The next few days I will be attending South by South West (SxSW) Interactive in Austin, TX. I will mostly focus on the “Future of Work” and the “Health + Education” tracks and will be reporting on the sessions and panels that I will attend in this blog.
SxSW seems to still be the leading edge of consumer IT culture. The consumerization of IT (the fact that new uses of technology hit the consumer market before they reach the enterprise) makes this the place to find and understand the digital and cultural trends that will affect enterprise IT in the next couple of years. To give a clear example: if you were at the SxSW launch of Twitter a few years back then it would not have hard predict the rise of enterprise versions of these tools like Yammer.
If you are at SxSW and would like to talk with me about juggling, digital civil rights, the Big Lebowski, education, philosophy or technology and society; then do come and find me (probably easiest to connect on Twitter.
David H. Guston is the director for the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. His talk titled “From Technocracy to Democracy” tries to add some human purpose to the techno-scientific potential in the morning. How do you govern the stuff that hasn’t been made yet? Technology is always deeply social too: we call this socio-technical. He made a set of points about technology and society with relevant images (that I can’t reproduce)
People make technologies
People live in, with and through technologies
Technological change and social change are closely connected
There are multiple solutions to any given technological problem
Socio-technological systems are difficult or impossible to predict (and even if we get right, we often get it wrong)
Socio-technical change can be incremental or disruptive
New technologies are often controversial and risky
Our socio-technical imaginations shape our future (e.g. Frederick Soddy and H.G. Wells inspired each other)
People play an important role in governing technologies and this leads to many questions that we need to start answering. Can we be more reflexive about how we imagine, research, design, build, market, and assess new technologies by asking:
Who are the people who innovate?
Who are the people subject to innovation?
How do they participate in the governance of technology now?
How might that change in the future(Ss) we are imagining for them?
How can technology be democratically governed (we have to heed to Eisenhower’s warning: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
These next few days I am attending Emerge 2012 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. The subtitle of this conference is “Artists + Scientist Redesign the Future”. The conference is a mix of talks, workshops and a media festival. The basic idea is that current science can inform us about what might happen in the future. Artistic exploration of those futures (i.e. science fiction) can than pull these futures forward and in turn inform science.
I will try and semi-live blog as much of this event as possible. Reflection will have to wait for later. Apologies for typos: I have a new laptop with a new keyboard that I still have to get used to.
Portraits of science and technology
The day kicked off with a group of scientists giving small portraits of the current cutting edge of their work:
What is interesting – Lee Hartwell
Hartwell really wants to understand where “interest” comes from. This is a research project that he is embarking on. He is hoping that he will find some answers to his question at this conference.
Some Thoughts on the Future of Healthcare – Neal Woodbury
Woodbury is from the Biodesign Institute from Arizona State University. How do you make medicine a much more sustainable practice? How do get useful medical technologies that are very inexpensive and look at medicine from an angle of keeping people healthy, rather than treating late stage disease? One example of this type of technology is the “Comprehensive Immunosignature Detection Array Platform: you take some blood and put it on a set of peptides and the outcome gives your insight in your current immune system. People with different diseases get very different immune system signatures/profiles. To enable this there are looking at possibilities for “painless blood draw”. His open question is how to you translate this type of technologies into useful practice at scale. What is the medical system of the future that will actually be able to utilize this type of information? When you have comprehensive health monitoring, you really have to change what diagnosis is for example.
Creating Creatures That Eat Bad Stuff and Excrete Valuable Stuff – Bruce Rittman
Rittman is focused on Environmental Biotechnology. The challenge they are addressing is that we need to replace most fossil fuels with renewable substitutes. We need to do this to slow down (and hopefully reverse) the atmospheric build up of CO2. He showed us a diagram of how renewable bioenergy might work in a carbon neutral loop where CO2 just goes through the circular process. They use a bacterium called “Synechocystis” which is capable of converting solar energy with CO2 into a fuel that can be used. They are tuning the genes of this bacterium to make it work even better, so that can turn these organisms into factories for producing energy based materials we might need. Another example are “Microbial Electrochemical Cells” in which they use bio-organisms on the anode of a fuel cell. The advantage of this is that they can create organic fuels.
Developing Synthetic Telepathy – Stephen Helms-Tillery
Helms-Tillery showed us a lot of different projects, most of them focusing on the hand and creating prosthetic devices for the hand. The hand is an interesting object for study: a complicated mechanical device that is essential for nearly everything that we do. It has twenty joints in in and all the “movers” are in the arm. Picking up something like a bottle is not a trivial thing from a biomechanical perspective. The hand doesn’t operate by itself, so it is important to look at the arm too (e.g. for reach). They are also looking at using your brain to control these external interfaces. Hands are also sensory organs and prosthetic hands should have similar sensory ability, so they are building sensorized skins. Current experiments with children who are in hospital to be treated for epilepsy show that it is very feasible to let them control something on the screen with their brain.
Be All You Can Be and Then Some: Military Human Enhancement – Dan Sarewitz and Brad Allenby
Sarewitz’ question is: where will the “next people” be come from. We are all currently much more enhanced than we were in the past (think doping in sports, kids taking Ritalin, vaccines, artificial knees or Google). This is all pedestrian though, the really enhanced people are in the military right now. So tomorrow’s humans will emerge from the Pentagon. What kind of things are happening there now: weapons, body armor, exo-skeletons.
According to Allenby is the problem that the human bandwidth is now the weakest link in systems necessary for operations in complex environments. They are working on building cognitive networks that include many individual human brains with systems of consciousness emerging as a property of this. They might even drive human beings out of the decision loop, because they might not be necessary anymore and might just be too slow. They will design human varietals: “we will never be human again”, get over it.
The Triumphs and Tragedies of Social Networks – Hari Sundaram and Marco Janssen
Janssen is interested in using information technology (and social networks) to empower citizens to act. How can we stimulate people to contribute to the public good? A few examples: In San Marcos they gave a few hundred households energy bills that showed how their energy use related to that of their neighbours. By combining this with simple smilies they actually managed to get people to use less energy overall. Another example is the use of towels in hotels: they experimented with it and found out that people cooperate if others do too. There are examples of this everywhere, like in Bali where people have shared irrigation for many years. The tragedy of the commons is not necessarily true anymore: Elinor Ostrom has developed a framework that shows how high level of cooperation is possible, but mainly in small homogenous communities. Cities are different: they are very heterogeneous and lack feedback on your behaviour. They think they can use computing to create these small homogenous communities in large cities. What is people are willing to be monitored in exchange for a reward? This is what some car insurance companies are already doing. The promise of technology lies in its ability to connect the large scale to the everyday.
Gaming the Future, With Impact – Sasha Barab and Alan Gershenfeld
Acccording to Gershenfeld, the game industry understands motivation and has pushed this forward as artistic artform. They keep people exactly on the edge of their capabilities and through challenges induce continued engagement with the game. Just because this medium has this potential doesn’t mean that is used for good. The current state of game-based learning is that the level of promise is very high, but that the scale of impact is relatively low: there is a big gap. Closing this gap is still a relatively young science and the Center for Games and Impact are working on creating a framework for actually building games that deliver impact and they have managed to rise the sector and get involvement from a lot of partners that are willing to fund the work and are interested in seeing what it can do for their problems.
Barab, a learning scientist, showed some of the initiatives that the center is doing are understanding, engineering and scaling for impact. Things like: games for transformational play, games as design fictions. He believes that video games of entire worlds in which learners are central, important and active participants. They are a place where the actions one takes have an impact on that gaming world and a place in which what you know is directly related to what you are able to do and who you become.
Sensor Networks in Search of Meaningful Knowledge – Andreas Spanias and Pavan Turaga
Enhancement, engagement and empowerment are the three themes that Turaga has heard about today. He talks about sensor networks that can actually empower change in behaviour. Sensing modalities are all over the place: these can mined for patterns. He showed an example of how their system could learn the rules of Blackjack by observing the interactions between people playing the game. How do we do this at scale? Using for example livelogged data to create adaptive representations which can then be used to make us better.
Spanias talked about sensor networks in our homes. He showed an example of moving from single microphones to microphone arrays that with proper algorithms can localize sound, cancel noise, do acoustic scene analysis and even solve the cocktail effect. They can use this to record and then create a spatial sound experience or do acoustic scene characterisation.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the Lift France 2011 conference. For me this was different than my usual conference experience. I have written before how Anglo-Saxon my perspective is, so to be at a conference where the majority of the audience is French was refreshing.
Although there was a track about learning, most of the conference approached the effects of digital technology on society from angles that were relatively new to me. In a pure learning conference, I am usually able to contextualize what I see immediately and do some real time reflecting. This time I had to stick to reporting on what I saw (all my #lift11 posts are listed here) and was forced to take a few days and reflect on what I had seen.
Below, in random order, an overview of what I would consider to be the big themes of the conference. Occasionally I will try to speculate on what these themes might mean for learning and for innovation.
Utilization of excess capacity empowered by collaborative platforms
Robin Chase gave the clearest explanation of this theme that many speakers kept referring back to:
Economic Logic of Using Access Capacity by Robin Chase
This world has large amounts of excess capacity that isn’t used. In the past, the transaction costs of sharing (or renting out) this capacity was too high to make it worthwhile. The Internet has facilitated the creation of collaborative platforms that lower these transaction costs and make trust explicit. Chase’s most simple example is the couch surfing idea and her Zipcar and Buzzcar businesses are examples of this too.
Entangled with the idea of sharing capacity is the idea of access being more important than ownership. This will likely come with a change in the models for consumption: from owning a product to consuming a service. The importance of access shows why it is important to pay attention to the (legal) battles being fought on patents, copyrights, trademarks and licenses.
I had some good discussions with colleagues about this topic. Many facilities, like desks in offices, are underused and it would be good to try and find ways of getting the percentage of utilization up. One problem we saw is how to deal with peak demand. Rick Marriner made the valid suggestion that transparency about the demand (e.g. knowing how many cars are booked in the near future) will actually feed back into the demand and thus flatten the peaks.
A quick question that any (part of an) organization should ask itself is which assets and resources have excess capacity because in the past transaction costs for sharing them across the organization were too high. Would it now be possible to create platforms that allow the use of this extra capacity?
Another question to which I currently do not have an answer is whether we can translate this story to cognitive capacity. Do we have excess cognitive capacity and would there be a way of sharing this? Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and the Wikipedia project seem to suggest we do. Can organizations capture this value?
Disintermediation
The idea of the Internet getting rid of intermediaries is very much related to the point above. Intermediaries were a big part of the transaction costs and they are disappearing everywhere. Travel agents are the canonical example, but at the conference, Paul Wicks talked about PatientsLikeMe, a site that partially tries to disintermediate doctors out of the patient-medicine relationship.
What candidates for disintermediation exist in learning? Is the Learning Management System the intermediary or the disintermediator? I think the former. What about the learning function itself? In the last years I have seen a shift where the learning function is moving away from designing learning programs into becoming a curator of content and service providers and a manager of logistics. These are exactly the type of activities that are not needed anymore in the networked world. Is this why the learning profession is in crisis? I certainly think so.
The primacy (and urgency) of design
Maybe it was the fact that the conference was full of French designeurs (with the characteristic Philippe Starck-ish eccentricities that I enjoy so much), but it really did put the urgency of design to the forefront once again for me. I would argue that design means you think about the effects that you would like to have in this world. As a creator it is your responsibility to think deeply and holistically. I will not say that you can always know the results of your design (product, service, building, city, organization, etc.), there will be externalities, but it is important that you leave nothing to chance (accident) or to convenience (laziness).
There is a wealth of productivity to be gained here. I am bombarded by bad (non-)design every single day. Large corporations are the worst offenders. The only design parameter that seems to be relevant for processes is whether they reduce risk enough, not whether they are usable for somebody trying to get something done. Most templates focus on completeness and not on aesthetics or ease of use. When last did you receive a PowerPoint deck that wasn’t full of superfluous elements that the author couldn’t be bothered to remove?
Ivo Wenzler reminded me of Checkhov’s gun (no unnecessary elements in a story). What percentage of the learning events that you have attended in the last couple of years adhered to this?
We can’t afford not to design. The company I work for is full of brilliant engineers. Where are the brilliant designers?
Distributed, federated and networked systems
Robin Chase used the image below and explicitly said that we now finally realize that distributed networks are the right model to overcome the problems of centralized and decentralized systems.
From "On Distributed Communication Networks", Baran, 1962
I have to admit that the distinction between decentralized and distributed eludes me for now (I guess I should read Baran’s paper), but I did notice at Fosdem earlier this year that the open source world is urgently trying to create alternatives to big centralized services like Twitter and Facebook. Moglen talked about the Freedombox as a small local computer that would do all the tasks that the cloud would normally do, there is StatusNet, unhosted and even talk of distributed redundant file systems and wireless mesh networking.
Can large organizations learn from this? I always see a tension between the need for central governance, standardization and uniformity on the one hand and the local and specific requirements on the other hand. More and more systems are now designed to allow for central governance and the advantages of interoperability and integration, while at the same time providing configurability away from the center. Call it organized customization or maybe even federation. I truly believe you should think deeply about this whenever you are implementing (or designing!) large scale information systems.
Blurring the distinction between the real and the virtual worlds
Lift also had an exhibitors section titled “the lift experience“, mostly a place for multimedia art (imagine a goldfish in a bowl sat atop an electric wheelchair, a camera captured the direction the fish swam in and the wheelchair would then move in the same direction). There were quite a few projects using the Arduino and even more that used “hacked” Kinects to enable new types of interaction languages.
Photo by Rick Marriner
Most projects tried, in some way, to negotiate a new way of working between the virtual and the real (or should I call it the visceral). As soon as those boundaries disappear designers will have an increased ability to shape reality. One of the projects that I engaged with the most was the UrbanMusicalGame: a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers hidden in soft balls. By playing with these balls you could make beautiful music while using an iPhone app to change the settings (unfortunately the algorithms were not yet optimized for my juggling). This type of project is the vanguard of what we will see in the near term.
Discomfort with the dehumanizing aspects of technology
A surprising theme for me was the well articulated discomfort with the dehumanizing aspects of some of the emerging digital technologies. As Benkler says: technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice and not all practices that are becoming feasible now have positive societal impact.
One artist, Emmanuel Germond, seemed to be very much in touch with these feeling. His project, Exposition au Danger Psychologique, made fun of people’s inability to deal with all this information and provided some coy solutions. Alex Peng talked about contemplative computing, Chris de Decker showed examples of low-tech solutions from the past that can help solve our current problems and projects in the Lift Experience showed things like analog wooden interfaces for manipulating digital music.
This leads me to believe that both physical reality and being disconnected will come at a premium in the near future. People will be willing to pay for having real experiences versus the ubiquitous virtual experiences. Not being connected to the virtual world will become more expensive as it becomes more difficult. Imagine a retreat which markets itself as having no wifi and a giving you a free physical newspaper in the morning (places like this are starting to pop up, see this unplugged conference or this reporter’s unconnected weekend).
There will be consequences for Learning and HR at large. For the last couple of years we have been moving more and more of our learning interventions into the virtual space. Companies have set up virtual universities with virtual classrooms, thousands and thousands of hours of e-learning are produced every year and the virtual worlds that are used in serious games are getting more like reality every month.
Thinking about the premium of reality it is then only logical that allowing your staff to connect with each other in the real world and collaborate in face to face meetings will be a differentiator for acquiring and retaining talent.
Big data for innovation
I’ve done a lot of thinking about big data this year (see for example these learning analytics posts) and this was a tangential topic at the conference. The clearest example came from a carpool site which can use it’s data about future reservation to clearly predict how busy traffic will be on a particular day. PatientsLikeMe is of course another example of a company that uses data as a valuable asset.
Supercrunchers is full of examples of data-driven solutions to business problems. The ease of capturing data, combined with the increase in computing power and data storage has made doing randomized trials and regression analysis feasible where before it was impossible.
This means that the following question is now relevant for any business: How can we use the data that we capture to make our products, services and processes better? Any answers?
The need to overcome the open/closed dichotomy
In my circles, I usually only encounter people who believe that most things should be open. Geoff Mulgan spoke of ways to synthesize the open/closed dichotomy. I am not completely sure how he foresees doing this, but I do know that both sides have a lot to learn from each other.
Disruptive software innovations currently don’t seem to happen int the open source world, but open source does manage to innovate when it comes to their own processes. They manage to scale projects to thousands of participants, have figured out ways of pragmatically dealing with issues of intellectual property (in a way that doesn’t inhibit development) and have created their own tool sets to make them successful at working in dispersed teams (Git being my favorite example).
When we want to change the way we do innovation in a networked world, then we shouldn’t look at the open source world for the content of innovation or the thought leadership, instead we should look at their process.
Your thoughts
A lot of the above is still very immature and incoherent thinking. I would therefore love to have a dialog with anybody who could help me deepen my thoughts on these topics.
Finally, to give a quick flavour of all my other posts about Lift 11, the following word cloud based on those posts:
A few months back I posted a design for an experiment on my blog. The goal of the experiment was to find out whether it would be possible to use a microblogging tool to narrate our work with the intention of making better performing virtual teams.
Over the last two months, the direct team that I work in (consisting of 18 people) basically participated in the experiment in the way that it was designed: They posted constant, daily or weekly updates on our Yammer network. Each update would describe things like what they had done, who they had spoken to or what issues they had encountered. Occasionally the updates were peppered with personal notes about things had happened or were going to happen after work.
Methodology of the experiment
There was no formal (or academic) research methodology for this working experiment. I decided to use a well-considered survey to get people’s thoughts at the end of it. Out of the 18 team members 17 decided to fill it in (in the rest of the post you can assume that n=17). The one person that didn’t, has taken up another role. This means there is zero bias in who answered and didn’t answer the survey.
I find it more interesting to zoom out and look at the methodology of this experiment as a whole. To me doing things like this is a very good approach to change in the workplace: a grassroots shared experiment with commitment from everybody working towards solutions for complex situations. This is something that I will definitely replicate in the future.
Didn’t this take a lot of time?
One concern that people had about the experiment was whether it would take a lot of time to write these updates and read what others have written. I’ve asked everybody how much time on average they spent writing status updates and reading the updates of others. This turned out to be a little bit less than 5 minutes a day for writing the posts and slightly over 5 minutes a day for reading them. The standard deviations where around 4.5 for both of these things, so there was quite a big spread. All in all it seems that narrating their work is something that most people can comfortably do in the margins of their day.
Barriers to narrating your work
Designing the experiment I imagined three barriers to narrating your work that people might stumble over and I tried to mitigate these barriers:
Lack of time and/or priority. I made sure people could choose their own frequency of updates. Even though it didn’t take people long to write the updates, just over 50% of the participants said that lack of time/priority was a limiting factor for how often they posted.
Not feeling comfortable about sharing in a (semi-)public space. I made sure that people could either post to the whole company, or just to a private group which only included the 18 participants. Out of the 18, there were two people who said that this was a limiting factor in narrating your work (and three people were neutral). This is less than I had expected, but it is still something to take into account going forward as 12 of the participants decided to mostly post in the private group.
Lack of understanding of the tool (in this case Yammer). I made sure to have an open session with the team in which they could ask any question they had about how to use the tool. In the end only three people said that this was a limiting factor for how often they posted.
The qualitative answers did not identify any other limiting factors.
Connectedness and ambient team awareness as the key values
Looking at all the answers in the questionnaire you can clearly see that the experiment has helped in giving people an understanding of what other people in their team are doing and has widened people’s perspectives:
The "Narrating your work" experiment has given me more insight into the work my peers are doingThe "Narrating your work" experiment has given me a better idea of the scope/breadth of the work that our team is doing and the stakeholders surrounding us
A quote:
I enjoyed it! I learned so much more about what my colleagues are doing than I would have during a webcast or team meeting. It helped me understand the day-to-day challenges and accomplishments within our team.
and:
The experiment was very valuable as it has proven that [narrating your work] contributes to a better understanding of how we work and what we are doing as a team.
People definitely feel more connected to the rest of their team:
The "Narrating your work" experiment has made me feel more connected to the rest of my team
There was practical and social value in the posts:
The value of "Narrating your work" is practical: the content is helpful and it is easy to ask questions/get repliesThe value of "Narrating your work is intangible and social: it creates an ambient awareness of each other
A lot of people would recommend “Narrating your work” as a methodology to other virtual teams:
I would recommend "Narrating your work" as a methodology for other virtual teams
What kind of status updates work best?
I asked what “Narrating your work” type of update was their favourite to read (thinking about content, length and timeliness). There was a clear preference for short messages (i.e. one paragraph). People also prefered messages to be as close as possible to when it happened (i.e. no message on Friday afternoon about what you did on the Monday). One final thing that was much appreciated was wittiness and a bit fun. We shouldn’t be afraid to put things in our messages that reveal a bit of our personality. Sharing excitement or disappointment humanizes us and that can be important in virtual teams (especially in large corporations).
Personally I liked this well-thought out response to the question:
The best posts were more than simply summing up what one did or accomplished; good narrations also showed some of the lines of thinking of the narrator, or issues that he/she encountered. This often drew helpful responses from others on Yammer, and this is where some some additional value (besides connectedness) lies.
It made me realize that another value of the narrations is that they can lead to good discussions or to unexpected connections to other people in the company. This brings us to the next question:
Public or private posts?
The posts in the private group were only visible to the 18 participants in the experiment. Sometimes these posts could be very valuable to people outside of the team. One of the key things that makes microblogging interesting is the asymmetry (I can follow you, but you don’t have to follow me). This means that posts can be read by people you don’t know, who get value out of it beyond what you could have imagined when posting. What to you might sound like a boring depiction of your morning, might give some stakeholders good insight in what you are doing.
So on the one hand it would be very beneficial to widen the audience of the posts, however it might inhibit people from writing slightly more sociable posts. We need to find a way to resolve this seeming paradox.
A way forward
Based on the experiments results I would like to recommend the following way forward (for my team, but likely for any team):
Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.
I liked what one of the participants wrote:
I would like our team to continue as we have, but the important steps to take now are 1) ensuring that we stay in the habit of narrating regularly, 2) showing the value of what we achieved to other teams and team leads, and 3) ensure that there is enough support (best practises etc) for teams that decide to implement [narrating your work].
I have now taken this as far as I have the energy and the interest to take it to. I would really love for somebody to come along and make this into a replicable method for improving virtual teams. Any interns or students interested?
