on his own. First he’ll play his part, then he’ll play hers. Sure it’ll take twice as long … but he’ll get there.

Eventually.

I've never been more productive than I've been over the past year. This was not due to a tool. It was not due to Personal Kanban. It was not due to energy drinks or hot yoga. 

It was due to the powerful combination of collaboration and clarity. Everything that was successful about 2009 I attribute to the potency of these two forces.  

Anything that fell short, can be easily traced to a lack of it.

Tonianne first came on board with Modus to help me write my book. During the first six months of the year, we pounded out about 80% of a fairly decent manuscript. We felt really good about this, but we were just getting our sea legs.

It wasn’t until June when we raised the sails and the effortless race began.

In the latter half of the year, Tonianne and I:

• Wrote three white papers, two for a major company and one for a groundbreaking new organization
• Conceived of and launched Personal Kanban with hundreds of articles on personal and team productivity
• Created three InfoPaks that described in detailed and illustrated richness what Personal Kanban is
• Worked with the World Bank and the CGIAR to create and implement a system to teach local government officials in forested countries how to calculate and distribute carbon credits to landowners
• Worked with (and continue to work with) the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to create an eLearning module on collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Managed the process to create an iPhone app (almost done)
• Helped a client refine the concepts for - and launch a development effort to build - a system that employs social media and real estate information to better define where we actually think we live
• Helped a client who owns and operates a drug rehab agency for street kids use Personal Kanban to focus his clients and his staff

and I know I’m forgetting things.

The UN Work and the World Bank project have shown me that David Anderson and I shouldn’t have been surprised when he used Kanban at Corbis and achieved 400%+ gains in productivity.

We should have expected it.

Collaboration and clarity through the kanban dictated it.

There were only two projects that Tonianne and I worked on this year that we were less than pleased with, and that is due to a lack of collaboration and clarity. Engagements where people lacked clear understanding of their role in the project or the purpose of the project or the direction of the project led to collaboration breakdown and failure.

The World Bank/CGIAR project was a wake up call. The group we worked with was comprised of people from around the world, all dedicated professionals, all very intelligent. Previously, the project was all but paralyzed. We got them in a room and working and together they took off. Vertical take off. They went from almost nothing to a clear concept of purpose and a tremendous amount of documentation in five days.

Why? Because in that conference room they had clarity and they were able to collaborate. And they did it gleefully. Why didn’t they do this before? No clarity and no feeling of collaborative momentum. They had jobs in their isolated offices and this project (no matter how important or interesting) was just another thing begging for attention during the course of their day.

The UN Project showed me that collaboration and clarity can be effortless in a distributed team as well. One of the lessons we are writing is in a module where other lessons are being written by Nancy White and John Smith. Instantly and elegantly, everyone began collaborating organically, which has made our work much easier. Our individual creativity and expertise is providing immediate quality improvements to our respective sections and the document as a whole.

So, if Tonianne and I can do all that in six months, and if David can get a 400%+ rise in team productivity, what does this mean?

That with a team that has clarity, the number of team members does not necessarily provide linear gains in productivity. I’m not saying it’s exponential. I’m just saying that 1+1 > 2. 

Imagine Yo-Yo Ma performing a solo.

Now imagine him performing a duet with Hai-Ye Ni.

Now imagine him performing the duet on his own. First he’ll play his part, then he’ll play hers. It’ll take twice as long … but he’ll get there.

Eventually.

Life cannot be a solo. Ma and Ni are two of the most accomplished cellists in history, but they can’t perform a duet on their own. Their art, their accomplishment, comes from knowing when they are soloing and when they are part of something larger than themselves.

This does not mean they lose themselves in the process. They don’t become cello-bots simply because it’s not their solo. When Yo-Yo falls back and Hai-Ye’s part is in the forefront, he’s playing his piece with the same grace and attentiveness as if he were on stage alone. Grace and attentiveness that comes from clarity is the bedrock of successful collaboration. You know your part, you know your place, you feel the whole being created because - and only because - you are playing your part perfectly.

As for 2008, I just wanted it to end. It was a year plagued by muddy thinking, half-completed projects, and soloists trying to collaborate. 2008 physically hurt.

2009’s successes have existed not only because Tonianne’s and my duet was able to operate on its own, but also because that same duet could easily shift and become part of an even larger entity, like our UN quartet and CGIAR’s 14 piece orchestra.

Beautiful music.

I want to thank Tonianne and those who truly understood Modus’ mission, helped make Personal Kanban what it has become, and prepared us for what looks to be a stunning 2010.

Thank you all for this year.

Photo of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by Jordan Fischer.

Whitepaper: Enterprise Mashups Change Everything

Tonianne and I just completed a new whitepaper as part of our association with Hinchcliffe and Company. Profitability, Predictability and Performance through Enterprise Mashups is now available for download.

JackBe’s Chris Warner wrote about our EMML whitepaper on the JackBe blog.  In his post, Chris addresses one of the whitepaper's central points - that businesses today need the ability to rapidly respond to major changes within the business context. 

He quotes this section of the whitepaper:

"However, discussing such typical uses for mashups might be missing the point. The mashup's strength lies in discovering the atypical, in exploiting data in new ways. The fact is, any information your business needs can be analyzed with a mashup, often more quickly, with minimal effort, and at much lower expense than hiring consultants or using traditional and more time-consuming SOA approaches to do the same work. Rapid experimentation with data leads to invention."

And then he adds:

“In short, every specific enterprise mashup example misses the [perhaps more important] point that enterprise mashups are good for whatever use the users find. Mashups are genuinely applicable to areas as diverse as situation intelligence, real-time business intelligence, classic decision-support, and lightweight application integration, to name a few. Every day we get more great uses and examples from our partners, our customers, and our mashup developer community members. And I am sure we haven’t even begun to cover all the possibilities.”

You see, we are creating data at an exponential rate. This unprecedented growth is accompanied by the consumer's assumption that products will constantly improve and evolve. Time to market for new products and features has been greatly reduced. This data can be combined and analyzed (via mashups). As data becomes more accessible, products to create the mashups have become easier to use.

Increasingly, anyone can create sophisticated business intelligence, an act previously reserved for highly trained business analysts. In the end, mashups represent a fundamental shift in the way we can create value and test hypotheses. Enterprise mashups take this one step further by creating predictable datasets and useable interfaces.

Download the whitepaper and keep the conversation going.

Personal Kanban Tweet-a-ban 17 Nov 2009

When: November 17, 2009 

Where: Twitter 

Hashtag: #pkflow

Save the date because Modus Cooperandi is hosting a "Tweet-a-ban." Whether you're a Personal Kanban practitioner or just have an interest in improving your productivity, join in on the asynchronous, 24 hour long global conversation. 

For details click here.

Thoughts on Conversation: Enterprise 2.0 Workshop at Somesso 09

Last week I had the good fortune to conduct a one-day seminar on Enterprise 2.0 for the Finance Industry in Zurich. I attended Somesso 09 as an instructor with Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 University. Somesso is an Enterprise 2.0 / business social media firm based in Switzerland. They host information-packed conferences directed at specific verticals. Whereas this conference focused on finance, Somesso brought in a range of highly relevant trend setters and trusted names in the industry.  

While I went armed with a well-stocked arsenal of slides describing every nuance of E20, my primary goal was to ensure attendees - a healthy mix of curious novices and experienced practitioners - left not only with a clear understanding of techniques and technologies, but also having had the opportunity to learn from the collected wisdom in the room.

The first half of the seminar focused on covering the nuts and bolts of E20 as quickly as possible. To be sure this is a challenge, given that E20 can be employed in nearly every aspect of a business to include business intelligence, customer support, production, advertising...the list goes on.

With the groundwork firmly established, the afternoon shifted towards conversation and workshopping. I was blessed to have people like Marilyn Pratt (SAP’s community evangelist), Anu Elmer (Swiss Re’s internal community manager) and David Terrar (CEO of Wordframe) in the group. Having them share their experience and expertise with the room meant that exploration could then be handled by means of a lively discussion – rather than by merely having just another question and answer exchange.

Through the course of the afternoon the conversation centered around two main issues: rewards and hosting communities.

Rewards: The group expressed interest in how to attract participation to internal or external E2 communities. Why would people participate? Why would they help manage?
We discussed how most communities are gameable systems, and the construction of the community (its rules, attributions, and rewards) would guide how people used the system. In most active communities  "super-users" often appear, helping to manage the community and (as it often works out) provide much of the content. Business management software provider SAP refers to these individuals as "ambassadors." Superusers tend to share copious amounts of information, proving to be invaluable resources subsequently gaining prestige and expanding their network. The larger one's network, the more opportunities result.

Hosting Communities: During our discussions, the power of communities for business became clear. When other organizations recognized Swiss Re and SAP's success in hosting their own communities, they wanted to host them too. This led to a lengthy discussion about the financial and opportunity costs of hosting a community, the staff it would necessitate, and the finesse that becomes indispensable when managing an open community.

Most interesting was seeing the realization that an organization didn’t necessarily need to "own" the community to derive value from it. From a marketing standpoint, the company's natural inclination was to "own" the community, to make it an extension of its brand. However, as our discussion of community progressed, some came to the realization that they may actually be better served working with existing communities elsewhere rather than trying to host their own. Some communities were already active elsewhere, and some felt that their customers were more comfortable being in an environment not specifically focused on their money. 
--
Somesso hosted a lovely event at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue. The location overlooking Lake Zurich and the Alps was perfect for eliciting contemplation and provoking thoughtful conversation. My thanks to Arjen Stryker and Judith Koch for bringing me in to work with such fantastic people.

Dreams Deferred

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes

Years ago, I was sitting in a very posh restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District with a friend of mine.  He was a very wealthy programmer, working for an incredibly prestigious financial company.  We were talking, eating, laughing and having a wonderful evening overall.

He looked up at me and told me he was going to go back on drugs.  About 7 years previous, he had kicked heroin.  He’d gone from shooting up in dirty houses to having a comfortable townhome in Noe Valley.  He’d built a lot in a very short period of time.

While giving me his reasoned rationale for wanting to go back onto heavy drugs he said, “I’m just not happy now. With everything I’ve achieved I’m just never happy.  When I was using, I was happy for very short periods of time.  I want to be happy again.”  By the time I left him that night and went back to my hotel, he’d already scored and started his slide back to his previous life.  Within a few months, he lost everything he’d worked for.

Happiness is elusive. We chase it, we want it.  Life seemingly conspires against it.  We mask our need for it by watching sitcoms that make us smile for very short periods of time – the over-the-counter version of heroin.

Over the last few years, I’ve met a long string of people who have gone through the 80s and 90s and now almost all of the aughts and have come up empty.  Whether they have money or not, whether the recession is felt by them or not, there is a measurable exodus from lifestyles that fundamentally work at cross-purposes to happiness.

Thankfully, very few of them see drugs as an acceptable solution.

This isn’t drop-out happiness people are seeking.  No communes, no great-american-novels, no buy-a-wineries (well, okay, two people bought wineries)…. This movement to happiness is pragmatic.  People understand that they are better family members, they are healthier, they can help others more, they are more productive team members, etc. when they are happy.

So .. why not be happy?

The Infrastructure of Happiness

Happiness is a construct and a really ethereal one at that.  It is often confused with states it is very similar to like gratification, placation, contentment, etc.  Happiness can be self-serving or it can be effacing and humble.

As managers or business owners or team members, we ignore happiness at our peril. 

Why?  Because there appears to be a tacit assumption that work and happiness don’t go together.  Happiness comes later.  When I retire, when I can take vacation, when I’m … not .. at …work.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the tension between our individual drives and social pressures:

Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. ….

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires.  He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires.

Professional fulfillment is part of happiness.  It has to be.  We all know it.

So, if we’re setting up a team for a project, why not have happiness be a primary goal of the team’s infrastructure?  Maybe even THE goal.  Product second, remuneration third.  Happiness first.

After reading about our endless quest for happiness by neuroscientists, orchestra conductors, Buddhist monks, psychologists, philosophers, humorists, management theorists, and everyone in-between, I’ve come to one conclusion.

People are happy when they know what they’re doing and aren’t offended by it.

There are very few reasons why we would ever do something we were offended by or without cause.  At work, people feel obligated to do what their employer requests – even if they find it offensive, demeaning or perplexing.  Depending on their situations, they may feel that they have no choice but to do as requested – with even quitting being out of the question.

Unenlightened employers may feel this is a position of power and rejoice in the entrapment of such people.  However, if your goal is to have a business that grows and innovates – this mindset is not going to help you.

Business cultures that strike a balance between business and personal health should engender a happier workforce.  People worry a great deal about what happens at the office.  They take that stress home with them.  That stress can negatively impact home life.  This creates more stress, which is in turn brought back to the office.

In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, tying the all time record for wins in a single season.  They were mostly the same team they were the year before and the next year when their records were nowhere close to 116.  In 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series after being dead last in 2007.  Again, with roughly the same line up.

There is an attitude of winning that can float or sink a team.  If your team is committed to being happy first, its chances of winning will be bolstered.  True commitment to a healthy culture creates momentum.

In The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh describes this momentum in his monkly style:

In your professional life, there may be other people you have to be in touch with and work with.  You may be working as a team to make a film, design a produce, or complete another kind of project.  Each person on your team has his own difficulties , his own suffering.  but because you are open, happy, fresh, and concentrated, you can help all of them touch their freshness.  you don’t care only about their work performance, because the quality of their work depends on the peace and well-being inside each of them.  You come to the business as a friend, helping everyone transform, bringing peace, harmony and well-being into their lives at home and at work.

Yes, Master Hahn is a bit beyond what HR might be comfortable with.  The point, however, is that teams made up of happy and psychologically healthy individuals understand that they are working with other human beings.  We are working with people who have lives outside of work and that they are living inside work too.

We are still alive while we’re at work.  We aren’t purchased work-robots who have deferred our dreams to times of not-work.

We have goals and, more often than not, those goals are good for the company.  We want to complete projects.  We want to understand the flow of work.  We want to do what we can.

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s description of what makes people feel happiness is very much in-line with understanding your company’s value-stream.  While there’s deeper issues at play, from a work perspective the value stream is vital.  Understanding the flow of work through your organization satisfies some basic needs to making your workforce happy.

Creating a lucid value stream and expressing people’s places in it gives workers a lot of power.  They can optimize their place in the value stream based on their current skills or skills they wish to acquire.  They can optimize the value stream itself by pointing out areas of improvement.  In short, the clarity provided by understanding what the heck is going on is instantly gratifying.

What is also interesting is, happiness as described by most of these authors is not a static state.  Happiness is, rather, an aesthetic or an amalgam.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert starts a long chapter about what happiness may or may not be with this point:

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness.

When all these authors get down to it, they end up describing self-rewarding systems that seem to result in rolling series of Maslovian peak experiences.

A-ha!

Business then, which is loathe to really get into matters of personal mental health, can actually do a few things here.

1. Make business explicit to those doing the work. 

The value stream, the fiscal health of the company, people’s roles in the organization, corporate ethics and goals – should all be made explicit so workers can choose to improve, innovate, and participate.

2. Decisions are free

Free your managers and you from top down decision making.  Give people the freedom to do their jobs.

3. Information Hoarding Will Not Be Tolerated

The fastest way to threaten anyone is to withhold information from them.  Want to kill productivity?  Keep secrets.

4. Make Work a Healthy Game

The goal of work is to create things. Rewarding people for creating things is a healthy game.  Avoid zero-sum games like promotions or winner-take-all prizes.  Incentivize your value stream and not end-goals.

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Happiness is not fluff and it’s not a “nice to have”.  It’s a central component to a functional team.  Put a little thought into it and see what you come up with.

Technorati Tags: happiness,management,thich nhat hahn,daniel gilbert,abraham maslow,mihaly csikszentmihalyi,lean,langston hughes

Blogged at my house in Seattle, WA

The 10 Principles of Social Media for Education

After the 10 Principles of Social Media for Business came out, people began to engage us on different real-world applications.  One of these was the University of Lisbon who asked for a brief thought-exercise.  They wanted us to think of ways the 10 Principles would apply to education.

We applied the 10 Principles to educations’ need to:

• Broadcast Value
• Streamline Publication
• Increase Communication
• Increase Access to Information and Resources

Modus Cooperandi’s Paper on Social Media for Higher Education for the University of Lisbon can be downloaded from the Modus Cooperandi site.

Technorati Tags: University of Lisbon,social media principles,10 social media principles,social media for education,social media for higher education,Modus Cooperandi

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Applying the Principles of Agile to People other than Coders

Agile methods have been applied for the last decade or so to programming teams.  The goal with Agile was to take a group of people who were famous for poor communication, unrealistic expectations, and unpredictable deliverables and give them a structure that minimized these elements.

Agile primarily focuses on the following:

1. Acknowledging that change is part of any endeavor
2. Greatly increasing the frequency of discourse and review
3. Assumptions are the rope from which the noose of business is tied

Bill Anderson and I guest-hosted a Yi-Tan call covering how Agile was formed, what its central tenets are, and what it can teach the rest of business.

Listen to the recording of that call.

Technorati Tags: Yi-tan,Jerry michalski. Bill Anderson. Jim Benson,Agile principles

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Volere è potere

Will is power.

Aggregated will is aggregated power.

Networked will is networked power.

As individuals we want to achieve.  As groups we can achieve.

Do our organizations reflect this?

Our relationships (professional or personal) should be designed to build networks of communication, respect, responsibility and value.   In organizations, those who lead are responsible for setting vision and culture.  This can be a group of two, where the two people involved understand their destination and are mutually working to get there.  It can work in organizations the size of Microsoft or GE – as long as appropriate leadership happens in appropriate places.

When organizations focus primarily on intangibles (profit, market dominance, public perception), focus is necessarily removed from tangibles (what we do, how we do it, why we do it).  As the focus becomes diffused, the individual is lost.  She no longer has responsibility or a sense of belonging.

Productivity slips.  Attitude descends.

People naturally work for some goal.  If the goal isn’t to innovate or help the company achieve its mission, then their goal is personal.  Income maximization, maximum free time, minimum effort, maximum career path.  If these goals are made outside of the mission of the company, they probably happen at the expense of the company

The fortune cookie says “You never hesitate to tackle to most difficult problems.”  Why isn’t this true for everyone?  Because often we are told that our input is neither sought nor appreciated.

Organizational willpower comes from clarity of purpose and buy-in from those in the organization.  The members of your organization require the elements of the 10 Principles of Social Media.  They need to have an understanding of operations, a good feeling about their status, clarity of corporate governance, rewards for jobs well done, and access to the information and people they need to do their jobs and improve process.

When your org allows for these, your org may earn this fortune cookie.  It too will never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems.

Technorati Tags: leadership,10 social media principles,social media principles,management,tribes

Written at the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Wa.

Photo by Tonianne

Findability is Power II – Social Media Principle #10

In the first attempt to describe Findability is Power, I defined the principle thusly:

10. Findability is power – Unfindable information or people are irrelevant.

Ed Vielmetti left this comment:

I'll have to disagree, Jim.

There's lots of unfindable information that's terribly relevant - information (or at least data) that's available only if you know precisely how to ask for it of precisely the right human being with precisely the right words and maybe the right tone of voice or the right letterhead.

If an organization can tax your patience by making it difficult for you to figure something out, it can destroy your desire for it.

Ed is right.  And I’m somewhat annoyed at myself for misstating my intentions.

This would be better stated as:

10. Findability is power – Unfindable assets are waste.

The previous post showed how context and other factors change how we relate to information.  But I was remiss in not making the whole point.

For business: information, people, and objects are all assets.  In order for assets to be worth holding, they need to be usable in some way that creates more value than their cost of storage, management and maintenance.

Jen Zug shows us through her (very timely) tweet that we as consumers now expect findability.  We expect to go to KUOW and intuitively find assets.

When the customer does not find what she wants, she gets annoyed.

Annoy me once, shame on you.  Annoy me twice, I’m tweeting about it!

Ed’s comment speaks to waste from information not being immediately findable.  Whether I’m looking for something at KUOW or within my own company – if I have to fight to find relevant information my patience will wear thin.  My push to find the important and relevant information will end when my internal opportunity cost calculator in my brain says, “This is now too  much trouble.”

On the flip side, when information is readily accessible, its value is astronomically higher.  When I Google something and get the answer in less than a second, the cost of acquisition of the information is monstrously lower than its potential value when I use it for something or even if I discard it.

The required end-value of a use of data needs to be very measurable to obtain it in a person-to-person system.  If I need something, it needs to be worth my time, the person I’m bothering, and the annoyance penalty for taking us both away from other things.  In a computerized, rapid access world – that same information takes less than a second to obtain and inconveniences no one.

This means that casual queries based on conversations that could prove fruitful in the future are possible.  Multiple avenues of inquiry can quickly be attempted, analyzed and discarded with minimal impact on corporate resources.  Discovery of unexpected and highly useful information is now much more likely.

I’ll finish up by bringing up Jen Zug again … she expects the information to be findable.  So should she.  Now, the organization of KUOW has gained her ire.  What would Jen have done if she found that content?  More than likely she would have tweeted it.  She would have said, “Incredible story today on KUOW about Vegemite Soup” (or something) and given a link. 

KUOW’s poor findability turned a viral promoter into a viral complainer.

Within a business, poor findability turns innovation into frustration.

Technorati Tags: Jen Zug,Ed Vielmetti,KUOW,twitter,10 social media principles,social media principles,social media,findability

Blogged in the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington