kip/bot/blog

This is just super-awesome-cool trippy. Everything that’s fun about social media — serendipity, diverse circles coming together, fun conversations. It started with a fun fact that I picked up from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: our digestive tracts have as many neurons (the cells that think in our brains) in them as do our spinal cords. What’s going on here?

The comments below come from former co-workers, a client, my old dog Maggie’s super-wonderful oncologist (I still get teary thinking about how great she was with Maggie), a molecular biologist friend, a poet, a two-time IronMan, an English professor . . . la w00t!

A friend of mine is plugged into many toy subcultures. This one is the most fascinating, strangest, trippiest and to some plain offensive. It’s simulated guns. These are toy guns that shoot air pellets, but are built exactly to the specifications of real guns. Tokyo Marui is the leading maker of these guns and you can find them on eBay and various other sellers. youtube is loaded with videos of kids reviewing them. There’s a lot of interesting stuff around these toys. The simulations are possibly more complex to design than the real ones. While the real ones have relatively simple mechanisms for striking metal on metal to fire a real bullet, these toys require the placement of air systems and batteries that are powerful enough to propel the pellet and create realistic kickback. They are freakishly real. I’ve never held a handgun and I felt weird holding this one. And the seller’s culture is full of warnings and complaints about people buying them long enough to shoot a movie scene and then returning them. Trippy.

The best part, of course, are the kooky Japanese warning illustrations:

I love this passage from Hot, Flat, and Crowded and keep forgetting to just post it:

The only thing that can stimulate this much innovation in new technologies, and the radical improvement of existing ones is the free market. Only the market can generate and allocate enough capital fast enough and efficiently enough to get 10,000 inventors working in 10,000 companies and 10,000 garages and 10,000 laboratories to drive transformational breakthroughs; only the market can then commercialize the best of them and improve on the existing ones at the scope, speed and scale we need.

But markets are not just open fields to which you simply add water and then sit back in a lawn chair, watch whatever randomly sprouts, and assume that the best outcome will always result. No, markets are like gardens. You have to intelligently design and fertilize them so they yield the good, healthy crops necessary for you to thrive.

More here.

After my TEDx Kent talk — a delightful romp though kipbot’s pissiness at how kids today don’t respect the amount of craft and expertise needed to do digital — someone recommended I read Rethinking Expertise, by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Collins and Evans are sociologists at Cardiff University who specialize in the acquisition and social understanding of knowledge and expertise. The book is

meant to increase the chance that the process of coming to be called an expert will have more to do with the possession of real and substantive expertise … to treat it as something other than relational

It’s quite a good read, though the introduction, and the purpose is kind of sad: “First we need to work out what it means to know what you are talking about.” What a sad task to have to take on.

There is a lot in this book to blog about, and I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I had an aha! on the subway (the realization and insight kind, not the marketing kind). The book is based on a ‘periodic table of expertises’, which contains a spectrum of knowledge levels around which we build our expertise. The spectrum reads:

beer mat knowledge - little trivia fun facts that are technically right, but doesn’t get you beyond definitions
popular understanding - such as a pop science book that gives you enough to talk about it at parties, but not enough to answer questions
primary source knowledge - reading books in the field
interactional expertise - doing it
contributory expertise - originating ideas in the field, serving as part of the peer community that defines and propels it

The last two are the areas of true expertise - people who study a field by immersing themselves in the primary literature (often in university) and then do the field, where they gain deeper knowledge and understanding, eventually moving into a kind of mastery where they shape the field with their contributions. The book is focused on science, so the idea can be understood, by majoring in biology, going to grad school where you study more primary literature, but are in a lab and teaching (interactional), and then doing some research that can be published as a contribution to the field (the dissertation).

Anyway, I love the beer mat analogy, and it’s actually real — they found a beer mat for Babycham company that tells you what a hologram is (with exclamation points too!). But the real insight for me was the faultline between primary source and interactional expertise. How many times have we made ourselves conversant in (and considered ourselves capable of managing) a field after reading a couple books in the field? Without doing the work, without reading something by or talking to someone who actually has done the work to see what the difference between dynamic interactional and static written knowledge would be. The degree of immersion is important here. In his reportage and non-fiction writing, Martin Amis regularly refers to reading a couple yards of books to get a handle on the field (specifically he was talking about nuclear disarmament policy and Stalin research). This was a huge insight for me as a manager and as an observer of other managerial cultures.

The other piece I really liked was the distinction around popular literature on a field. Somewhere between beer mats and text books are popularizations — the Stephen Hawking pop science stuff. I used to make fun of the Business Week cover dynamic in the internet industry — the day something gets covered in BW, the client or your boss calls and says “OMG we need to have this!!!!” But now, looking at the broader spectrum of expertise — going from beer mats out to doing and originating — I’m wondering if things like our beloved HBR, the sacred text to many of us (including me), is actually popular or primary.

PS Jeff Parks, in his talk, “Being Human is not Quantifiable” has a funny riff about expertise. While looking at Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quote, he gently mocks the notion of a social media expert arguing that this stuff hasn’t been around long enough for some to put 10,000 hours into it!

I have a weird memory from a surfer movie. I can’t remember the title, and having never watched surfer movies aside from stopping briefly on the remote in between stops, I have no context for it. (Major exception to the previous sentences: Point Break, which, of course, transcends and resists genre classification.) So here’s the memory:

Some girl, wearing an old-fashioned, square cut bikini is talking to an older guy about her boyfriend-the-hero-of-this-movie’s chances at winning a surfing contest. The boyfriend is, of course, the underdog. He has been screwed by his wealthier, more practiced, less scrupulous, and prettier but less attractive opponents. The boyfriend is behind and his success depends on the next run. The girlfriend wonders what’s needed to pull off this surfing and life miracle.

The older guy is big, barrel-chested, chomping a cigar, wearing a tank top and hat and holding his binoculars. He looks pensive and says something like “well, he may have the skill, and he may catch a good wave, but he needs more than that . . . he needs a great, big chest full of character.” (Not sure how to spell chest full — chestful seems like treasure chest. Chest full feels too biological and ribcage focused.)

This kind of thinking is common to people and companies new to interactive work. There’s a belief that spirit and energy and character can overcome all obstacles, even the laws of physics or ignorance (or a bad wave). In the movies, we see repeatedly how someone can overcome absurd adversity with a pep talk, digging down and finding the fire, or coming up with a clever trick (that Karate Kid broken ankle thing). In the Olympics, many of the events give athletes three shots at getting it right, so that third attempt is a chance at making up for a suboptimal performance and bringing a lot of heart to win the gold. In distance events or timed sports, there’s always a hope that the runner can pour it on in the last five minutes, or the team can put together a series of scoring drives (touchdown!, on-sides kick!, touchdown!, interception!, gadget play! touchdown! ZOMG we won!).

But interactive isn’t like that. Notions of heart, digging deep, fishing something out of your bag of tricks doesn’t work. You’re usually up against laws of physics. As Fred Brooks reminds us, nine women in a month can’t make a baby — no matter how much character they have.

Interactive is like chess. It’s built on a foundation, there are virtually no clever tricks, no ways to surge and overcome a bad position. If you play a poor opening, your middlegame options are limited — you’re on the defensive. If your middlegame position is weak, you can’t go on the attack, even if you have a lot of heart for it. If your endgame is technically lost, all you can hope is that your opponent makes a mistake. But no pep talk or chirpy can-doism can change the fact that you have a lost position. You need to play to win from the beginning, you need to begin with a view of the end, you need to be in the now and be in the future calculating possible nows that may arise.

For my software surfer movie, some gems:

Measure twice, cut once.

Have a plan.

Explore the implications of your moves.

When you have a problem and hear someone say “oh, it’ll be fine, I’m not worried” a half tone higher than their usual voice, smack that person on the forehead until s/he starts worrying.

Track your projects early, not just two weeks out from launch.

In fact, don’t bother checking in two weeks out from launch, cuz if it’s broke it’s too late and you’re only gonna screw it up.

Don’t trust the happy optimists, fill your team with people who like solving puzzles and loathe inelegance and easy solutions.

Most important, keep your head in the game, look at the whole board, and calculate.

The celebration of failure has become a tired, counterproductive meme.

Sure, the tension involved in celebrating something normally thought to be bad gets your attention. It’s also a way to get people out of their comfort zone. So cheers for that.

But, really, we actually want to succeed and the more I read about failing forward, failing your way to success, and not being able to succeed without failing, the more I think the word does us a disservice on several levels. For starters, failure, it’s important to remember, is a broad umbrella. On the positive side, the one that’s worthy of fetishizing, it includes things that happened not to work. They didn’t fail so much as the client didn’t buy it, the market wasn’t ready for it, it was ahead of its time, or it was a good idea but not popular enough to be profitable. On the negative, however, failure also includes (and originally meant) screw-ups, incompetence, miscalculations, and arrogant dilettantism masquerading as expertise.

The problem is that the word failure doesn’t contain within it the means for evaluating good ones and bad ones. Failure doesn’t have an internal quality metric in its meaning that helps us identify the ones that actually advance the work and ones that should result in heads being knocked, going back to the drawing board, hitting the books, or putting together a new team.

Celebrating failure doesn’t help us increase our likelihood of doing quality work so much as it increases our chances of stumbling into it. By celebrating failure, we encourage peolpe and teams to try more, and more risky, ideas. But we don’t encourage people to focus on craft, execution, or a notion of quality. For some cultures, this might be good. If you’re in an environment that is so stale and idea-less that no one ever goes beyond the obvious, than you may need that jolt. But, in an environment that is already supposed to be about creativity, innovation, and design, you’re probably dumbing the place down. By talking about failure, rather than iteration and revving, we’re not advancing design thinking so much as inflating attitude. The word failure doesn’t have enough oomph in it to get people thinking.

Worst of all, I think, celebrating failure gives teams and people easy outs when something doesn’t go well. Since failure doesn’t contain a quality metric we have trouble describing what constitutes a useful failure. Most conversations about failure assume that everyone knows the actual complete screw-ups (do we really?) but don’t help identify the earnest, but ultimately wasteful, failures. As a result, when we fail, it’s easy to describe one’s self as taking a shot and missing but then celebrate the taking of the shot anyway. Rather than critique something to find out what the hell went wrong or, more productively, what do we do better, celebrating a failure implies that things were fine, it just didn’t work out.

To be clear, I think we should promote the taking of risks. I absolutely believe that the quality of an idea — its originality, elegance, or efficiency in solving a problem or doing something new and wonderful — should be celebrated even if the product ultimately doesn’t succeed in the marketplace or isn’t approved by the client. (I also think it would be an interesting exercise to see if celebrants of failure in the design world are willing to go so far as to call the Segway, Zune, and the XO successful failures.) But I think we should celebrate failure in a very different way: by calling it iteration, critique and refinement. Better yet, let’s call it experiment.

Experimentation is a much better word to use, though I already know it’s too wonky and beaker-y to catch on. Still, it’s worth talking about the difference if only to make the word we’ll be stuck with for the next year — FAILURE! — meaningful. Here’s the difference:

Let’s use a fresh example from an unexpected place: the iPhone. This is from the WIRED cover story:

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting

Jobs rather famously doesn’t celebrate failure. What he’s done in this moment is call something what it is — inadequate, not acceptable, deeply troubling. At the same time, however, he didn’t throw a tantrum. There was a critique in his assessment of the prototype/iteration/rev/version/experiment/failure — and it went beyond the bugs. Bugs can be solved and closed, the bigger issue was that it wasn’t coming together as a coherent product. That was a design moment, an experiment being evaluated — there was no celebration of failure.

As Nick Cage so memorably re-told the story in the immortal national treasure National Treasure: “When Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to fail 99 times trying to invent the light bulb, Edison said ‘I didn’t fail 99 times. I discovered 99 ways how NOT to make a light bulb.’”

Stop failing and patting yourself on the back for it. Start experimenting and stay focused on quality and success.

B&N’s “pick me up” is a great cross-channel integration. I’m using my fantasy baseball drafts as a reason to finally learn a Mac-OSX database program, specifically FileMaker Pro. According to bn.com, “The Missing Manual” for FMP appears to be available at the Park Slope store. I signed up to have someone to reserve the book for me and here’s the confirmation:

In the next couple hours, I’m supposed to get an email telling me the book is there. I love how they took any possible confusion out of the process — ‘don’t come to the store’ till you get the email, give the email about an hour. I just did it a few minutes ago, so the only possible room for annoyance is if I just don’t get an email and I have no idea how to track the request. Still, it’s pretty cool.

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UPDATE: In less than an hour, I got both my email and a text message. Pretty sweet.

Mastering the use of jargon increasingly seems to be a key to building strong, creative teams and collaborative environments. In the past, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to stamp jargon out of the language of teams I’ve led. Improperly deployed jargon can often be confusing, obfuscating the real meanings under the word or creating more conversation about the jargony bit than the actual topic at hand. George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language convinced me that using jargon has an ethical and power relationship dimension. When you use words that only specialists know, you (potentially) (deliberately) leave non-specialists out of a conversation and disempower them.

Most importantly, my skepticism of jargon also stems from a belief that jargon tends to make things static and close off avenues of exploration. In an earlier post, I wrote:

What I noticed, though, was a rush to put labels on ideas and capture the dynamic within an existing, perhaps widely known concept (value chain, purchase cycle, influencer strategy). The words were all useful, but they seemed to dampen the energy of the conversation - they didn’t tell us who was doing what to whom (or, more importantly for marketers with whom) or offer theories of why.

I suggested that we should avoid putting conceptual labels on dynamics during a brainstorm. That we should stick to people dynamics — getting inside people’s heads would get us to better ideas. Being inside people’s heads would give us a better handle on whether the idea was good or not.

If you have a very specific, precise word for something, you’re pretty much gating it off from the critical, heretical scrutiny that leads to invention and creativity.

My reaction against jargon is not quite a reflex, but it is a going-in assumption that I operate under. Stephen Fry, however, has me moving towards more balanced and more explicitly proactive approach to jargon with teams I work with.

Fry’s influence comes by way of The Ode Less Travelled, a quirky, nifty volume in which Fry encourages people to join him in a long-held hobby of his: writing poetry (for purely personal purposes). I picked up the book at Keats House while visiting London, all intoxicated by words and speaking and always interested in Stephen Fry. In the book, Fry makes compelling arguments for re-engaging in poetry (”verse is one of our last stands against the instant and the infantile”) but insists that there is no royal road. In distinct contrast to Allen Ginsberg’s horse-shit comment that anyone can play jazz, you “just pick up your horn and blow”, Fry is quite adamant that you don’t just put pen to paper and anything goes. You need to learn some rules — rules which have funny names like scansion, spondee, and trochee — but they’re worth learning.

In the process of encouraging people to learn difficult things, Fry also makes some interesting statements about jargon. First, he starts by rather harshly dismissing the reflexive dismissal of jargon (which clearly I took a little personally):

Only an embarassed adolescent or deranged coward thinks jargon and reserved languages are pretentious and that detail and structure are boring. Sensible people are above simpering at references to colour in music, structure in wine or rhythm in architecture. When you learn to sail, you are literally shown the ropes and taught that they are called sheets or painters and that knots are hitches and forward is aft and right is starboard. That is not pseudery or exclusivity, it is precision, it is part of initiating the newcomer into the guild.

I still believe that jargon is often misused as a way of being showy or keeping people out of the guild. However, I have been on a long series of jags about the importance of getting seriously good at a discipline, getting down on serial neophytism posing as generalism, and in general, going deep. So the above passage stopped me cold. Later, Fry softens the line but hardens the thinking:

most activities worth pursuing come with their own jargon, their private language and technical vocabulary. In music you would be learning about fifths and relative majors . . . I could attempt to ‘translate’ words like iamb and caesura into everyday English, but frankly that would be patronising and silly. It would also be very confusing when, as may well happen, you turn to other books on poetry for further elucidation.

Even tighter, he later adds, “no art worth the striving after is without its complexities.”

So, now I’m expanding one of my rules as a meeting or team leader from stamping out jargon to creating the right level of jargon. Bad jargon obfuscates meanings, establishes bogus power structures within a group, and often stamps out the nuance and possibility of exploration that can lead to creative thinking. On the other hand, jargon can provide the common language that every group, especially those in which people are collaborating across, between and within disciplines, needs.

One place to find the balance is in Nabokov’s characterization of jargon as “convenient and innocuous nomenclaturial handles.” Convenience and innocuousness are key: does the jargon speed the conversation? is it innocuous or does it call undue attention to itself? Most important, does it function as a handle and not a thing unto itself?

I’m convinced that there is a condition, that should be in upcoming DSM , of environmentally induced cognitive diminishment. I’m calling it “the Googles” and I believe I suffer from said Googles. I’ve been thinking about this condition since reading Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making us Stupid” (my blog bit about it here). Carr has witnessed several diminishments: Shortened attention spans, decreased ability to focus on complex ideas, and the near impossibility of thinking deeply about something. He attributes it to Google because their commercial model, which is central to so much of our knowledge seeking, encourages short-attention span and quantity of items viewed over quality of the viewing.

On first reading the article, I immediately saw myself and my friends in those symptoms — trouble reading novels, never reading an article to completion, rarely stopping to re-read a passage, and a rushed, frenetic sense that I need to quickly skim the next thing lest I miss something. Carr has an upcoming book that describes the situation as being chronically stuck in “the shallows”. But I think it actually goes deeper. I think the symptoms above have related symptoms and speak to a deeper condition:

- inability to formulate original thoughts within various pockets of my industry of internet marketing (and its sub-disciplines of design, UX, and strategy), it feels like our conversations are increasingly about analogies and metaphors and case studies. “Let’s do it like Apple”, “this is how Google rolls”, “we need to do for x category what this company did in y”, “let’s adopt this model”. These threads lack originality on two levels. First, it’s all by reference to something else. There’s no blank slate, there are no truly fresh looks (you may bring in fresh eyes, but that voice is usually just reacting and spouting first thoughts, not helping to go deeper than where you started). Second, it multiplies the shallowing effect Carr talks about. What does anyone mean when they reference Apple or Google? Do we really have a deep, shared understanding of what we’re agreeing to? Do we understand what it means in terms of day-to-day work?

- inability to have deep conversations or true information exchanges having the Googles means that my talking style has started to resemble the research/information gathering style above The person suffering from ‘the Googles’ has conversations full of quick hits across a wide range of topics and entries. Like a stone skipping across a lake, they never go deep. Googles-infected conversations tend to be the exchange of memes or the matching of related links. A colleague utters a word or phrase embedded in a sentence with deeper thought. But I latch onto that word and immediately my brain bubbles up search results of related links. Then, without connecting the dots or evaluating the context, I blurt out my top-ranked meme. My counterpart is just as likely to latch onto my keywords and do the same. We leave these conversations with a half-shared understanding of what we’re doing and lack the energy or will to push deep. Dialog is replaced by a semi-grounded free association of memes, references, and synaptic firings sparked by keywords in the sentences spoken.

So these are my symptoms, deficits, diminishments:

- shortened attention span
- reduced focus
- inability to follow complex texts
- difficulty staying in a deep conversation
- diving below the memes and hyperlinking in my brain into original thoughts

I call the cluster of symptoms ‘the Googles’ and I am starting treatment (next post . . . )

I don’t know if I’m just noticing this or if it’s new. But it’s kind of weird — Amazon is touting books that have ‘deckle edge’. I originally thought it was an effect of when books needed the pages cut before reading, but it’s actually an effect of papermilling:

Definition: The ragged edge of the paper as it comes from the papermaking machine is the deckle edge. Handmade paper normally has 4 deckle edges while machinemade paper has two. Normally it is cleanly cut. Left in place, the deckle edge becomes a decorative, textured edging. An imitation or fake deckle edge can be created by tearing or sawing the edge of the paper.

Smoothing the edges is an extra cost, of course, and there have always been books — cheap pulpy, genre stuff, and higher end literary stuff — with the edges. But now it’s being called out as a feature of the book:

Right around the time eReading is set to experience another wave of growth . . . curious.