CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Improving BI with Improv

The heart of Business Intelligence is creativity -- it is both the purpose and the engine.  We want to empower our organizations’ best minds with meaningful information and useful tools for manipulating that information, so that they can create new insights, new methods, new breakthroughs, new competitive advantages.  And, we also depend upon those same creative juices when we are trying to design and implement BI programs from scratch in the first place.

Given that, isn’t it remarkable that we spend so little time thinking and talking about how to create cultures conducive to creativity?  Most "management theory" and "management best practices" literature is completely devoid of practical wisdom on how to develop the creative muscles of people within our organizations.  But, I have found a new favorite source of creativity-leadership training, and it’s a very unlikely source: Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theatre.

Viola’s genius for unlocking the creative talents of actors is applicable to the leadership challenges in most corporate organizations striving for greater creativity.  I bet that you will find the first 20 pages of her book the best ROI ever on your professional reading time.  For instance, consider how this passage applies to analysts as well as actors:

We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything.  This is as true for the infant moving from kicking to crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with equations.  If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he or she chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach everything it has to teach.  We must reconsider what is meant by "talent."  It is highly possible that what is called talented behavior is simply greater individual capacity for experiencing.

Does your BI program feed people highly pre-processed information in standard report formats?  Or, do you allow people to make a mess while they are experimenting, discovering, learning, mixing, mash-upping, and sharing?  I’ve seen more than one CIO grouse about "users" who don’t use BI information properly, and my typical response is that we need to incubate a pro-sumer culture -- inviting people simultaneously to produce and consume information.  Those people will have much richer experiences with the information and the business process, giving them a much better understanding of possibilities, limitations, proper applications -- and the need for creative solutions that move the business forward.  Our job is to use our BI initiaves to bring out the creative person hiding within each analyst in the organization.

If you want to get a dozen great ideas on how to do that, spend 30 minutes reading the first couple of chapters of Viola's classic work. 

Facts Versus Truths

My youngest son, Parker, walked into my study a couple of weeks ago with a question that had been troubling him from his World History class:  Is there a difference between fact and truth?  Funny that as adults and professionals we all still struggle with that same question.  On business intelligence projects, I see it every week.

A fact is a statement of objective, actual reality.  Two facts cannot directly contradict one another; that’s what "objective" means -- it’s not a matter of perspective.  Either my SSN is 123-45-6789 or it is not.  Facts are great, but they leave out something interesting. Consider this fact statement, and see what’s missing:

• I own 5 cars. 

A truth is a statement regarding pattern or form.  Truths deal with issues like "why" and "from this perspective" and "for this purpose" and "in this situation."  Truths should be built upon facts, but a truth has the advantage of being actionable.  Here’s what I mean:

• I am a car nut.
• I am not a car nut.

These two statements are BOTH true, and they are built upon certain facts, but they cannot be facts themselves, because they are directly contradictory.  To my wife, I am a car nut: she can expect that I will always have more cars than most people, that I will probably accumulate them, and that we’ll soon have hydraulic lifts in our garage.  But, to local car brokers that deal in expensive cars, I am not a car nut: I don’t spend money on exotic or pop-classic cars, so they should not try to sell to me.

In the typical Business Intelligence project, people spend a lot of time and money trying to create a Single Version of Truth.  Perhaps we should call it instead Single Version of Fact.  We can all agree on the facts, and we can all glean different truths from those facts.

The Enemy of The Best: The Good

Yesterday, I was talking with some of my closest friends from EO about life and work -- especially on the topic of prioritizing for success.  These guys have achieved remarkable success in many different business models, but there was a common thread: passion.  No one in the room was driven by money; rather, they were all driven by an involuntary desire to see a particular thing happen.  So, you’re thinking "We’ve all heard the stories about the obsessive, tunnel-vision, single-focus leader.  There’s nothing interesting about that."

Here’s what's interesting: every one of these guys has multiple terrific ideas and in most cases multiple actual projects in play.  The distinctive focus of successful people does not derive from an absence of perspective or vision; it derives from being brutally clear and draconian about THE ONE THING that must trump everything else when necessary.  For each of my friends, this was their "Best" -- the most distinctive application of their unique talents, the most world-changing possibility, the most compelling next-five-years story, the most worthy and productive and respectable way to have lived.  And, in story after story, it was amazing how many times these guys had rejected the temptation of the good opportunity when it threatened their Best Opportunity.  They left a trail of good opportunities in their wakes on the way to big success.

If their lives were a movie, it would be Moulin Rouge -- totally over the top, and extraordinary, and wonderful.  Nothing average or hedged or ordinary.

The enemy of the Best is not the Bad; it’s the Good.

Illusion of Control

Extra Extra: Control is an illusion.   

Given all the brain-intoxicating hype about "the power within you" and all the sure-fire-conference-invitation-getting books on "how you too can build an Amazon-like juggernaut", this may come as a complete shock to you, but here goes...

I am not in control.

Now just to be clear, I am a big-time Type A, driven, visionary entrepreneur and consultant.  I TOTALLY believe in working hard and smart with a plan and a great cast.  And, we've been successful.  But, here's a confession that few successful people want to make: hard work, smarts, great teams, confidence, discipline, Covey, etc are NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT to guarantee success.  Life's just not that tidy, and I'm sure not omniscient or omnipotent (like, say, God).

I feel blessed and honored and lucky and fortunate and proud and vulnerable all at the same time. 

It's a bit like parenting.  We have two super-fantastic sons.  But, Julie and I refuse to accept credit for that, because we know too many other great parents who've experienced very different outcomes.  Similarly, there are a lot of hard-working people smarter than me who've not enjoyed professional success.  Go figure.

So, the next time you're feeling a little out of control, know that everyone else falls into two camps: those that work through similar feelings and those that are self-hypnotizing.

Who am I?

We've all heard the old saying...

You are not who you think you are
You are not who others think you are
You are who you think others think you are

That’s useful for introspection exercises; but it does not help as a guideline for living.

In the physical world, VERY FEW professionals rely exclusively on "official" identity markers -- like job title.  We know who to go to for information and insight, and we go to them -- regardless the job title.  Similarly, we know who not to trust on certain topics, even if their boss has been hoodwinked into believing they are credible on the topic.  We make very sophisticated and subtle distinctions in the physical world, based upon our past experience with a person or upon the experiences of other colleagues with that person.

In the digital world, which includes internet and intranets, we are mere babes when it comes to identity.  If you've never seen Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 presentation (available here as a Flash stream), it’s worth watching as you think about professional collaboration communities.  The power of those communities grows exponentially as the number of contributors grows, so there’s a strong incentive to recruit.  But, those wonderful economics are predicated upon (1) recruiting the right kind of members, (2) allowing them to establish personal domains of expertise, and (3) creating subtle markers of credibility/authority for each individual.

So, setting aside for the moment the question of whether there is something spiritually transcendent about life ....

Professionally, I am

The things I say and do
What I create
Where I associate
What others say about me

How are we going to develop identity and trust models for the digital world that are as rich as nuanced as those we use in the real world?

Design is Personal

Under Steve Jobs, Apple IS design.  They own the space.  Other companies fantasize about competing, but it’s like a pee-wee quarterback fantasizing about throwing a last second TD pass over Champ Bailey.  Get real.

At dinner this weekend, a friend of mine whipped out his iPhone to check the weather for the next day.  It was very sexy, very fluid -- positively engrossing.  More than just having usability, it had the characteristic of making you want to be able to use it.

Now here’s the interesting thing: there is nothing new there.  Nothing that Nokia or Motorola or LG couldn’t have done.  So, what’s the difference?  How does Apple consistently create the extraordinary while others wallow in design mediocrity?

Seth Godin and Tamara Aldin are onto it. (read the whole article here)

Seth: The iPhone is merely a triumph of guts. It's a triumph of someone forcing people to do things they were scared of, and thus completely changing the paradigm of a multibillion-dollar industry.

Tamara: Do you think it's also related to the fear that causes us to go for the lowest common denominator? Well, not the lowest, but THE common denominator? The iPhone was designed and built for Steve Jobs, right? And it works.

Seth: Right; it's not for everybody. The thing is, the stuff that's for everybody is already sold to everybody. So you can't win by being more average than average, because that slot's taken.

What’s the problem with innovation by committee?  Democracy is intrinsically average.  Sure, it’s low risk; but it also has a high probability of mediocrity.  In today’s super-competitive world, only excellence is rewarded extraordinarily.  Step out.  Whatever it is you're working on, make it personal.

Asking The Wrong Questions

Don’t you hate "research" that's based upon questions like...

Please rank the following problems with current (fill in the blank) software:

1. Cost
2. Support
3. SOA compatibility
4. Feature breadth
5. Licensing
6. Shortage of skills
7. etc

It really sucks as research, because it perpetuates the status quo.  “87% of people surveyed indicated that Feature Breadth was the most important issue.”  Useless.  No wonder most of that junk is funded by giant incumbents.  It’s a smokescreen that lulls everyone into not thinking originally or clearly about the very topic it purports to address.

Tamara Adlin published an interview with Brenda Laurel, in which Brenda talked about the bias power of conventional wisdom.  She’s brought out distinctive software (e.g., video games for girls), because she knew how to ask the right questions.  In her words,

I was pretty fed up by that point by seeing how the gaming world was very gendered.  I wasn't going to accept the street wisdom that girls just didn't play computer games period, end of story. That was not something that made any sense to me since I was a game player. We did a lot of work with thousands of kids and tried to understand the kinds of play that attracted girls; not just computer play, but play period. I think if we'd asked what kind of computer games girls would like, we wouldn't have gotten an interesting answer. So we asked deeper questions....

Too often when evaluating new opportunities, we all ask the wrong questions.  We enter into the conversation with so much bias, that our language and metaphors and entire frames of reference are all jacked up.  We box in the respondents cognitively, preventing them from taking us to a riskier-but-richer discussion of their lives, aspirations, and needs.  THEY don’t think about "the box" naturally, but we make sure we point it out for them right up front.  It makes us feel smart and prepared -- when we get answers very similar to those we expected (HUGE shock).  But, it really just shows how scared we are to hear how much more creative we need to be if we are going to deliver something really new and meaningful for their lives.

Ever since the TDWI conference in August, I’ve been haunted by the notion that forward progress in Business Intelligence has stalled because everyone is still regurgitating the same approaches from the 1980’s.  The surveys are set up with those answers in mind.  BUT SERIOUSLY, do we really believe that there’s nothing new needed in BI?  Everyone has normalized warehouses and query tools -- yet thousands and thousands of IT and BIZ leaders from firms of all sizes still flock to TDWI looking for answers to why they don’t really have business intelligence (as opposed to Business Intelligence).  And, the advice they still get is (with a few "lunatic" exceptions, like Mark Madsen and Matt Schwartz and Colin White): here’s how to build a better warehouse or buy a good reporting tool.   

As Seth Godin puts it in his interview with Tamara, "the status quo isn't enough of a reason ... to accept something. Part of being an entrepreneur is about going into a place where something isn't happening, making it happen, and having the marketplace thank you for it." 

If you want to find a major opportunity for breakthrough, make a list of all the scary places that your mind wants to avoid...and ask your potential patrons to tell fantasy stories that cover all those scary topics...and watch how they work today when dealing with your scary areas...and then weave something beautiful and original from the threads of your fears.

Oh, and ignore all of the conventional wisdom groupies.

Neil Raden: The Emperor Has No Clothes

I ran across an interesting interview with information strategist Neil Raden the other day.  You can read the full transcript here, but the following are the most provocative points (Neil's comments in red).

The problem with most (BI) vendors ... (is) they still look at business intelligence as something that happens in a machine. I certainly wouldn't say this about all the people at all the vendors, but they basically don't understand what people do for a living... and how the people really use (technology) in their work.  (The BI establishment) has constrained the use of the technology to just attempting to inform people, but not to aid them in doing their work.

Newsflash: Remember the "It's the economy, stupid" bumper stickers?  This time: It’s about people, stupid.

The fact of the matter is that almost everybody who works in an organization who is a knowledge worker -- whatever that means anymore -- operates on (a variety of) levels of skill and expertise simultaneously. They may be the most sought-after expert in the company on one thing but they may spend 80 percent of the time doing things they don't really know very well, where they seek the advice of other experts. I think that a lot of the qualities that are needed -- collaboration, the things we see in social networking, all the Web 2.0 features that ought to get inherited by BI -- it seems more likely that Microsoft Excel is going to inherit those things first. And at that point, Excel will kill BI. Excel will become BI.

Newsflash: BI vendors only hate Excel because it exposes how people really want to work and how very different that is from the way their big, expensive BI "suites" work.  They only dismiss Web 2.0 and BI 2.0 and whatever 2.0 for the same reason.

Look at the changing demographics of companies today. It's people like my kids who are moving into those cubicles and people like me who are getting retired. Those kids know more about technology than most of those seasoned IT people. And they live with it. It's not something that they do for a living. It's an integral part of their lives. They're not going to tolerate the kind of delays and poor quality and ridiculous conversations about standards and that sort of thing. They're just going to say, "Look, I'm playing a 3-D video strategy game with four people in China I don't even know, while I'm downloading data to my iPod, while I'm answering messages in Yahoo messenger. Are you going to tell me I can't have a report for three months because it has to go through QA?"

Newsflash: For the maybe the second or third time in history, a generation is coming of age with a RADICALLY different set of skills and behaviors based upon EXPONENTIALLY better/cheaper/faster access to information versus the previous generation.  The last time that happened...Luther and Gutenberg lit the fuse on the Renaissance Rocket.  The establishment has never been the same since.

Three Cheers for a BI Heretic

These days it seems that everyone is getting carried away on the bandwagon of "Single Version of the Truth" and "BI for the Masses."  As you probably know from prior posts, I think this emphasis neglects the smart analysts who don't want to code -- they are the gifted "middle child" of the professional world.  I know it's heresy, but at least I have some good company.

David Biggers is a co-recipient of the 2007 TDWI Best Practices award for "radical BI," which he helped build at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Ca. The Lab’s solution embraces "alternative approaches," including data sheets on the desktop. Many of his users are world-renowned scientists. "You don’t tell the smartest guys in the room that what they have on their spreadsheets isn’t the truth," he said. "We’ve provided tools that help the user discover their own truths if they’re different from the enterprise version." Ted Cuzillo of TDWI

It's good to remember that the "smartest people in the room" are rarely the ones delivering the IT solutions.

Matt Schwartz, Ockham, and Vizzini

Back in the 14th century, a religious guy named Ockham coined a principle that you’ve probably heard paraphrased "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one."  It’s really a remarkably powerful concept, and we forget it at our peril.

Today, I want to send kudos to Matt Schwartz for leading by the principle of Ockham's Razor.  Matt and his Business Intelligence team at Corporate Express just won TDWI's top award for excellence in business intelligence programs.  But, get this: they don’t do requirements documents.

"Inconceivable!" 

Actually, not.  The generally-followed process for managing a BI program is to have the business folks (managed by one person in one organization) launch written requirements and change requests over the transom at the technology folks (managed by another person in another organization).  It’s a painful process for everyone; it generates mountains of paperwork with a very short shelf-life; and it has a very high noise-to-signal ratio.  Bottom line: it’s slow, expensive, and shoddy.

Fortunately, Matt’s (un)common sense told him to merge the technology people and business people into a single organization in a single location, where pairs of tech/biz people work together in real time every day.  Not a whole lot of formal documentation required when we’re attending the same staff meeting, having lunch together, and staring at the same screen when solving a problem. 

What an amazingly simple solution.  And, the results speak for themselves.  Nice work!