Off Course-On Target

Oxymorons of the Day: Common Uniqueness, Similar Differences, and Different Similarities

NOTE:  This post is partly inspired by and is in memory of one of the world’s greatest physicists and one of my all time favorite thinkers, David Bohm, who passed away 17 years ago on Oct. 27 1992. 

I’ve been ranting and raving that “All categorization must die” and working, in vain (so far) to bring an end to the trend of segmenting people into generations such as X, Y, Boomer, etc. Here is my latest rant and rave, plus a request.

Let me start by clarifying that I am not saying there are no differences between people of different ages, nor am I saying that age is irrelevant. However, it is also nothing more than one of probably millions of characteristics that define any person. For the most part and in my experience, there is a very low correlation between people’s behaviors and habits and their chronological age. Equally, my real world experiences seem to almost always be at odds with what many of the pundits, experts, and popular conference speakers and book writers are saying when it comes to classifying people and their behaviors based on their age or generation. 

I came across some good examples that I think support my observations and the source is rather unusual: the Pew Research Center report on “Home Broadband Adoption 2009”, which is part of their larger work on the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It provides some excellent data to show just how diverse and different broadband adoption is and I strongly recommend reading it.  For those who want even more detail, read the full “Home Broadband Adoption 2009” report.

My interest in this Pew report is not on its specific focus, which is broadband adoption in the USA. And it is not lost on me that citing this Pew report, which is based on segmenting groups by age, seems counter to my argument. But when you read their surprising findings and trends, I believe that in the net their data shows just how diverse and counterintuitive the patterns and people are, and how most of these fly against the prevailing wisdom or presumed common knowledge.

This report is also limited, since it only covers the American population. However, after having lived much of my life (including the past two years) in places other than in North America, I must point out that I keep seeing more exceptions to these so-called norms and to such an extent that I think that there are no norms! 

I do understand, at least in part, that what drives us to want to categorize and group things is that we have historically used this method to make sense of the universe. We think it helps us establish some order amid the chaos. However I think this is working less and less well, and in fact it is leading us to less understanding and (worse perhaps) even misunderstanding in a majority of cases. One of my all-time favorite thinkers and mentors is David Bohm who is author of such greats as On Creativity, Science Order and Creativity, and Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Bohm’s thinking on order, creativity, and uniqueness was absolutely brilliant regarding what constitutes a genuinely unique new idea. I’ve long been fascinated by his notion on how our brains notice “similar differences and different similarities” in different situations and how there is such a difference between occasional perceptive insight, and genuinely creative paradigm shifts.  But that is best left to another and much longer post that I’ll try to get to soon. 

My primary point in this post, indeed my plea, is that we recognize our uniqueness and work much harder to stop the common practice of profiling people based on their age, and worse yet, into generations with the presumption that there would be any accuracy at all in such gross oversimplifications and presumptions. 

The reality is that each of us is deeply unique and our behaviors are similarly influenced by the uniqueness of the:

• Context of each day
• Others we are interacting with
• Situations we find ourselves in 

The net result is that we should presume to know very little about individuals or groups based on any one of the myriad of characteristics that define each of us, such as age. Instead let’s celebrate our differences and uniqueness and focus on designing, serving, working, learning, playing with, and loving others as the unique “snowflakes” we all are. 

What we do have in common is our differences. We are all snowflakes—completely unique, and in that regard only, just like every other snowflake!

Wayne

What if the Impossible Isn’t?

As I mentioned in my recent post “Reflective Reduction Sauce”, returning to my work universe after months at sea has led me to reflect upon some themes I encountered as a result of my attending the Learning 2009 conference. One theme I’m delighted to see more attention on is “What if the impossible isn’t?”

This theme is about the need to understand that we are living at a time where almost anything is possible. While I would still wager that the majority of people are not quite believers yet, I continue to have great fun exploring  what is the current “state-of-the-art of the possible” with others in my presentations and conversations.

What makes something possible includes such factors as:

• Does it exist? (invented/discovered yet?)
• Am I aware of it?
• Is it available to me? (out of private beta, out of the research lab, etc.)
• Is it ready for me?  (good enough for my use)
• Can I afford it?

Fundamentally, my sense, my message, and my belief is that the only thing holding us back anymore is our assumptions of what it possible, what we should be demanding and expecting as consumers, and the overall attitude we need to take that if something is not possible today, it will be tomorrow—almost literally. 

Living in the Age of Abundance

But I am not suggesting that just because something is possible or available, you need to use it. Quite the opposite actually. Our choices should be driven by our needs, our passions, and our curiosity. Yet this habit of trying anything new is a holdover from the previous era of scarcity whereby we would often feel a need to use something just because it came to our attention, arrived on the market, or was pushed at us as new and improved. 

As we transition into the age of abundance, I believe we need to assume that everything and anything is available and possible, and work from there. In doing so, I find it necessary to invert these earlier approaches and avoid the tendency of starting with a solution in search of a problem.

As many of us* start living in an era of abundance where anything becomes possible, it puts a wonderful pressure on us to think and focus more on:

• What do we really need?
• What are the essential characteristics we are looking for?
• What are our top priorities?

In grossly oversimplified terms, the way we have historically planned and designed is:

• To start with some ideal end state in mind and then develop back from that based on what is impossible.
• To build a solution based on what we think is possible and accept what is often a very significant degree of compromise in the process. 

In doing so, most of our sense of what is possible is quite dated and is based on unconscious assumptions.   Both of these problems are causing us to squander opportunities to improve and do things we believe are still only dreams, and the way to change this is to go after both of these problems.

Learning to Adjust Our Sense of What is Possible

With the rate of change increasing exponentially, our sense of what is possible and what is impossible requires almost constant real-time updating, and necessitates a new planning and project management model. This new model allows for dynamic updating when something that was impossible when the current plan was developed becomes possible. When this happens, the project should start using it and taking advantage of it.

This kind of updating can largely be addressed through technical means if all such requirements are well-articulated in the initial planning process, such that the needed capabilities and other requirements are quantified and stated and can thus be tracked for relevant changes.

However, our unconscious assumptions are a much more troubling and challenging problem because they lurk below our level of awareness and because they become indelibly ingrained into our habits, behaviors, and thinking. For example, my focus on the Snowflake Effect—the transition from an era of mass production to one of mass personalization—includes many such assumptions. Mass production is not reserved for the domain of manufacturing, but rather has permeated most societies and our overall way of thinking. 

When I talk about this meta theme of the Snowflake Effect, one of the most common and provocative questions that I ask is, “If we all seem to agree that each of us is unique, and furthermore that each moment and situation is unique, then why do we live in a world that is designed for sameness?” 

When we design something, we typically start by identifying the “target audience”, a group of people who are  defined by a set of common characteristics. The larger this audience, the better. Think about this for a minute. Imagine you are designing and developing any new product, such as a lesson for students, a book, a website, a car, or service. Do you find that designing all of these involves the same basic model based on an assumption of sameness?

And I get it. This model used to make complete sense. Mass production was a brilliant model in its time and we largely got to where we are today because of it. However, the great news is that most of the conditions and constraints which made mass production such a successful model have changed or have been eliminated, yet the model persists. Add to this the equally wonderful dynamic that truly amazing new capabilities, products, and services are becoming possible and available every day. We are increasingly moving to the point where the impossible isn’t.

It’s Time to Get Good at Believing in the Impossible

What to do?  What needs to change? First and foremost I think it is we who need to change—our thinking and our assumptions. We need to get good at believing in the impossible. In true synchronistic fashion, I recently received this quote from my good friend Murry Christensen which resonated strongly and added to my sense that this meta theme I’m discussing here is growing:

"We must learn to deal with possibilities instead of probabilities."

-- Verna Allee

And one of my favorite thinkers and writers is Kevin Kelly and he has been making these same kinds of observations for many years now. One of my favorite Kevin phrases is:

“Impossible in theory, possible in practice”

Kevin makes this observation in light of the many capabilities we are now immersed in  yet which only a few years or months previously we would have regarded as impossible. You can read Kevin’s piece on “Believing the Impossible” or watch his TED talks such as “The next 5000 days of the web” (included here), and “How Technology Evolves”.

Still not convinced?  Watch these other TED talks and see if you change your mind a little or a lot:

• Pranav Mistry demonstrating his “Sixth Sense” device

• Juan Enriquez’s tour of some views of “mindboggling science”

• David Hanson showing his robots that “show emotion”

Believing that “the impossible isn’t” is what has led me to conclude that the dream of being able to seize every “teachable moment”, to have personalized learning experiences available for every person on the planet multiple times every day, and get to a “just the right” end state where we can get just the right stuff to just the right person at just the right time in just he right context, has become an achievable goal.

What about you?  When it comes to capabilities, products, services, etc., what is on your “wish it were possible” list? What, were it to be possible, would make the most significant difference in your professional or personal life?  My experience in pursuing these questions is that by articulating and sharing them, we will discover that many are already possible and those that aren’t can be put on our watch list, so that we will be notified in days, weeks, or months that it has just become possible. 

Sound impossible?  Just watch, it isn’t!

Wayne

______________

* Let’s keep in mind that in terms of world population (almost 7 billion), we are still the privileged few who live in in this era of abundance, and although this group is also growing exponentially, we all need to continue to work to distribute abundance.

Reflective Reduction Sauce

As many of you know, I am privileged to live in two parallel universes: one where I am the strategic futurist at Velocity Made Good Inc. (VMG), as well as speaker, provocateur, etc., traveling the world by planes, trains, and automobiles, and living at the speed of thought; and the other where I live and work on my sailboat, the good ship Learnativity, wandering and pondering the world one nautical mile at a time. Each time I move from one universe to the other, the shapeshifting process produces a tremendous amount of new learning for me.

Upon my most recent return to my fast universe, where I was immediately immersed in the Learning 2009 conference in Orlando last week, the learning was wonderfully severe. 

With a few days to reflect and do some cognitive “simmering and sauce reduction”, a few recurring themes and observations emerged for me: 

• Authenticity
• Curiosity
• Confidence
• Faith and Trust
• Unconscious Assumptions
• Redefining Experience
• Uncertainty
• Readiness for the Unexpected
• What If the Impossible Isn’t?
• Personal Capitalization

I’m sharing something about each of these with you in the hopes that they will be of some value and spark additional feedback and conversations. Each of these deserves and demands some explanation and discussion, so I’ll write about each one in a series of posts to follow. Today, I’m starting with Authenticity.

Authenticity

Authenticity has been a recurring topic for me for several years now, and it is one I am finding in both of my parallel universes. For me, authenticity is about the quality of being genuine, and it is one of the best examples of how the most profound and important things in life are the simplest. 

Authenticity can be and is applied to products and things such as content. In a previous post “The Land that Never Was”, I outlined some of my views on how the whole definition of what is real and genuine is either getting more difficult to determine or perhaps is just being redefined as the difference between real and synthetic becomes less and less and, in some cases, the distinction disappears completely. 

At the Learning 2009 conference, I heard both the topic and the word “authentic” in many of the sessions and in the hallways. There was a lot of conversation about authentic content for example. Authentic content is not to be confused with simply the poor quality of content, but rather it is about how accurate and relevant the content is, how true the “voice” of the content is, how relevant is it, and so on. 

A few months ago, while in my other nautical universe, I had a very personal experience with authentic content when I found myself on my sailboat in Pago Pago harbor in American Samoa on September 29th, a day which I have since referred to as “Tsunami Tuesday”. You can read more about this fascinating experience in on my Learnativity blog (Part I, Part II, Part III) and in my previous posting here on OCOT “Tsunami and Technology: Powers That Be at Sea” where I discuss how I found myself being the on-the-scene reporter (by virtue of being there in person), which I shared via the wonders of current technology, such as my satellite phone. This technology enabled me to send out test messages to Twitter and hence be picked up by many other bloggers and then by the world press.

In the weeks that followed, I was deluged by emails, texts, calls, and tweets from some of those who had been staying informed about the tsunami and about their friends and family who were also there at the time. What most struck me though were the common comments I heard about how extremely effective the reporting was, especially via those who were sending out tweets and writing blogs using firsthand accounts from those who were actually there. 

What I picked up from all this was that it was much more than the obvious fact that we were there. It was the authenticity that came from living this experience. We were being directly affected by this amazing natural phenomenon and were dealing with the reality of saving our ships, our possessions, and our friends and family, and were sharing it as it happened.

In the case of content for learning, training, and education, I am hearing about increasing awareness and demand for content that is similarly real, firsthand, relevant, and coming from those who have direct experience. Perhaps this simply goes back to emphasizing the age old advice for any writers or content creators to “write what you know”.

However, this conversation about authenticity and genuineness goes way beyond the narrow definition of content. Most notably, it is about us as people being genuine. Previously this quality of genuineness has been applied mostly to organizations such as businesses, governments, and non-profits, and has been about exposing when these are organizations are not representing and presenting themselves accurately and genuinely.  More recently, however, with the increased depth and breadth of the conversation that now takes place between consumers and producers, teachers and learners, and politicians and constituents, authentic and genuine conversation has become possibly the predictor and predicator of success.

One of the most direct and best versions of this idea came from the conversation between Elliott and Betsy Myers at Learning 2009. Betsy impressed me both for what she said as well as how she said it. She is extremely engaging and effective. One of Betsy’s primary topics is “authentic leadership” and in her conversation with Elliott, she stressed key issues such as curiosity and courage. She spoke to me particularly when she recommended that each of us should “have the courage to be your authentic self”. 

For me, cultivating this quality is not something reserved for those who knowingly obfuscate their real selves, but also is something each of us needs to keep in mind when we fail to be who we really are—when we create too great a gap between who we are on the inside and who we present on the outside.

While it has always been a laudable goal to be true to yourself, I think that with the advent of modern communications technology, and most recently, the rise in the use of social media such as blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook, authenticity and genuineness are being rigorously tested for and demanded far more than ever before. 

There is no question in my mind and experience that being your “authentic self” takes real and constant courage. However, there is also no question that the benefits of doing so are greater still. Does this match with what you are seeing and experiencing? What other ways are you seeing authenticity becoming an increasing priority?  I look forward to hearing from you.

Wayne

What It’s All About

Want to see what it is all about? Want to see a real live humanitarian and all around great person?

Check out this video of my dear friend Linda English, a founder and Director of Membership Development, Learning for International NGOs LINGOs, www.lingos.org

This is from the Microsoft Alumni Foundation, Honors 2009 Integral Fellows ceremony on Wednesday (Nov.18, 2009).

You GO girl!

Write You Are!

For many years now, I’ve more often than not taken great exception to those traits and characteristics which  the “experts” and pundits say are the norm or the coming trends of our societies. They just don’t seem to match up with the reality I see all around me and what my sense of these trends are.

For example, I still keep reading about these grave concerns that we (especially the younger generations) are becoming isolated individuals who:

• Live in dark rooms lit only by the glow of our computer screens
• Have no social life and only limited “real” human contact
• Read less and write less
• Passively sit there all day clicking our mouse and watching endless video

I don’t know where all these masses of people are who the experts say are out there and are becoming the norm. I see mostly the opposite among all of the many groups, ages, nations, and cultures that I’m privileged to spend time with around the world. I see people of all ages, classes, and cultures who are more social than ever—communicating, sharing, reflecting, observing, analyzing, and otherwise engaging more than I think we may have ever done.

I think the reason for this vast difference in observations is mostly because these interactions don’t look and feel like they used to. Behaviors have changed and they don’t fit the norms and definitions of the past. But make no mistake—from all indications and observations I can make, the fundamentals of socializing, interacting, communicating, writing, probing, being curious, and other such fundamental traits are not only alive and well, but they are at an all time high and are increasing exponentially.

You can therefore imagine my delight in finding more and more examples in the past few months of others who have been noticing this same counter-trend. Even better, some of this has now been formally studied and evaluated, so it is no longer just a matter of opinion and a collection of anecdotal observations.

The “Stanford Study of Writing”

One of the more recent examples is the massive study called “Stanford Study of Writing” that was recently completed by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. Clive Thompson did a good synopsis of this study in a the Sept. 2009 edition of Wired magazine called “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy”. Lunsford studied college students from 2001 to 2006 and used over 14,000 samples of their diverse writings including formal assignments, emails, blogs, and chat sessions. Tellingly, 83% of their writing took place outside of their academic assignments. One of her conclusions particularly rang true to me when she remarked, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”

Perhaps most importantly, this study showed that it is not just volume but effectiveness of writing that has increased so dramatically. I picked up a new word (always a great find for me) in Clive’s article that Lunsford uses to quantify a critical competency that her study showed had dramatically increased. Kairos is the ability of a writer to “assess their audience and adapt their tone and technique to best get their point across.”

New World Encyclopedia notes that in Panathenaicus, Isocrates wrote “educated people are those who manage well the circumstances which they encounter day by day, and who possess a judgment which is accurate in meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action.” Sounds like a pretty important skill to me!

According to Clive (something of particular note to those in education), Lunsford observed in her study that “students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.”

My Lessons Learned

Here is a short spur-of-the-moment list of some of my recent observations and learning regarding writing— both my own and that of those around me. I would be most interested to hear from you about how well these match or conflict with what you are seeing when it comes to writing and communication skills now and what you think will happen to them in the future.

• The diversity and quantity of outlets and motivation for writing and sharing is increasing at an exponential rate. It is easy to forget how much the pace of new forms of writing and distribution is accelerating. Not that many years have passed since many of us switched from paper-based writing of letters, books, and articles to the much more prolific digital forms of word processors. In the last few years, we saw the exponential growth of connectivity via the Internet and saw the rise of email and online forums. Laptops and mobile phones became mainstream and provided some of the catalyst for more outlets, such as instant messaging and SMS text messages. And in the past few months, we’ve seen even faster growth of phenomena such as Facebook and Twitter (to name but a few). Each of these provides yet another outlet and demand for writing, and we seem to be answering the call in droves.
• There is an equally rapid growth in the diversity of types and styles of writing. If you have been reading much of my writing, or worse had to listen to me, you know I graduated with honors from the University of Never-a-Sentence-When-a-Paragraph-Will-Do. For me, the brevity which outlets such as “tweets” and SMS texting ruthlessly enforce has been helped me to write (sometimes) with greater clarity and conciseness. As my dear friend Marcia Connor recently put it in an article she wrote about social media,  “If my friend Wayne can tweet, anyone can!”
• The motivation factors for writing are also increasing at similar rates and for more and more people. When I talk with others who maintain blogs, journals, websites, and email lists, and have a presence on Twitter and Facebook, most of them mention that knowing people are reading what they write, often commenting on it, adding additional points of view, etc., significantly motivates them to develop the habit of writing more often and sharing more of their experiences.
• Writing is becoming more immediate and more authentic. It resembles a conversation in terms of its characteristics—it is more spontaneous, more serendipitous, and more personal. And as with a great conversation, these tend to be much richer in their content and context.
• Writing is becoming more and more personalized, another example of “The Snowflake Effect”. This writing trend reflects firsthand experiences—writing about what you know, reflective writing, and writing that is much richer in value.
• Skills in analysis are becoming less important since this is increasingly automated and done for us with a mouse click. But  having skills for synthesizing is growing in value as we consume ever larger quantities of disparate information sources and types, reflect upon them, and put together our thoughts and ideas on what they mean and what trends and patterns we see.
• These changes in our writing provide more examples of how we are increasingly becoming societies of prosumers. For example, I don’t regard myself as a writer or a reporter, but when I recently found myself in the midst of the tsunami in Pago Pago American Samoa a few weeks ago, thanks to the wonder of modern communications technology, suddenly I was just that: an on-the-scene reporter, able to provide firsthand, immediate and very personalized reports via my tweets, emails and my blog.  You can read my accounts of this experience by following these links:
  • Doing the Tsunami Tango in American Samoa: Part I
  • Doing the Tsunami Tango in American Samoa: Part II
  • Doing the Tsunami Tango in American Samoa: Part III

  These accounts were subsequently picked up by news services around the world, many of which were able to call me on my sailboat via my satellite phone and do a live interview as I was literally in the mist of the tumultuous effects of the tsunami in real time. This is not only something that was technically impossible a few years ago, but serves as a dramatic example of just how much we are becoming the “prosumer” society which Alvin and Heidi Toffler so presciently described in their book “The Third Wave” wherein we are no longer either a producer or a consumer, but are both at the same time.

• These changes in our writing skills and habits are not at all limited to the younger generation. This is a phenomenon affecting all of us who are living and writing at this time and in these environments.

Your Turn to Write!

I’m sure you can come up with many more examples of other trends and directions, skills, and consequences of the changes happening with our writing and communications. I therefore hope and encourage you to add yet another example of this trend by either posting some of your observations on your own blogs, tweets or Facebook pages, or directly here. I hope that my  own writing here is reflecting the positive traits of this exponentially accelerating trend.

Referring back to the Wired article I mention at the start of this posting, I thought Clive made a great point in closing when he noted: “knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.” Write on Clive!

Wayne

I Did It My Way!

One of the main tenets of the Snowflake Effect is that of mass customization and ultimately, personalization. As such, I try to follow trends that would indicate if things like mass customization are actually starting to happen and if William Gibson’s great line that “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” is being realized.

On-demand manufacturing is one area of interest. A recent article in Fast Company from October 1, 2009 called “Zazzle Dazzles on Demand” talks about the success that Zazzle is having with this new method of manufacturing. Since 2005 they have been focused mostly on customized printing of things like T-shirts, mugs, shoes, business cards, etc. Zazzle is now seeing over 200,000 new items designed on their site DAILY! Most orders are processed in 24 hours and they claim to be able to go from order to finished product in as little as 17 minutes. For example they recently enabled Keds the shoemaker to have individual customers, many of them children, design each individual panel of the shoe (as well as the insole) with art or designs of their choosing.

This radical shift from the days of mass production, where everything was the same, is not only affecting manufacturing but perhaps more so sales and business models. These quotes from Zazzle’s CEO Robert Beaver exemplify the ways their customers are evolving to take advantage of these new capabilities. He notes, for example, that:

“The competitive mentality is If I help somebody else, that’s going to take dollars out of my pocket. But that isn’t the way our sellers are thinking. More sellers enhance the overall quality of the marketplace.”

And he also made the point that many of their biggest customers such as Disney, LucasArts, Matell and Getty Images, learned that:

“... this wasn’t about posting your 10 most popular designs—that’s retail. Unlock everything.”

These observations are very much in keeping with one of the undercurrents of the Snowflake Effect which Eric Duval and I speak to a lot: that of now living in a world of abundance where choice and design are becoming the critical value propositions. While the Zazzle example is a relatively mild degree of mass customization, at least compared to what I see coming, this is a here and now example that shows how we are also headed for a society of “prosumers” where we are not nicely segregated into being either a producer or a consumer but rather part of a totally new set of roles and rules where each of us are both consuming and producing concurrently.

I’ll continue to bring you more examples of these future trends and directions in the hopes that it helps you to see how these changes will impact your world and life and helps you be better prepared for and gain more benefits from the Snowflake Effect.

-- Wayne

Infinite Learning: The Ultimate in Life’s Frustrations or Gifts?

When I was a young boy I remember spending days on end pondering the question “If you take one step forward towards an end point, and each step is exactly one half the distance between you and that end point, how many steps will it take you to get there?” The seemingly illogical answer is that it takes an infinite number of steps and you never get there!

Similarly confounding and one of the conundrums we all discover about learning is that the more you learn the more you realize how much you don’t know. With each answer comes more questions and so the amount you realize you have to learn grows exponentially!

Brian Greene, a noted physicist and author, penned what I thought was an excellent article in Wired ((May 2009) called “Questions, Not Answers, Make Science the Ultimate Adventure” summed it up beautifully. Brian, by the way, is the author of two excellent books that have helped satisfy some of my continuous curiosity of the cosmos: The Elegant Universe”and The Fabric of the Cosmos.

I like Brian’s observational skills and writing, and his article included some great observations such as:

“To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity.”

and:

“Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short-lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Establish truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.”

Brian’s experiences resonate strongly with mine, and I think and hope that each of us can substitute our profession, domain, or interest for his use of “scientist” or “science” and feel the same way.

What I do know is that just like the answer to my childhood “how many steps” question, I will take as many steps forward in learning as my life allows and yet never arrive at a an endpoint of knowing all. For some perhaps, this is the ultimate frustration and makes learning futile. But for me and I would hope for most, the journey, the pursuit of knowledge, and understanding, is the destination. One of the greatest gifts in life is that I will always have an infinite supply of things to be curious about and to learn.

My fondest hope is that we will all be fortunate enough to marvel at the mystery of things around us, be forever curious, and be blessed with a journey in life that is one of unending learning.

-- Wayne

The Land That Never Was…Or Is It?

You know that fun question most of us have pondered at some point that asks “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?” Or the version my kids preferred when they were young, "If a bear poops in the woods and no one is there, does it still stink?” Well I recently had an experience that created a new question along these lines for me, which is “If you are anchored, but it is in the middle of the ocean and there is nothing but ocean in every direction for as far as your eye can see, are you there?” Here’s the background and then what it led me to think about it.

One day during my current journey sailing from Nuku’alofa, Tonga to Whangarei, New Zealand**, I decided to stop at North Minerva Reef to wait for a better weather window for the crossing down to the north end of New Zealand. I’ve got a very good set of electronic charts (with paper backups), and I was able to display the details of the reef, along with the single small entrance that leads to the inside, which is located on the reef’s northwest corner. Using my chart plotter, I laid out my course. It was a great sail all the way there with the wind coming from behind and my spinnaker fully luffed out in front, pulling us along at great speed.

As I got within visual sighting distance (usually about 15 nautical miles), I started checking out the location with my binoculars, and in spite of the perfect visibility, all I could see was more open ocean. I checked my charts, checked my waypoints and all seemed well, so I continued on to the way point I had created right outside the entrance to the reef. But even when I arrived at that exact spot, it was still all water. There was, however, a ring of surf extending all the way around this entrance point for several miles and I actually knew to expect all this from my reading about Minerva, but it was still a unique experience to motor through the narrow entrance to nowhere and know it was there strictly based on the chart information and the changing color of the sea.

Once inside the reef, I motored over to the far southeast corner of the reef, again based strictly on the chart information and the line of surf and changing sea color that I could see up ahead. The water inside was incredibly clear and I could clearly see the white coral sand bottom, even though it was as much as 100 feet below me. I eased up to the rising bottom as I approached the southeast corner and dropped my anchor in about thirty feet of literally crystal clear blue water and was soon peacefully floating in this strange “land that never was.”

I stayed for 3 magical days until I got a good weather window, and in all that time I never quite got over the surreal nature of this stop as I looked out in every direction and saw nothing but open ocean. And yet, here I was safely anchored inside an imaginary lagoon that was oh so real.

Really?

So what I started thinking about is how this experience matches up with a long range prediction of mine, something I have been talking about for the past few years. That prediction is about a future where there will be a decreasing ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is synthetic, man-made, or virtual.

One area where I see this happening is with actual physical objects, just like my reef experience. For example, we now have synthetic diamonds which are literally indistinguishable from the real thing, because technically speaking, they are molecularly identical. As I understand it, these diamonds are made in much the same way that Mother Nature uses to create the diamonds we dig out of the ground.

This ability to make such authentic diamonds poses an interesting question for diamond companies, jewelers, and even sweethearts, which is “Are they of equal value?” Diamonds are an interesting case because their value is almost entirely artificial or perceived. They are not really that rare, especially now that we can make as many as we like, and their price is far beyond the cost of mining, cutting, polishing, and processing them to their finished state.

Over the past few decades Japan has provided a great example of this entirely perceived value of diamonds. Prior to 1967, diamonds had very little value or presence in Japan, and they were not given, for example, as engagement and wedding rings or other jewelry. The DeBeers Company, the single largest diamond company in the world, noticed this and saw a great opportunity, and over the course of several years with one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever, they completely turned this around. Today in Japan, almost 80% of all brides are wearing diamond rings.  According to Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion and The Diamond Invention:

“The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan became the second largest market, after the United States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings. “

Clearly the value of diamonds is a perceived one and therefore the introduction of “perfect” synthetic diamonds poses a very significant threat to the diamond and jewelry industry. Diamonds may be forever, but is their value?

Looking a bit further ahead, let’s look at something like at one of my favorites—wine. Can it be much longer before you will be able to make any wine you want by simply recreating the exact same molecular compound that matches a 1947 Cheval Blanc? Again it is just chemistry and molecules, right? As this happens, the same questions about value and difference of real wine and synthetic wine will emerge. And there would be no reason to limit this ability to synthesize to wine (and diamonds), of course, and so I imagine that in the future we will have a tap in the kitchen from which we can draw any liquid we want at the push of a button.

Other coming examples in the world of physical objects are the advent of 3D printers,  which are following the usual technology curves of exponentially increasing capabilities and decreasing costs. These printers enable us to have actual working devices in our hands at the push of a button,  and yet these devices are “manufactured” on the fly and on demand.

The Product and the Story

Where I see all of this evolving is that we will have two or more different value chains which I call “the product” and “the story.” The product is just as you’d expect: the actual object of our desire, be it diamonds, wine, or other things. Their value to us is in how well they fit our needs and context. Are they just what we need, just when we need them, at just the right price, size, etc.? In the case of wine for example, is it a great pairing with the meal we about to have? In the case of the story value chain though, the value comes no so much from the actual object, but from the “story” that goes with it. The fact that a diamond came from the ground, from some mine, and was lovingly crafted and polished and mounted by artisans will matter and will be of value. Being able to tell the story of a wine—that it came from just this one vineyard, that these grapes were picked the same year your daughter was born, and has been carefully stored in a cellar for the past 30 years—will be where the value comes from.

On a more mundane and everyday level, consider the lowly folder on your computer desktop. These used to be real, at least in the computer sense, because these were directories and physical places on your hard drive where the individual files in the folder resided. While these still exist, folders are becoming increasingly virtual. For example, you probably have what appears to be a folder in your email program called “Unread mail”. Yet if you were to search your hard drive, you would not find any such folder or files, but rather just a flag or a tag on those emails that you have not yet read.

Virtual Personal Presence

And just to round out this meta-trend, we can see other areas where the same disruptive changes in the definition of “real” are occurring such as with personal presence. Currently we have some still rather crude examples, such as virtual spaces like Second Life. We are also seeing the increased use of and improvements in technologies that enable us to attend meetings virtually with much less sense of distance or difference between actually being in the same room and virtually being there. As this improvement continues along the exponential curve of change, it is inevitable that we will reach the same point where we won’t be able to tell or care who is “really” in the room.

Does it matter? Probably to some extent it always will for we are humans and as it was once put “We still like to smell each other.” However in terms of having effective conversations and meetings, isn’t it more important to have the right people at the right time than to be limited to those who can be in the same place at the same time?

Focus on Value

In addition to the increased possibilities and capabilities of this meta-trend, what I personally like the most is that it will require us to put more and more focus on value. What determines the value, what are the priorities, how can we measure and tell the difference? And I believe this trend will also place more value on the skills of finding such value and the value hunters and services who can deliver such value to us. As I’ve often remarked about wine, anyone can find a good bottle of wine to drink when they have a hundred dollars to spend, but the real find is a great bottle of wine you find for ten!

As always I’m most curious to hear from you about how well or not this matches with your experiences and observations. What examples are you seeing of this trend toward more virtual and synthetic products and services? When have you recently been unable to tell the difference between real and synthetic, and did it matter?

Happy value hunting!

Wayne

** For those interested, you can cut and paste these Lat/long coordinates into Google Earth to see where these various locations are:

• Nuku’alofa Harbor 21 02.704S 174 55.90W
• North Minerva Reef 23 38.634S 178 53.559W
• Whangarei, NZ 35 44S 174 20E

Being the Dumbest Guy in Every Group is Very Smart!

The other day while writing an update for my Learnativity blog (where I write about my experiences out sailing the planet), I wanted to reference a favorite quote I recalled from baseball giant Yogi Berra about watching, observing, and learning. Since, as is often the case, I don’t always have an Internet connection when I’m at sea (currently about 220 nautical miles SW of Tonga at 23 17.506S 178 28.424W), I had to rely on what masquerades as my memory.

But today I got around to reinstalling one of my best reference resources on the laptop I recently rebuilt—my offline version of Wikipedia, called WikiTaxi—and which promptly gave me the proper quote I was looking for the other day. 

I got the source right—it was from Yogi Berra—but my wording was off a bit. Yogi’s great quote (one of thousands) is:

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” 

Great food for thought, and I’m doing as much watching, observing, and learning as I can. It never seems to be enough, but I love being in that position. 

The Value of Being the Dumb Guy

I’ve also come to better understand why I keep putting myself into a situation where I’m the “dumbest guy” in every group— I learn so much more! 

Learning for me is a way of living and just “being”* and I prefer to always be at the extreme end of any spectrum I’m on. Or as my dear friend Eileen says, I’m an “extremophile” which Wikipedia defines as:

“An extremophile (from Latin extremus meaning ‘extreme’ and Greek philia meaning ‘love’) is an organism that thrives in and may even require physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to the majority of life on Earth.”

I therefore try to surround myself with others who are the experts in an area I am interested in or involved with, since I can be the proverbial sponge and soak up the knowledge, wisdom, observations, tips, and tricks which their experience has produced. 

Fortunately, I’ve even been able to take this way of being in the world, and turn this “bug” of mine into a “feature”, using it to earn my living. Most often, I give keynote speeches and other talks to groups of people and at conferences around the world. These are typically conferences or meetings organized by and for a community of practice or professional group, and therefore the attendees constitute some or most of the world’s experts in a particular domain, one which I usually know little to nothing about.

Somehow I’ve found a way of offering value by being the dumbest guy in the group. Not knowing their context, I am able to ask those often insightful “dumb questions” that you don’t ask when you are too close to a subject. I work at finding great ideas and peak performances. When I find them, they are usually very context-laden. I try removing all of the context and then check to see if there is a gold nugget there at the core or if it depends solely on the context. Therefore all my models, concepts and ideas are extremely generalized and context-free, and my role is to help other groups take such models and customize them to their applications by adding in their specific and unique context. But I digress a bit (as usual), so it’s time to get back to what I’ve learned about my learning.

I’ve been doing my best to put my theories into personal practice of late, including this one, the “dumb guy in the group" theory.  How? By jumping into the deep end of the ignorance pool and setting sail across the Pacific. Two years ago, sailing was an area that I knew little to nothing about, and yet here I am halfway around the planet by sail and I haven’t drowned, sunk, or hit much more than docks…yet. You may now also understand why my kids encouraged me to name my sailboat “Learnativity”. It sure fits and has lived up to that name many times! 

We are All Becoming “Tearners”

But I also I equally relish the opportunity to be a teacher on those occasions when I have some experience and learning to share. Whenever possible, I try to deposit some credits back into the world bank of knowledge and wisdom, one which I often withdraw from heavily and regularly. Which brings to mind yet another of my observations and ideas. We are evolving into a society of what I have referred to as “tearners”. This term is an amalgamation of the words “teachers” and “learners” and it describes the condition where we are all both of these at the same time.

Whitewater Skills in Living and Learning

This blending of teaching and learning makes sense to me and it brings to mind something else that I learned from Peter Vaill’s book Learning as a Way of Being*—that life is a permanent whitewater now. Yet many people continue to ask "When is the calm part in the river coming up?” or “When is it (life) going to get back to normal?” They tell others, or even themselves, that the current turbulence (whitewater) is just due to a bad day or week or month or quarter or year!

However, it never seems to get back to “normal”, does it?! When this doesn't happen, people set themselves up for a big fall. They feel that they have failed, or that things are out of control. Instead, if they come to understand that now we all live in a state of permanent whitewater, a.k.a exponential change, and that this is the "new version of normal", we can let go of the old “normal” and get on with developing good whitewater skills! 

This realization has led me to read about, and hang out with people who are experts at whitewater rafting, canoeing, and kayaking. Following my quest to always be the dumbest guy in every group as well as loving experiential learning, I signed up for some whitewater rafting and kayaking years ago. One of the great pearls of wisdom I picked up was that you always want to be going much slower or much faster than the water around you. By doing so, YOU are in control.  So you develop whitewater skills that enable you to always have this differential between you and the water and by doing so, you are able to navigate what would otherwise be potentially fatal or impassable waters, and you even have fun doing it, arriving at the end of a run tired, but with a full body grin.

OK, that will do for today. I’m just anxious to pass on some of these thoughts and observations in the hope that some of what I’ve learned by being the dumb guy can help you be much smarter! I’d love to hear from you if this matches with your experiences or if you just think I’m plain dumb!

Wayne

* Learning as a Way of Being by Peter Vaill is one of my favorite books and a highly recommended read!

Tsunami and Technology: Powers That Be at Sea

I had an amazing set of experiences recently when I found myself in the center of the tsunami that hit Pago Pago Harbor in American Samoa on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009. As you may know, I live and work from my sailboat Learnativity and am busy wandering and pondering the world from this vantage point—one nautical mile at a time.

So it was that I sailed into Pago Pago harbor on Friday, September 25th and was peacefully tied up to this beautiful island when Mother Nature decided to remind us just who was in charge by setting off a series of undersea earthquakes starting early Tuesday morning.

If you are interested in the details you can read more on my Learnativity blog, which I maintain on my travels. Given the gravity and depth of this recent experience I wrote up a set of three stories about my “Tsunami Tango”: Part I, Part II and Part III.

The first tsunami effect was the draining of most of the water from Pago Pago harbor. As a result, within seconds I found myself hanging on for dear life to the rigging up on the deck of Learnativity as she went from floating peacefully to lying hard over on her side on the bottom of the harbor.

Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction, right?  Sure enough, the now empty harbor began to refill immediately with those millions of gallons of water flooding back in and lifting Learnativity and I up, up, up until we were about 15 feet higher than high tide levels. Knowing what was coming next, I cut my dock lines, fired up the engine, and rammed the throttle full forward, hoping I had enough horsepower to pull away from the dock before we were sucked back and under it.

Given that I’m here to write this, we obviously succeeded, and I was able to motor out into the middle of the harbor while the pattern of flooding and emptying continued for several more cycles.

I learned a lot both during this initial experience and in the ensuing days as we all pitched in and recovered from the damage and toll of the aftermath. At the end of Tsunami Tango, Part III, I included a short list of lessons learned from my experience. One of the things that really struck me was how powerful today's communications technology is, as well as some of the unexpected benefits, connections, and network effect that they produce.

And so begins the point of this posting—my use of the communications technology aboard Learnativity.

Once I was able to devote my attention to something other than escape and survival, I realized that data from all the seismic and tsunami instruments would soon be circulating the news networks and that the friends and family of people who were here would be worried and wanting to know if they were all right, as well as more details of what was going on.

American Samoa is an interesting anomaly. It is officially a part of the United States and the only U.S. soil south of the equator, but it is also very small. I didn’t think there would be much news reporting going out from the island, and probably whatever they did have was damaged or washed away in the past few minutes by the tsunami.

Fortunately I carry a satellite phone with me and this provides me with true anytime/anywhere communications in the form of voice calls and SMS text messages, plus it can act as a data modem for email. However, my hands were rather busy keeping the boat afloat and out of the way of all the other unmanned boats and debris trying their best to hit and sink Learnativity, so keying in a text message on a satphone, a long, slow process, was out. Forget email too with the required laptop and typing.

But I could talk without my hands (difficult for me at times, but possible) and I did have my key contacts stored in the speed dial memory of the phone, so I punched that key. It seemed like an eternity before for all the various connections were made—the signal traveling out of my phone, up to the nearest satellite, across the sat network in the sky (Iridium), down to land, across a lot of miles, out to a cellular network, and finally into my trusted friend John’s cell phone—and I was fortunate enough that even with the time difference between us, John was awake and answered my call on his cell phone. John, who was in Florida, had not yet heard any news reports about the tsunami and I was able to give him a synopsis of both my situation and that of the island and the harbor.

John is my primary contact while I’m out at sea. He has direct access to all my various online accounts and passwords, so we agreed that he would immediately do two things: log in as me on Twitter and start forwarding the text messages I would send out as Tweets, and he would also send a short summary email to the list of friends and family to whom I normally send my twice daily email updates.

Relieved that my friends and family would know that I was alive and well, and that others would soon have some information from a firsthand observer about what was happening here in Pago Pago, I was able to start sending short SMS text messages whenever I could divert my attention from the immediate needs of others around me. John then rebroadcast all of these via my Twitter account and email list.

What I hadn’t quite expected was how quickly the network effect would kick in. The following example is an email that John sent out in response to queries he started getting within minutes after he posted my first texts. Note the timestamp and in John’s time zone the first tsunami wave struck Pago Pago at about 4:25 p.m. (BTW, you can also use these links to see the Tweets yourself):

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 4:34 PM, <John> wrote:
I am relaying all of my messages with Wayne onto Twitter ... www.twitter.com/wwwayne ... this will show you all traffic, as I get a msg from him, I update.
Sorry... best way to get all Twitter traffic on Wayne, including link to his interview on CBS news is http://twitter.com/#search?q=wwwayne ... he's sending update on this.
When I speak with him, I will send and email to the group.
You can keep visiting the site and it will have the latest messages he sends, or that any writes in reference to him.
-john

I also spoke with John several times over the next few hours to provide him with more details and keep him fully apprised of the situation.

What started to happen next was that news networks, reporters, bloggers, and others started to find my feeds as they were searching for information and were contacting John and me. Within less than an hour after this all started, I was receiving calls, texts, and emails and was able to help these sources get the word out to the rest of the world. Amazing!

Of course the problem with traditional news media such as TV, radio and print is that they are on a schedule and need put all this input together, edit it, and then wait for the next available time slot. In the much more immediate interim though, these new means of communication and “reporting” are happening in real time.

Brent Schlenker was similarly struck by this same situation and effects and wrote a very good posting in his Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development blog entitled “Tsunami confirms strength and power of digital connections”. Brent’s account will give you a vivid sense of what it was like for him to be one of the many who were receiving these feeds and following the action.

It was several hours before I was able to get Learnativity back to what remained of the shore and the dock, where I would try my best to search for those missing and help others out and begin the long slow process of recovery, cleanup, and restoration.  Shore side was a disaster—resembling a war zone more than a tropical town, with whole buildings washed away, entire car dealership lots emptied, gas stations wiped out and spewing gas everywhere, boats up in trees, cars lodged in building windows, fish flopping on the main road, and debris everywhere. 

Not knowing how badly the other parts of the island were hit, I finally had a moment to check for working Wi-Fi connections, and to my delight and amazement I found one and was able to get on the Internet to receive and send emails from some of my other accounts.  Here is one of the first emails I sent out:

On Sep 29, 2009, at 3:51 PM, "Wayne Hodgins" <whodgins@ocens.net> wrote:
Just a quick update from me to let you know that LTY, Ruby and I survived the volcano/earthquake/tsunami and are now docked again near where we started this morning.

Unbelievable adventure and learning experience!  I just got this web connection so wanted to get this out to anyone who was missed in the ones that John SO kindly sent out to you when I was able to reach him via sat phone.  We are getting warnings of another potential Tsunami in about 90 minutes so I'm not straying too far from the boat, but trying to help out with others and the search for one of our fellow sailors who was washed off the dock and is still missing. Chaos and a mess ashore as you can imagine but most of us are all here and accounted for.
Ruby is back onboard now.  When the harbor first emptied and LTY was laying on the bottom hard over on her side, she was sliding off the deck so I jumped, grabbed her by her always on harness just as she went over the side and threw her ashore to the family of the boat beside me who decided to stay ashore for the ordeal.  They are an Australian couple with a 12 year old boy and a Canadian man crewing with them.  At one point when the water was coming back in, they were all clinging to the light pole on the dock as the water came up more than 10' over the top of the dock which is usually about 10' above water level.  Quite the sight and all I could do was watch as I had LTY revved to the max trying desperately to get away from the suction of the eddies all around me and get clear of the concrete dock and all the other ships, containers and other debris roaring toward me.  So all I could do was watch as they clung for dear life to the light pole, Ruby strung around the Gary's neck as he held onto his wife Lisa and son Jake.  They ended up losing their boat as it floated way, crashed into several others and vice versa and ended up aground at the far West end of the harbor.  I'm moving them onboard LTY now.  We'll inspect their boat more when it is safe and see if it is a total loss or not.

All I have time for now.  Just wanted to let you know LTY, Ruby and I are fine, prepping for what might be next and trying to help those less fortunate.

Wayne

In the hours and days that followed, I was interviewed by countless news sources from around the world who used the information on their radio, television, and print media. I was pleased that I was able to help provide them with some firsthand information. However, I thought that the real champions of the day were the community of individuals who created a much more immediate, intimate, and informal network and provided the most significant and timely benefits. I learned firsthand just how powerful the combined forces of people and technology can be.

When the world we live in is very much one of exponential change, it is easy to take things for granted, assume everyone has the same access to technology, and to miss the growing examples of the network effect which as my recent example shows, the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts. I hope we can all remain suitably amazed, humbled, and impressed by both the power of natural forces and those we create. Combined, they truly are AWEmazing.

-- Wayne

PS.  I remained in Pago Pago for another week helping those less fortunate than I to recover and repair their boats, business, and hearts. The toll was very high, with over forty people losing their lives including children and a fellow cruiser. There was a great loss of boats, homes, and dreams. Once the majority of the work was done, I needed to start heading south to New Zealand, so I could be out of the hurricane/cyclone belt. So I sailed down to Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, which is located at the southern end of this chain of islands. Currently I’m under sail and about 160 nautical miles SW of Nuku’alofa Tonga (cut and paste this lat/long into Google Earth to see for yourself 22 23.238S 177 15.153W) and able to post this article via my same satphone using it this time as a data modem. Still amazing to me.