I think I have neglected this blog, which is a shame because I have always found this space rewarding.   When I started three years ago, I felt as if I was trying to be somebody I wasn’t or write something I shouldn’t.   I was trying to write up a paper this morning on my experiences in a failed business attempt when I realised something.   In a lot of areas of my life, including this one, I often come across as though I am someone else.   It’s formal, not informal, complex and creative yet not me.  The posts which are the most like me are the one’s that I think get read less.

Is it a crime to write as though you were someone else online?

No. But what does it say about the bloated doctor on the other end of the keyboard typing this sentence?  So what is the bloody point if you aren’t going to do or say the things you think need to be done and said?  You get depressed, tired, withdrawn and overall very weird.   Yet, there is a timing and wisdom in this that involves taking the time to find your voice.  You start with copying, trying on ‘dad’s shoes’, pretending and so on until you realise, this is me.  I am the kind of person who has a hard time selling out and my body lets me know almost immediately if I am doing it.  I get depressed, can’t sleep, get angry and so forth.  When you begin to find your voice, it’s a good feeling, you are you and know it.  You settle in on some things.  The words flow from the chubby fingers to the keyboard with ease, the revisions seem less important and you even begin to like the editing process a little bit.

The voice is like the sweet spot on a picked lock.   Perhaps the wrong metaphor, yet the obscuring face of the lock from what lies behind is more than likely apt.  Consider then that on the other side of this metaphorical door lies the chamber of secrets to your voice.  What key wouldn’t you try?  Yet, the only way you can find your voice is to use it until you get the key that fits.  Unless of course the lock is in another room, behind a gate, guarded by a moat filled with alligators (or crocs if you are from Australia).  The point is: you are you and you should tell you not to sell you out for a few dollars.  Be you, yes you, because you have to live with you.  Don’t YOU forget that.

Often when we come to teach at University we think we need to find ‘cool things’ or some trick to get them engaged.  This isn’t true.  Consider Xtranormal.  This first video was my reflection on the semester… I think it worked well and acted as a way to get them talking:

A colleague whom I teach with made one also:

These videos were well received, at least by me   The following was one we made with the whole class, including myself and Alison, inputting their ideas as we discussed them:

The only point I have is this: it doesn’t have to be boring, and it doesn’t have to be trendy, ok that’s two points.  Be clever and work collaboratively, you may be surprised what you learn.

The theory of the day is the long tail, a reworking of the Pareto Principle (i.e. 80% of the wealth of Italian landowners is concentrated in the hands of 20% of the people), which seeks to explain why hits and misses wind up where they do.  In real terms the idea is a useful w to explain why, in theory, 80% of all that’s consumed accounts for 20% of all products and so on.  Ironically, this is not a reflection on taste as the following video explains, it’s a reflection of the method of distribution and supply (I call it pipe size).  Yet this is not what determines a ‘hit’.  Not in my opinion.  A hit is determined by many different things… which I will talk about in a minute.

Pipe size has to do with a number of things.  We all have a certain amount of influence and as such we can distribute messages to people via our own methods of communication.  When someone in the family dies or a baby comes along, the pipes of family communication get to work and the word spreads.  Some us are more influential ‘sneezers’ as Seth Godin calls them, and we can have a broader impact.  But it’s not a formula and neither is it a constant reason why.  The concept of ‘engagement’ or ‘resonance’ as someone else I know put it, explains why things are spread around.   We participate.  When this occurs on a massive scale the network gets bigger, the pipes get bigger and massive demand is generated.

The long tail works as a technical explanation quite well, that is, it explains how ‘pipe size’ and demand and supply corroborate to create ‘hits’.  Yet, it fails to adequately explain why hits occur.  This fails in the realm of the unpredictability of human ‘systems’.   Human systems form groups, make meaning and do what I call ‘engage’.  William James said it this way, ‘the truth is something that happens to an idea… not the idea itself’ (that’s a paraphrase by the way).  While I don’t wish to debate the idea of what truth is, I want to touch on what James was saying in my lateral understanding of it anyway.  Why things become popular can be stated as: they become popular because we engage with it on a massive scale (big pipes), we spread it around and share it (talking –> see Tipping Point, Idea Virus), and we resonate or engage with it.   This latter concept, the idea of engagement is the most understated yet most powerful because big pipes don’t guarantee a hit, engagement does.  What level of participation do people have in an idea?  A high amount, then you have success, a low amount depending on the context you have a different kind of success, or you have a failure.

Success and failure come down to audience engagement yet we cannot ignore pipe size, marketing or methods of supply.  We have to consider these as important, yet the level of engagement, discussion and talk around a product or idea and the overall level of activity, is what propels a product to success.  This is what the publishing, music and other industries know and exploit all the time.  Consider this qoute from a well known literary Agent Donald Maas:

The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the customer is already familiar with the author.  In other words, readers are buying brand-name authors whose work they have already read and enjoyed.  The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee.  That process is called word of mouth.  Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies … samplers, first chapters circulated by email, Web sites and the like.  In most cases, someone reads a novel, gets excited about it, and tells a friend. (Taken from Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas).

Now we know this and we can reliably track all success (yes I said ALL!) down to people.  You know why, everything social is social.  Wow, it took three degrees for me to work that out but it’s true.  Everything social is social.  Nothing happens without people.  We have fancy ideas such as those found on the shelves of Borders yet in reality the process of sharing information and excitement has not changed ever.   What is hard to know is what is likely to be a hit and what is likely to be a miss.  Pipe size has a lot to do with it of course.  The bigger the pipes, the bigger the exposure.  Yet, in this world of media falling apart and the growing disintermediation of media, the pipes are awfully big and the potential for sharing for word of mouth is the biggest and most responsive it has ever been thanks to the internet.   Still this is no guarantee of resonance, or engagement, big pipes don’t guarantee success

I will finish part 1 with a story on the recent television phenomenon Flash Forward.

A colleague of mine pointed me towards twitter search a while ago and sent me a link when Flash Forward was on.  I watched as real time feedback about the show, jokes and other randomness came up one tweet at a time.   I saw people saying what they liked and didn’t like about the show to their friends on the twitter (sorry couldn’t resist) and then sharing with others in other networks these thoughts.  Watching the conversations go through in real time showed me how unpredictable and different we really are, and how the idea of the long tail is relevant.   Now on to Part 2… Coming Soon: Engagement and why things become popular!

“The man with a new idea is a crank… until it succeeds” – Mark Twain

A wise man once told me that there is a high price to new ideas.  I thought he was talking about venture capital!  No, he was talking about the cost of innovation.  It takes great balls of fire to innovate, when it’s easier to do what we have always done in order to succeed.   True innovation is the riskiest risk there is, to use terrible English, because when you are ‘out there’ in the deepest depths (there I go again) of the blue ocean, there is nothing to hold on to.  I am not talking about your small and slow gradual innovations, I am talking about innovations that change things.  The punctuations, the extended uncut directors editions that remodel the ending so it’s new.  I am in a metaphorical mindset at the moment, I should pen a Tom Peters’ guru book … I might just sell two copies. I have a self-created reference for describing this process I call it: Engaging Concepts.   It’s the forefront of innovation, the grey bits inbetween the new stuff where thought and reality congeal for the first time.  It’s a bloody scary place, with very little predictability or repeatability.

The high price of new ideas

New ideas come with a price.  There is adjustment period, rejection or acceptance but there is also a chance for improvement.   There are a few people I know who I would put in the Mark Twain category.  These are people I like to call thought innovators.  You don’t find their papers in the Academy of Management Review, or Management Information Systems Quarterly, no you find them in a shed, outside or putting out their radical ideas into the community somewhere else.  It’s as if people who are thought leaders get punished until enough people come around.  Does this make them special?  No, it does not.  It does make them worth listening to, if you can filter out the strange things they say and the weirdness of their lives.

So where does the cost come in?

The cost comes in when we realise the risk.  Risk management is all about minimising or eliminating risk, it’s not really about innovation.  You have to take tremendous risks sometimes to innovate.  You have to say, ‘to hell with this we have to try it and see what happens – we can’t know the variables in this case’.  I think most of the great innovations were risky and may have even failed.  You know what?  They did it.  They paid the high price of risk of catastrophic failure and now life is better… in short!

New ideas are often risky, sometimes stupid and other times downright crazy… and there is that.  However, as Twain noticed the title of ‘crank’ and ‘genuis’ are one good idea away!

A few years ago I wrote a post about what I was learning from integrating a Tiki Wiki into the curriculum of a course called Mobile Workforce Technologies.  Time has passed, wheels have churned and work was done.  GUESS WHAT!  A paper came from that experience that started on this very blog…

Read the paper here

The idea that came to me while we were using the wiki, shaped the final outcome here and I am very happy with this paper.  Ideas are not just little things we keep and then throw away.  They are things from which BIGGER THINGS can grow.  Like papers for example.  More than that though, ideas have a way of being carried sometimes way beyond what you intended and can reach bigger and better heights when you let them go.  This small victory is a case in point.

Ideas are important and we need to be constantly building, shaping and guiding the ideas we have.  We need to stretch boundaries, go beyond what we accept and create more about what is known, we need to build better things from the dust of our past failures.  We need to destroy creatively the past sometimes and make new things grow where they need to.  Standing still doesn’t work, observing doesn’t work… it’s action and the engagement of new ideas!  Get out there and build something awesome right now! DO IT!

I am attempting to do something similar to Alison who wrote a list of things she was interested in as an attempt to find focus.   At this point in time I find myself horrendously bored with my work, life and pretty much what I spend 99% of my time doing.   Perhaps, boredom is a larger symptom of a dissatisfaction with life itself… especially since I set out with four goals this year and none of them have been reached.   Yes, I am whining and so what.  You don’t like it … I apologise.   This is not a whine though, it’s a structuring activity, I am attempting to build a list of things that I am interested in.  So here it is… the master list… in glorious technicolour black and white:

A list that makes my previous list feel less adequate

1. The art of starting a business (and not failing!)
2. Internet and internet business
3. Human problem solving and how that works
4. Fiction writing
5. Creativity and design
6. Gaming
7. Technology (cool stuff not fixing or repairing computers or programming… I HATE THAT)
8. Family stuff and values
9. Existence and reality
10. Theology, the human spirit and matters of Faith
11. Music and guitar playing
12. Film (pimpslap!)
13. Aid work
14. Having fun

This is all I could think of right now!  Our lives are rich are they not?  However, in all the fluff I read there is something I have found to be of value. Recently, in our standard occupational health and safety text, I was led to a section on strategic planning. This sectionthat had some interesting information on how to meet objectives.  You have to formulate the steps as a “To” statement (that was my interpretation, upon reflection it probably didn’t say that!!!) To me I think I could summarise what I would want (i.e. the deep down desires) as the following “To” statements:

1. To start new and interesting business ventures
2. To write new and interesting fiction
3. To learn new and interesting things every single day
4. To somehow contribute to the spirituality of people in a positive way

Now comes the next part.  I need the “how”.  Dammit!  Oh well… at least I have begun my life structuring exercise.  I can’t leave it here, I need a how statement of some sort.  The “How” puts legs on the “To” statement. For example how would I learn new and interesting things every single day:

How: Make a conscious effort to seek new opportunities to learn interesting things every day by making time to learn something (basket weaving, French, eschatology, step aerobics or fly fishing for example),  for a small amount of time everyday.

Now this is a commitment.  I am committed!  Learning is a way of life for me and I love it.  But I only love it while it’s new.  Hence, why I want to start new and interesting businesses.  I hate the boredom of repetition found in work  routines and the mundane grind of administration… if I could I would outsource the ruddy lot of it!   In fact I probably do… let’s not talk about that, let’s talk about the how statement.  Now, I must work out the how as I possess more clarity that I previously thought I did when I started writing this thirty minutes ago.   I am ending this post now because I must meditate on the “how”!

Here’s an idea.  In a recent conversation on this blog I have noticed that I hold a particular view about the emergence of strategic direction.  For example, when I started this blog I had no particular direction in mind and I had no real niche to draw from.   However, I noticed that most of the major direction in my life emerges.  Yes there have been times when I intentionally set out to do something and it worked, but the direction it was leading me to wasn’t obvious.  Take for example my recent doctorate.

I was told early on that you got a doctorate to become an academic.  I have since found that I enjoyed the practical application of ideas so much that I am wondering if I will continue as an academic in the next year.  That said, this emerged from the terrible experience of doing a Ph.D. so perhaps I am speaking out of exhaustion, terror and the thought of becoming a lifelong nerd.  Nevertheless, I learned through the process that I love applying ideas.  I love seeing them at work and I love putting them to use.  This emerged through the process.

When I started this blog it was more for personal development.  But, I have learned that I like speaking more about general ideas and concepts rather than simply specifically personal development.   So I followed the path I was leading myself in.  In this sense I wonder if in a lot of real world problem solving endeavours and strategic applications we actually find ourselves following what emerges or if we are trying to make things happen.  Emergence means following patterns as we notice them.  Is this even possible?

There are clearly times when we plan in advance and it helps us.  On the other hand there are times when a direction emerges outside of normal planning and following it seems logical.  Now I haven’t adapted these or even thought about them before writing this post.   Perhaps I need to put these down into a forum or something… who knows.  All I really know is sometimes there is a framework that emerges out of a situation and we should follow it… it wasn’t planned and/or thought out. As a matter of fact this requires an intuitive leap.

In reality most of the things we do require this kind of leap and yet I don’t remember once being told by my lecturers that AT LEAST HALF of my life decisions would require an intuitive leap.  We are taught about ambiguity, strategy and so on without ever being told that strategy sometimes emerges out of the muck.   I remember once I was looking to buy a new dog.  I analysed, thought out the plans and considered the alternatives.  One day I woke up and thought I am just going to buy the dog.  So I packed up the kids and hammered it down to the Animal Welfare League of QLD to get a dog we had picked off a website.

When we got there, the dog we picked wasn’t suitable.  He wouldn’t negotiate the children or even come out of his little house to say hello.  I was devastated having driven all the way from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to get a dog!  I knew however that the timing was right and I knew intuitively that a dog was there for me.  We hassled the volunteer in charge of dog dispersion and after a time she brought out an old dog that loved the kids and was 100% suitable.  I can’t say what really made me think that the dog was there… God or perhaps advanced precognition?  I just knew that I had to take an intuitive leap.  I knew it!  As I know now with things in my life… it’s time to take another leap to find the answer to my present problems… but that is a whole other post for another day.

I want to leave you today with this thought… don’t try and make things happen sometimes… just sit back and see if you can see where the pattern (hello FRINGE) is leading you.  There is something that you need to do and if you think about it, perhaps with some wise counsel, it will become obvious.  It is becoming obvious… though it isn’t quite yet.   The thing is as patterns emerge and you follow them without much thought … you find out new and interesting realities that you never knew existed!  Happy hunting!

Recently I bought a game for my daughter which is all about managing a wildlife park.  I made her promise to me that she would take the time to learn how to play before asking any more questions.  After playing it for a while she has given up because she couldn’t work it out.  Now, she is only little but I must admit I have seen this trend in people much older than her.

Here is another example.  Recently I told a group of my students about the final exam for a subject I am running.  I gave four very obvious hints as to what I was expecting in the exam only to be shocked and dismayed when I marked them over the last couple of days.  They didn’t get the hint.  Now, maybe I am being a little too blind to what an obvious hint is … but when you say, “This is a really obvious hint,” followed by, “you can find the answer on this page,” you begin to see my frustration.  The generation that has come after me are a special case and I have written about them before.  What I have noticed however, more and more, is that context gets lost in massive amounts of information.  So what has that to do with learning?

Learning takes place in a context

If you have ever attempt to learn a language you will know of the problem of immersion.  This is when you are placed in unfamiliar surroundings and forced to make sense of the language in order to communicate what you mean properly.   If you are learning French for example, the French in Action series forces you to study the whole damn course… in French!  They immerse you in the language so that learning is faster, richer and more contextual.  What happens though when you take large amounts of information, displayed in a shallow context across a wideband?  INFORMATION OVERLOAD!  You have lots of information, plenty of facts but very little perspective or context.

Add to that the problem facing our children.  They have unprecendented access to information in massive amounts but only know small portions of it.  That is, courtesy of a massive exposure to information from the point of education until now, we have a generation of people who are very capable at collecting large amounts of information in shallow context situations.  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink calls a more positive version of this (based on research) “thin slicing”.

Thin Slicing and Generation Y

Thin slicing is making extremely fast decisions with a small amount of information (A good introduction to the topic can be found here).  What happens when we are forced to make fast decisions about things as a matter of practice and have only limited amounts of information?  We end up slicing that information into smaller “thinner” parts and based on our previous expertise are able to make snap judgments in a moments time.  If you think of a leg ham as a piece of knowledge… taking some of the bone should be enough for the expert to make a judgment that is probably going to be true as it is logical.  For example, if you are a mechanic and you want to diagnose a problem with a car.  You can hear a rattle and know instantly what the problem is and what the likely solution will be.   If you are an expert! Now, let’s reverse that situation for a moment and take a slightly different look at it.

When you are exposed to massive amounts of information and you are forced to make sense of it, your brain is likely (I am conjecturing here… is there a neuroscientist in the house?) to build models of the information that it thinks you want.  That is, as you are exposed to massive dispersed amounts of information, you have to compartmentalise it in order to be able to store it.  When you have too much information to choose from you build models that are shallow because you can’t actually contextualise the information as much as you should be because you have, “too much information”. In Gladwell’s book he speaks of ‘experts’ being able to glance at a problem and make snap judgments.  In some cases, this is quite profound because it enables the expert to see the connections faster than others.  In the case of Generation Y, they are building models of information this way… all the time.  They are creating shallow pools of information by thin slicing everything.  They are learning ‘enough’ of everything at a shallow level of context and then applying this knowledge to the way in which they solve their problems.

We are now starting to see the effects of this kind of thing at Griffith University.  People that have been exposed to the massive amounts of information seem to be to part of a the new learning plague… to coin a phrase.

The new learning plague

You may call this an attention problem.  We can’t hold the attention of people because they are used to having concurrent information streams available.  However, I think what’s happening is that our education system and the society we live in has created an “information monster”!  We have so much information now that in order to filter it, you need to slice it into smaller portions and be happy with the lack of depth OR become very good at one thing at the expense of having a collection of shallow knowledge OR a variety of either.   This has, in my mind at least, created a plague.  We have a generation of people who are happy to keep things at the surface level where information is linear, causally efficacious and makes perfect sense.  Don’t believe me… watch a morning show about budgeting and you get simple advice that is repeated ad nausem.

I recently tested this out at a course I went to for work about Occupational Health and Safetly.   I was sitting next to an early to mid twenties manager who was exteremly intelligent.  Throughout the course, he kept texting, talking and not really taking notes.  It really pissed me off when he got better marks than me on the test because I had my phone switched off.  When I got over myself, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.  He was extremly good at filtering.  He could hear what the trainer was saying and filter that on a surface level whilst focusing on his text messaging at the same time.  People of my ilk will focus on one thing at a time.  Generation Y people tend to be able to move between different information mediums shallowly and filter out what they need and then move on to the next thing.   To watch this filtering process in action was something to behold.   I couldn’t believe after teaching 17 and 18 year olds for a few years that I had missed this.

Whilst having a developed skill set of dealing with information overload through thin slicing and filtering is wonderful, it can’t replace deep learning.  Deep learning challenges context, ideas, notions and themes.  I remember having to defend the way I teach a few years ago for a performance review and I picked on Mizerow who argued that in order for learning to occur, you need your subjects to be able to challenge how and what they learned by getting them to critically reflect on it.  I still believe that.  You can’t be an expert in something if you have filtered it out to a logical sequence.  Neither can you find perspective, depth or multiple streams of meaning if you are simply looking for the straightforward answer all the time.  By the way, life is pretty far from straightforward!

At the time of this writing I have move beyond frustration with people who don’t want to learn the deep way.  Instead I have developed coping strategies to help me understand why people want to learn in shallow streams of information.  It’s this… nobody is really as interested as I am! I am not even saying that this is a new phenomenon… it isn’t.  What I am saying is that we have generations of people exposed to large amounts of ‘wikipedia’ style information without bearing down a context for them to challenge these core assumptions.   People who filter out important information to get a logical core fail to realise one important point: Facts are socially constructed.

To finish up this post I thought a video would be nice… see you next time.

The ability to choose or a chosen ability?  Is it destiny, fate or what we make of it?  When you make choices is it you making the choice or some offensive simulacra?

The answer to this question of course is not answerable in this blog post.  Now I did promise to write about rhetoric and use of it in the question form.  So why not deal with a very basic rhetorical question?  A rhetorical question is one that demonstrates something in the hearer that provokes them to look for the answer in the question.  Here is an example:

If a man asks for bread from God he won’t get a snake will he?

That’s what I like about the New American Standard Bible.  It has questions in it that I never noticed before.   Here’s a better example:

Why do we keep on fighting?

The causal explanation of that question gives rise to more than one possible answer.   What about this one:

If I didn’t have a free will I couldn’t type this sentence could I?

You may argue:

How do you know the sentence was pre-determined?

Both statements are designed for maximum rhetorical effect.  The really don’t have a one-minute answer do they?  Sorry.  Somebody once said that problem solving isn’t so much about finding the right answers as it is about asking the right questions.  Questions that give rise to solutions that in turn give rise to more questions is what real problem solving is about.

Holy crap!  This image comes courtesy of a blog I stumbled.  The other day I was getting out of the car and saw one of these buggers right near the drivers side.  I was like WHAT!  So I got my trusty can of fly spray out and 20 of the suckers came out of the bricks near the carport!

When I saw this picture I thought… the ones I killed WERE BIGGER! Add this to the mice plague I have and the cockroaches I have in my house and you see my fight with pests.  Why wouldn’t you live in Brisbane?  Perfect one day, deadly the next!

Don’t even get me started on the snakes!