CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Collaboration and False Friends

My new friend Huguette has been studying up on her English with a book called Vrais Amis et Faux Amis.  In English, that's "true friends and false friends."  Now, this book is not about friendship; it's about words.  Specifically, it's about words that exist in both English and French -- true friends being the situations in which both languages interpret one word the same way, and false friends being those risky situations in which the same letters or sounds have different interpretations by the two cultures.  For instance, "superb" means the same thing in both languages.  But, "car" means this to English-speakers...

...but this to French-speakers.

 

So, it would be easy for me to THINK that I understand Huguette when she uses the word "car," but my mind would be traveling in a different direction from hers…which could create a funny (or not-so-funny) situation later.

This morning, I was thinking about how pervasive this situation is -- even within a single culture.  And, it dawned on me:

DISagreement is not the worst situation in communication.  
MISagreement is.

We are in such a hurry all the time.  A hurry to talk.  A hurry to be heard.  A hurry to move on to the next thing.  A hurry to get something done.  Many times, I REALLY WANT to believe that the other person agrees with me.  So, I am not careful to confirm we have a true agreement, rather than a MISagreement.  It is only later that we must suddenly stop/rewind/redo either one or both partners' resulting work.  

Fortunately, disagreement is also often an illusion.  Yes, fortunately.  You see, I find that most initial appearances of disagreement are such that with a bit of clarification we find that we were simply focused on different parts of the same problem or that we did not have the same information -- and we don't actually disagree in any meaningful way about what needs to be done.

Paradoxically, the fastest way to a truly collaborative outcome is the early appearance of disagreement. 

The early appearance of disagreement usually turns off the automaton-in-a-hurry-to-move-on switch in your brain, slowing you down to focus on what is happening now: this conversation, this partnership, this collaboration needs attention right now to make sure we are in tune -- to avoid MISagreement. 

When you sense one of these situations, I recommend you approach it like the scientific method: test for the alternative hypothesis -- "When you say <insert word>, I interpret that as <insert narrative description or example>.  How are you using the term <insert word>?"  Repeat this until you find the term on which you are disagreeing -- or until you decide that you really, actually disagree.  Either way, it is in your best interest to highlight, isolate, and address misunderstandings and to avoid MISagreements.

While the MISagreement problem certainly happens in spoken communication, I think it is epidemic in written communication like corporate reporting presentations -- especially those that use abbreviated text, bullet points, and illustrations.  In fact, I think we often TRY to make MISagreement happen in our presentations: it requires a great deal of intellectual honesty to use words and images that are intended to avoid MISagreement.  

It is not enough to use words that can mean what you say.  It is essential to use words that cannot mean anything else.

 Even if this means inviting disagreement.  Because I'll take a true disagreement over a false agreement any day of the week.

 

The Wave

I just finished the excellent book The Wave by Susan Casey, and this morning a seed from the book sprouted in my mind.  Casey interviews several Hawaiians about the sea and the surf, and they all talk about not the waves (plural) at a place but the wave (singular) at a place.  That is, they (even their ancient ancestors) realized that all of the crests breaking in at a particular spot are the product of a single, unique, stationary entity -- which turns out to be (though perhaps the ancients did not quite understand this part) the topology of the ocean floor at that place.  So, each place has a recurring, known and unique set of behaviors under various circumstances, which is to say a way of responding to energy of swells of various intensities and directions.  The Hawaiians characterize the whole of these behaviors as a persona: the wave at a place has a personality and a name and a reputation, and you have a relationship with it.

So, I was thinking this morning that the Hawaiians’ view of the wave also reveals their view of a person.  They projected onto the wave a concept that they already understood from dealing with each other.  They must have already viewed real men and women as being defined by how each refracts, reflects, absorbs, and amplifies the energy in the swells of life to create smooth or rugged, excellent or scary, tubular or foamy, etc waves for the rest of us.  When life hits Sam from thus-and-such direction, he does this-and-that.  Etc.  I think this is a wonderful way to look at yourself, your life, and your relationships -- personal and professional.

Stuff happens, to paraphrase the bumper sticker.  We all encounter thousands of different swells -- energy of challenges and opportunities and mysteries -- in our lives.  These swells hit us from every imaginable angle and height, so they touch every bend and curve and surface of our character -- revealing a rich and true picture, like a sonogram of our soul.  It is a complex picture, and it bears the truth of improvisation: this is not a staged picture; rather, it is a dynamic test in which we see a person “in play in the real world, not posing or reading a script.”  And, I think this is the truest picture.  Here’s why.

Consider the character of someone you admire.  Describe that character with a few words. Now consider those words, and ask yourself: are they manifest in a static environment (no swells) or in a dynamic environment (impacted with swells)?  If you used words like....trustworthy, caring, strong, diligent, etc....you are describing someone’s behavior in dynamic environments in which life gave that person every opportunity to sell out or ignore or rest or play.  But, this person reacted to those swells by channeling them into something smooth for you.  A nice wave.

Life is not stasis, and we are not static models.  And the swells of life are not interruptions or disruptions to some hypothetical snapshot state: they are the dynamic energy that allows us to reveal ourselves by how we reflect and refract and absorb and amplify those swells for the people around us.  The trick is to learn to channel more types of conditions into clean, smooth, rides -- to avoid producing turmoil and turbulence.  We all have good days and bad days, but that’s not what this is about.  It’s about patterns of behavior and illusions of an the unexamined life.  Take a look at your patterns: what is the character of your wave?

(p.s. --  Your team is a wave, too.  How does it respond to dynamic swells to create a great ride?)

 

ID-ent-defying: Identity is More than a Profile

One of the benefits of having two older teenage sons is that they provide a wealth of insight into emerging patterns of technology use -- particularly as relate to social and collaborative trends.  So, I asked my 17 year old son the other day "How do you use profile pages to understand things about people -- you know, to get a grip on their identity?"  His answer: "I don't.  Profiles are useless.  I look at what they are saying, who's talking with them, and what those other people are saying about them."

 

Identity is about what you DO and WITH WHOM.

 

This conversation was brought back to my mind recently by the new Dan Ariely book The Upside of Irrationality, in which he makes a good case (among others) that using a profile to understand a person's identity is like "trying to understand how a cookie will taste by reading its nutrition label."

 

I've written on this topic from a couple of other perspectives a few times (link here and here), but the topic took on new relevancy and urgency when Cisco announced Quad this week.  Quad is an integrated communication and collaboration hub.  It looks great, and it seems clear to me that Cisco are on the scent of enterprise collaboration in a way that few others are.  There are a lot of cool principles at play in Quad, but here's the one I want to drive home.  Cisco has planted a flag in some prime real estate: identity.  

 

Identity is the central datum of the human co-operating system.

 

Identity helps me interpret things from you. Identity helps me filter the things I send to you.  And, Identity is shaped by all those interactions, too.  Quad allows Cisco to incubate identity from all our communications and collaborations, which enhances our ability to communicate and collaborate in return -- a virtuous cycle.  This is a wonderful, big deal.  Finally, we have a big player who gets it: the collaborative enterprise needs tools, but the end-game here is a human co-operating system, so it's fundamentally about "person."

The Enterprise 2.0 Sitcom

The whole Enterprise 2.0 thing feels a bit like a sitcom sometimes:  Seinfeld vs. Enterprise 2.0

 

We've lost our way.  Enterprise collaboration is not simply more conversation through more and easier channels among more people.

Let's back up and re-establish the RATIONALE for Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Collaboration, the Participative Enterprise, the Flat Organization, and all the other aliases used for this concept.

1. recruitment and retention -- this applies to employees, customers, partners, ad vendors.  We can make it easier for them to talk to and hear from you and each other, which will reduce the transaction cost of doing business with you (reduced communication friction and latency) and elevate their satisfaction with the experience. (man is, after all, a social creature)
2. multi-party creation -- this also applies to employees, customers, partners, and vendors.  We can make it easier for them to study the organization as an organism situated within an ecosystem, to develop and analyze hypotheses about how to improve the vitality of that organism, to create new products or methods or messages based upon those analyses, and to promote it all in a way that mobilizes the necessary mass of support to move the organization ahead.

Very, very much has been written about the first rationale.  I understand it, and I agree that it's real and valuable.  It is necessary, but it is not sufficient.  

Some, but less, has been written and done about the second rationale.  To a large extent, our efforts to allow multi-party creation have still been limited to … the ability to create conversation.  There has been very little focus on emergent hypothesis development, testing, and exploitation.  In other words, most of the work to-date has been about allowing people to talk about pre-developed content; so, the conversation is emergent, but the data content itself is not.  

IMO, this is a problem.

When we define a priori the content around which the participants can converse, we kill thought in at least 3 ways:

1. We make issues forgettable.  As the Madison Avenue folks have known for a long time, your brand is more memorable to a person when you involve her brain more.  Spoon feeding does not work.  Remember the Marlboro billboards?  Why was the cowboy image imposed over the brand name?  To get your brain to play with the ad like a puzzle.  And, it worked. When we feed people static or pre-digested or bounded informational content, they forget it.
2. We constrain the conversation to status-quo thinking.  If you give young kids plastic farm animals, they will role play Farmer John -- not Gordon Gecko.  If you want creative, emergent solutions you have to allow for creative, emergent content as input to the process.
3. We dim the brightest bulbs.  The best brains for creative problem solving are driven by curiosity.  They NEED to try new things, look at things different ways.  Play and experimentation and exploring actually energizes them, lights up their brains.  If our collaborative environments do not allow these minds to play, they will not engage.

Most professional/commercial endeavors are fact-centric at the core.  If our conversations do not revolve around living/dynamic factual UGC -- where the "C" is for "Content" -- then those conversations will be deemed irrelevant by decision makers.  And, Enterprise 2 will fade as just another in a long line of over-hyped tech buzzwords.

Signs of We Know Not What

Yesterday at mid-day, I drove to meet my wife for lunch at our favorite soup joint.  On the way, I listened to NPR, which was broadcasting a program on "the need for a Stimulus Package."  I capitalize it because journalists, politicians, and everymen have taken to invoking the term as a sacred incantation -- capable of bringing rain, er economic growth.  I listened to about 15 minutes of the guest expert interview and about 5 minutes of the call-ins, and it was apparent that neither the expert nor the host nor any caller had a coherent view of what could or should be stimulated.  They just know we need one.

I could not stop thinking about what John Locke said about the use of words:

"Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. ... they would be signs of he knows not what, which is in truth to be the signs of nothing."  John Locke, Book III, 1689

Honest people can disagree on the best course of action for achieving an objective.  They can even disagree about which is the proper objective.  But, first each person must come to the discussion with a clear, concise, and coherent expression of the objectives, the actions, and the causal connections they want to discuss.

This is not just a political problem; executives are as guilty as any group.  (When IBM is parodying Manager-speak in its ads, you know we have a problem.)  Synergy.  Empowerment.  Architecture.  Realignment.  Disintermediation.  The list goes on and on.  Think of all the bad, bad mission statements you've seen.  Now go ask the average employee in your organization to state the organization's objectives, priorities, and operating philosophies.  I'll bet you hear a lot of "signs of he knows not what."  And that's a problem.  Your problem.

At our little firm, we certainly have not solved this problem fully. But, I can heartily recommend two things that have helped:

1. Banish certain words.  Yep, censorship.  If no one can express in small words a clear and coherent definition of that word on which everyone can agree, don't let anyone use that word.  When a certain collection of letters has lost specific meaning, it's no longer really a word at all.  Throw it out, and you will find everyone communicating more clearly.
   
2. Force yourself through the 1-Page Strategic Planning process.  (1PSP Template)  You will not be able to hide behind 300 pages of strategic blather anymore.  But, you will be able to create a simple, coherent plan that makes sure you and your team are on the same page.

Propositioning vs. Value Proposition

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian novelist, Lolita et al) said great writing is "a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science."  Read that again: precision/poetry and intuition/science.  It got my attention, too.

Specifically, I think this insight explains why so much technology marketing stinks: we talk on-and-on-and-on about the precision of our science, and then we try to superglue some poetic intuition onto the side.  That makes perfect sense for engineers: you start with the wonderful thing you’ve figured out how to do.  Great reasoning.  But, not great writing.

Great writing starts with an understanding of the needs, aspirations, and emotional hot-buttons of the audience.  It’s a careful, intentional study of how to engage the mind of the audience.  If you object to this as manipulation, then compare it to how one woos a lover.  It’s certainly not by starting with an inventory of SAT scores, bank accounts, degrees, career path, investment history, cars, and body mass index.  So then, are courtesy, attention, empathy, wit, appearance, and eloquence manipulative?  Or, are they simply attractive behaviors?  And, if they are attractive behaviors, to what deep-seated cognitive/biological mechanisms are they appealing?

Great tech marketing should focus 99% on precision in the emotional connection with our customers and 1% on intuitive hinting at the science beneath.  Happy courting!

Why Do We Talk?

My boys spent a school day in total silence this week, in a "quiet statement" against hate and violence.  Midway through the day, I got the email note below from my oldest...showing that the experience had revealed a profound truth about life and the essence of being human.

Do you know how hard it is to be silent for a whole day?  Anyway, I have recently come to the epiphany that 90% of the things that I say during the day can be avoided with relative ease (granted that 10% has been a major pain to attempt to communicate today.) I assume that I am not alone in this statistic, and this raises a very serious question, what is the purpose of speaking? Are we simply more comfortable when we are filling the air with words that somehow connect us together? Maybe thats it. Maybe communication is mostly just a way for humans to connect with each other and not just a means to an end of accomplishing a goal. It's strange. It's only a day, and yet I feel so isolated.  Anyway, I just thought I would share my epiphany with you.

I love that kid.  What a great reminder.  Everyone (me included) is so task-focused, that we even reduce the most basic human need for social connection into a utility-optimized 12-step program for creating better Powerpoint slides.  Or employee meetings that "get everyone on the same page" or "improve employee satisfaction" or...whatever.

Talking, listening, connecting, sharing -- in our efforts to make it as "effective" as possible, we often apply crude metrics...and then eliminate the pursuit of many forms that are important but not measurable.  People are messy.  Connection is messy. Get messy.