Off Course-On Target

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

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* 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

The Future is about Winning!

Recently, I participated in a meeting with colleagues at Autodesk Inc. on the Future of Events (FOE), where we tackled how to make events, such as conferences, Autodesk University, user groups such as AUGI, communities, etc., more green and sustainable.

Autodesk Commitment to the Environment

While this post is not directly about the topic of sustainability and the environment, I’m delighted with the seriousness and depth with which we are treating these issues at Autodesk. Corporately, we have a strong Environmental Commitment and Environmental Policy. But more important to me is how this initiative is being distributed throughout the entire company. We are being encouraged to make it our responsibility both as employees and citizens.

This recent FOE meeting focused on finding ways to realize these commitments, policies, and goals through Autodesk events. The meeting was but one example of how we are committed to improving the environmental performance of both our own business operations and educating ourselves and partners to do the same.  In addition, we are committed to helping our customers improve the environmental performance of their designs through the software and technology we develop. I quite like that this has a win-win quality to it. These priorities and commitments are equally as important to the long-term success of making the world a better and healthier place as they are to our success as a company.

Winning vs. Losing

One thing that prompted me to write this posting were comments in the FOE meeting about how much some of us feel we have lost when it comes to event-based experiences. For example, people reminisced about how great going to a movie theater used to be—with all the smells, sounds and other very visceral characteristics. One participant added how it was also a family outing, and even though one memory included getting gum stuck in her hair, it was still remembered as a totally wonderful experience.

Many in the room lamented what they saw as the decline and loss of the "good old" movie-going experience. They felt that today more people seem to sit alone in front of their TV or computer screens to watch movies, films and video. I think this view is just the glass half full vs glass half empty way of looking at things.  I don't doubt that there are statistics to support that more  individual viewing is going on and that movie theatre attendance is down.  But let's be sure to look at the whole picture here (sorry, I couldn't resist). 

Best I can tell, the total picture shows that we have more people watching (and making) more movies, pictures, and films than ever before in history.  Being a glass-half-full type of person, I do not view the change of movie-watching habits as a loss (we can still have large group movie-going experiences for the most part), but as a great opportunity to have more choices and results from experiences with film, movies, and video (to pick but a few examples). What's more, the results of this increase in movie and video production and consumption is quite profound and powerful as a timely example demonstrated very well. 

Being a big believer in synchronicity, I was not surprised that on the same day as the FOE meeting, the New York Times printed “Bringing the World Together via Film” , an article about Pangea Day,  an event which "endeavors to bring the world together and promote understanding and tolerance through film." According to the article, the power of film is substantially increased when we extend this from the domain of experts only and include “the rest of us” who might be so inclined to create some original film and video. Far from losing the “good old” movie theatre experience,  we are gaining more experiences and more options to augment and increase the effect of film and video.  Sounds more like winning than losing to me, and to badly paraphrase the Bill Withers song "Use Me": If it feels this good to lose, then keep on losing me until you lose me up!

Learning from Past Patterns?

Why is it that whenever something new and innovative comes along, people perceive that it means the elimination of whatever went before? Not only are in-person events not going away, we are increasingly adding new types of experiences (see my previous posting Fast, Fresh, and Furious: “Pecha Kucha”...the New Karaoke? for one such example). We're human and as someone so accurately observed "we still like to smell each other" (by the way, if anyone knows the attribution for this please let me know).

I therefore want to encourage all of us to look at things like events very differently and set different expectations. Most of our old and familiar ways and experiences such as theater-based film, events, conferences, meetings, etc. are NOT going to be eliminated by the new any more than radio was eliminated by TV (see my posting Books—the NEW old medium for similar reactions about new technologies).

Rather, we have more opportunities to augment these historical models with new ones.  Look at the profound power of TED prize-winner Jehame Noujaim's simple wish to bring the world together via film.  One person, one wish can make all the difference.  What's yours?

So what new opportunities can you think of to pursue human expression, communication, dialogue, interaction, sharing, discovery and learning? Could there be any more worthwhile pursuit and benefit?  I think not.

More on Mashups

Last week I was honored to do the opening keynote for the symposium on Mashups put on by the New Media Consortium.  NMC, in collaboration with Educause, recently released the 2008 version of "The Horizon Report" which is "... a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe those emerging technologies that are likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations." 

There is a full download of the Creative Commons PDF version here, which I recommend reading.  The report covers key emerging technologies, critical challenges, significant trends, and what they refer to as "Meta Trends", which have emerged after 5 years of producing The Horizon Report.

The Symposium on Mashups was a fun experience in and of itself, since the event was conducted entirely online using a parallel combination of the virtual world of Second Life and a more "traditional" online environment using Adobe Breeze. Sessions, where conducted live, lasted generally about 45 minutes with about one-third to one-half of that time devoted to dialog with participants using said audio tools.  And to add some additional uniqueness, I delivered the keynote from my "floating office" (a.k.a. the good ship Learnativity) while anchored near La Paz in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico.  I connected up via a combination of a web connection via my laptop data card and a cell phone for the audio portion.

For the past few years, I've been emphasizing and championing the power and potential that a more holistic perspective of mashups can offer, and you can refer back to some of my previous posts, such as "Mishmash of Mashups", "Mashed Up Snowflakes" and "The Future is a Monstrous & Marvelous Mashup", to get more about my views on this topic.

For this most recent opportunity with the NMC audience, I had the benefit and challenge of an audience who were very well versed on the topic and practice of mashups, but were still focusing and limiting their use of mashups to that of technology and content.  My objective was to take advantage of their expertise and experiences with mashups, and help them see how mashups can best be understood and used as an almost universal conceptual model that can be applied to almost everything and everyone.

In the slides below, I suggested that a simple definition of mashups should be something like, "A mashup is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole."

| View | Upload your own

Therefore mashups are also another powerful implementation of the LEGO block model of modularity. In the Q&A session, I highlighted the importance of understanding that mashups require the use of modules rather than raw resources.  This concept focuses on the challenge of using components that are "just right" in size by ensuring that they are as small as possible, but not one bit smaller. I suggested that, in my experience, optimum size  is when two fundamental criteria are met:

1. Each component is large enough and complete enough to exist on its own.
2. By itself, each component is too small to be useful.

For example, each LEGO block is complete and exists independent of any other block, yet any one block is unlikely to be useful all by itself.  It is therefore important to note that mashups are not the same as creating something new "from scratch".  Buildings today are largely "mashups" because over 85% of the materials used to create a building are pre-built components, such as windows, door units, light fixtures, heating and ventilation components, cupboards, etc. These are then delivered whole to the building site.  Manufactured goods such as computers and cars are no longer created in factories that build them from raw materials. Instead they are assembled from pre-existing components, such as hard drives, keyboards, engines, wheel assemblies, etc., in flexible manufacturing plants. 

We are already seeing how large shrink-wrapped software applications are being replaced by unique collections (mashups) of small modules of code in the form of widgets, utilities or the combination of two pre-existing applications, such as Google Earth and your database of places visited, pictures taken, or customers served.

Mashups have huge economies of scale and speed of creation because they are are new assemblies created from pre-existing components or "blocks". And yet, each assembly will most likely be unique, because that specific collection of components has never been assembled that way before.  Therefore mashups offer the promise of enabling truly exponential scaling and mass customization or personalization, which is at the heart of my passion about a future based on the Snowflake Effect, where everyone of us can increasingly have just the right people and things at just the right time, in just the right context, etc.

Based on the questions in the discussion segment at the end of this session, as well as the follow-on comments I've received, I think that most of the audience seemed to really understand how mashups can be and are being applied to everything from software code to events and conferences, projects and even people.  By "people", I'm referring to such things as the finding just the right combination of people for a successful project team, or the mashup of your skills, knowledge, and abilities (also known as the description of your real job!).

Now that we have more and more examples of mashups around us, I'm hoping that many more people will see this as a conceptual model, rather than any one form of implementation.  As you consider this much broader view of mashups, what applications and uses can you see?  How are you perhaps already applying the concept of mashups to a more diverse range of problems and solutions?

Getting back to the NMC keynote, I had just enough time to close out the session by telling a short version of my story about "flapping", which cautions against the trap of trying to design innovative new solutions by copying old models.  I've received a tremendous follow-up response from many of the attendees, telling how powerful this perspective was for them and how much it helped them, both in the rest of the sessions at the NMC Mashup Symposium as well as back on the job.  Please see "Confusing Flapping with Flying"  for the full story. You too can see how much you are flapping versus how much you are flying.

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Getting it Right

On Oct. 16th, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote called "Getting it Right" to the Autodesk Bay Area Manufacturing User Group or BAMUG. I was matched with fellow Autodesker Jay Tedeschi, who followed me on the stage and did a great job of putting my big picture and long range views into very clear context for these manufacturing design professionals. You can read more from Jay on his blog "The Gear Box".

My reference to "right" was two-fold:

• First, it refers to mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect: getting just the right stuff, to just the right people, at just the right time, in just the right context, in just the right ..........
• Secondly, it refers to the shift of human skills and value to right brain dominant skills and abilities.

As the slides below show the main topics I covered, including:

• How to avoid the "Perfecting the Irrelevant" syndrome
• The Snowflake Effect
• Skills of the future moving to the right side of the brain
• Applying the Long Tail to design
• The future of design

| View | Upload your own

Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure to be with Dan Pink and will have more on our meeting in a future posting. Dan is the author of one of my top recommended books right now "A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future" and I've been using his observations frequently. 

In this presentation to the BAMUG, I noted the connections between Dan's thought on the future of right brain skills and how this ties directly to design. For example as Dan notes in A Whole New Mind:

“...businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today's overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent, physically beautiful and emotionally compelling." or as Dan also puts it, "the MFA is the new MBA“

MFA = Master of Fine Arts

MBA = Master of Business Administration

Given that the everyone in the audience at this BAMUG meeting were mechanical engineers (or other design professionals in the manufacturing industry), I pointed out how dramatic the effect of this shift will be on them individually and their professions. 

Their jobs and skill sets have traditionally been focused on very left brain activities, such as analysis, and these are the very things that are becoming increasingly automated by the software they are using. 

I was able to show how Computer Aided Design or CAD programs that this audience uses, such as Autodesk AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor, have been increasingly automating more and more of these left brain skills—reducing or eliminating the time the designer needs to spend looking after them. Therefore the role of the engineer or user of these programs is to look after increasingly more right-brain dominant activities, such as synthesis, seeing patterns, making bigger picture design choices, and problem solving. 

Quite contrary to some of the dark bleak visions of the future predicted by futurists and science fiction writers, in which humans would be relegated to menial tasks and the "machines" would be doing all the "thinking" and be very "intelligent", a very different and very bright future is emerging—one where there is more reliance and focus on the role of the human brain to deal with these very right-brain-oriented skills of recognizing patterns amidst the chaos, seeing the bigger picture, developing holistic solutions, etc.

Meanwhile, the computers and machines are looking after more of the left-brain skills of analysis, and sorting through immense numbers of possibilities. Both sides of the brain and both sides of the human/machine relationship are very necessary. From where I sit, we are seeing a steady migration and matching of which side does what. 

The only danger I can see, and it is a very real and growing one, is to miss this shift to the right and miss the chance to be both more human and more valuable than ever. 

I'll come back to this theme of the shift to the right in future postings. For now, check out some of Dan's points, take a step back, and assess how this trend is affecting your job, your industry and your brain. Just the act of doing so is a great way to exercise the right side of your brain—so limber up, you've got everything to gain.

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del.icio.us tags: Autodesk, Inventor, AutoCAD, mechanical, engineer, right brain, left brain, whole new mind, Dan Pink, exponential change, BAMUG, CAD

Technorati tags: Autodesk, Inventor, AutoCAD, mechanical, engineer, right brain, left brain, whole new mind, Dan Pink, exponential change, BAMUG, CAD

Frontiers in Service

Recently I was honored with an invitation from Jim Spohrer to attend and present at the Frontiers in Service Conference on Friday, Oct. 5th, 2007 in San Francisco. Jim is the Director of Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, and he has been a longtime colleague and inspiration. Our connection dates back to his days at Apple Computer in the late 80's when he was a DEST (Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, and Technologist) and program manager of learning technology projects in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Many thanks to Jim for this opportunity.

I met Jim back in the late 80's when he was leading the effort to create Apple's first online learning community and vision for anytime, anywhere e-learning and the Educational Object Exchange. Jim is also responsible for coming up with the whole idea behind WorldBoard.

The WorldBoard idea came to Jim one day in 1996 when he was out hiking and saw an interesting plant that he wanted to know more about. He started to imagine the benefits of combining a new viewing system built into his eye glasses with digital photography, GPS, and location information, and a way to leave information at that location for the next hiker who asked the same question he had asked (remember this was 1996!).  Eventually, he came to call this notion WorldBoard and there is now a whole group called the WorldBoard Forum working on this and related challenges. The site is very "click worthy"!

Back in 2000 when I was creating  "Into the Future: A vision paper" for the American Society of Technical Development ASTD and the US National Governor's Association (NGA), I used Jim's idea of the WorldBoard as an example of "augmented reality", whereas all that talk at the time was about virtual reality. Check out my paper for more details if you're interested. I can't believe it was "only" seven years ago!  

The Frontiers in Service Conference, which I mentioned at the start of this post, was founded in 1992 and is considered by many to be:

"'...the world's leading annual conference on service research. The conference has a very global nature, and generally draws attendees from 25 countries or more from around the world. It is sponsored annually by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland.'

The Center for Excellence in Service (CES) is a nonprofit organization composed of individuals dedicated to service strategy and research. CES combines its unique perspective of customer point-of-view and an exploration of a variety of services (with a focus on information technology) in order to provide business leaders and academics with the latest knowledge in service research.  CES also implements practical business objectives into its academic research, and this dynamic creates a partnership between the business world and academia."

I was particularly attracted to the dual attributes of this event and organization: they represent an international R&D community and one focused on the future of services. Services is a big focus area of interest for me. I see a future where our current distinction between services and products will be blurred to the point of requiring a whole new vocabulary to describe the emerging new world where products are becoming more service-like and services are becoming more product-like. 

This same view is also discussed in some of my prior postings, such as New Perspectives: Third Wave, where I point out author Alvin Toffler's predictions from 40 years ago where he envisioned that we would see a  blurring of the distinction between a consumer or a producer and his coining of the word "pro-sumer" to describe this.

Similarly, I believe we are seeing more evidence of a parallel pattern of convergence between products and services. Furthermore, I expect we will see this materialize on a mass scale in MUCH less than the almost 40 years it took for the "pro-sumer" society to emerge. 

At the Frontiers in Service conference, I had the honor of being on stage with Dr. Michel Wedel (University of Maryland) and Dr. Sajeev Varki (University of South Florida, USA), two eminent experts in the areas of recommender systems.

In our session “Rating Recommendations: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”, examples from the world of music predominated much of the discussion, since they provide so many tangible examples of what is already possible for mass personalization through feedback loops, metadata, and recommender systems, which address the tricky challenge of personalizing our listening experiences. Consider for a moment just how difficult and "fuzzy" this problem is to get some assistance with choosing "just the right" song at just the right time for just you and just your context at any given moment.

Given my affinity for mass personalization and what my co-conspirator Erik Duval and I refer to as the Snowflake Effect, you can imagine why I was delighted to be there.

The name Snowflake Effect refers to the fact that you are like a snowflake; there is no one else quite like you, and of course that also makes you just like every other snowflake!  But moreover so too is every situation, every project unique, so we're aiming for enabling each of us to have "just the right" people, content and "stuff" at just the right time in just the right context on just the right medium, etc,

In my presentation to this group (see slides below), I posed the question that if this observation of uniqueness has arguably always been the case and is SO obvious, then why do we live in a world that assumes the opposite?  If we look around us, almost very product and service has been designed for some relatively large number of people, a "target audience, customer or demographic" and a whole set of assumptions about how everyone in this group is the same! But the times they are a changing!

| View | Upload your own

I went on to suggest that it is now possible to have such mass personalization, that there are more and more examples showing up every day, and therefore there are more and more people who know this is possible and are demanding it. Such "market demand" is usually met. 

My additional point about what's new was the degree to which we are seeing what I call "MC3", the combined multiplier effect of:

Mass Customization x Mass Contribution x Mass Conversation = Mass Personalization

The R&D work , which Dr. Wedel and so many of the international researchers in the room are doing in this area, promises to accelerate this trend much further, much faster. 

I always relish any chance to get in front of people doing the really hard work of research and development, because it gives me the opportunity to suggest some new areas of research that some of them might pick up on. Such opportunities have just been too good to turn down and have proven extremely effective in the past. Perhaps being a bit overzealous, I couldn't resist providing this latest opportunity to be in front of such a prestigious and international group of R&D experts, so I put up the following list of key challenges I see facing both the service industry (the focus of this group) and mass personalization:

• Scalability:
  • Global personalization at a planetary scale
    • e.g. 6.6 billion people on the planet growing exponentially
  • Uniqueness is unique and infinitely so
    • n degrees of personalization per every person, place and thing
    • n radio “stations” per person
    • n-number play lists
• Sustainability:
  • Mass contribution models
• Transferability:
  • Portable Feedback and Attention data
  • Re-purposing from strange sources
  • Not “just” for content
    • Think about competencies; for example, “just the right” people
• Transparency:
  • Dynamic pattern recognition and speculative computing
  • Minimizing the direct explicit input required from individuals
• Metadata Matters:
  • Automated metadata generation
  • Attention metadata
  • Context acquisition
  • Inferred metadata and implicit metadata acquisition
    • e.g. the “missingness” that Dr. Wedel noted)
  • Mood metadata
  • Subjective vs. objective metadata
    • Genome projects (e.g. Pandora Music Genome Project

There's too much to cover in more detail in this posting (lucky you!), but I will use some of these items as fodder for future postings.

My thanks to Jim Spohrer, Ronald Rust, and the Center for Excellence in Service organization for this opportunity to learn about the many exciting R&D efforts underway and the chance to suggest some of the future work they might take on. Based on what I saw and heard at the conference, I'm more optimistic than ever that the dream of having the Snowflake Effect lead to mass personalization on a planetary scale is well on its way to becoming a reality!

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del.icio.us tags: Frontiers in Service, service, Jim Spohrer, Center of Excellence, Toffler, prosumer, pro-sumers, Future Shock, Third Wave, personalization, Snowflake Effect, Erik Duval, metadata

Technorati tags: Frontiers in Service, service, Jim Spohrer, Center of Excellence, Toffler, prosumer, pro-sumers, Future Shock, Third Wave, personalization, Snowflake Effect, Erik Duval, metadata

Cooking up a Snowstorm!

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As someone who just loves food, eating, and cooking, I've often been struck by the parallels between eating and learning. Feeding the mind and feeding the body have lots in common. So I have used their similarities as the basis for many of the stories I tell onstage, because they help illustrate the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization. 

While we've obviously had to pay attention to food as one of the basics of existence (food, clothing, shelter), interest in food seems to be escalating to whole new levels these days. I'm delighted, for example, at the veritable explosion of television and web-based shows that cover everything about food:

• The production of food sources, farming, fishing, gardening 
• Cooking, baking, and meal preparation 
• Finding great places to eat, delicious new recipes, new culinary talents, etc. 

Heck, now there are entire television networks dedicated to food and drawing huge audiences of all ages! And just take a look at the magazine rack when you next visit a bookstore to see how many magazines are dedicated to these topics.

So I thought you'd be interested in some new sites about food that have popped up recently. Webware.com has a number of recent posts and commentary about food-related sites. Here are three that I  think exemplify these food trends and what else we can learn from them.

IM cooked

This site is an interesting example of the trend away from "mega sites" to more specialized ones. More of the Snowflake Effect from my point of view. IM Cooked provides a place for people to share their knowledge, interests, and passions for cooking via video.

To get a feel for IM Cooked, you might want to take a few minutes to watch one of its currently top-rated videos "Man Makes Chicken with Pears" presented by the always quirky and fun Christopher Walken.

There are lots of videos available about cooking on the Internet, and even YouTube is an option for posting food-related videos, but the challenge with any general purpose site is how to find both content and the people who share your specific interests.

Another challenge is how to make these information sources more pro-active, so that you are constantly assisted in your quest to discover new ideas, ingredients, and recipes, and the people who share your passions. Or as I often like say, "Doing more finding than searching." 

But having too many niche sites also gives us a new problem in this age of abundance—the challenges that come from so much choice. I think the solution is neither a matter of going for even larger mega sites nor moving towards more niche sites. Rather, we need to move toward creating better social and automated recommender systems and having more pattern recognition that helps us mine the exponentially exploding volume of "stuff" out there, so we can zero in on just the right individual people, files, content ,and ideas that match our unique situation at any moment in time.

BakeSpace 

This site puts the focus on the food rather than the technology, something that is "so yesterday" as my kids used to say to me, but it is also so relevant that BakeSpace doesn't use Ajax or other latest "gee whiz" technology. Instead, this site helps to connect people who share a common set of interests and enables them to pursue their passions better alone and with others. As Caroline McCarthy put it nicely in her review on Webware "after all, if it doesn't taste good, it doesn't matter how well it's arranged on the plate."

I also think the tag line for the BakeSpace site is very apropos: "Come for the food. Stay for the conversation."  I'd be so much happier if we were putting more focus on conversations than community!

GroupRecipes

Over ten years ago, my daughter Lia, who was 13 at the time, hit upon a great technique to figure out what to cook up for dinner or some other meal. She would check out the contents we had on hand in the kitchen, decide what she felt like eating at the time, and then she would fire up a browser and enter these ingredients into a search engine. Her request would return a list of recipes that contained some or all of these ingredients. Inevitably, it helped her to discover a great recipe, which she'd print out, and then she would head back to the kitchen to whip it up. Worked great and it is something she still does now that she is living on her own.

GroupRecipes takes this same basic idea, but makes it even more personalized. For example, they have a StumbleUpon-like feature that is one of my favorites (you have tried StumbleUpon, right?!).  StumbleUpon increases what I call the "serendipity factor". You enter a food you'd like to "stumble upon" and then GroupRecipes uses these to find matches and provide ratings of probability that you will like a given recipe. Think of it as the "page rank" (what makes Google searches work so well) for food.

By helping you discover not only other recipes, but other people who are more like you in this very specific context, GroupRecipes adds the social aspect and improved discovery of those things you like. 

In this age of abundance, the problem is so much great food, so little time!  So this ability to have some "decision support" is a huge help.

So as you can see there really are tremendous parallels between feeding our minds and our bodies. It's also worth noting that the upcoming Learning 2007 will feature chef Bobby Flay as one of the keynoters. Elliott Masie plans to interview Bobby on this same topic of the parallels between learning and cooking, and how both can benefit. I'll be there and will have more to report back to you at the end of October.

Hope this post helps to feed both your mind and your body. As you do so,  I hope you will feed the rest of us with your comments and suggestions. (sorry, couldn't resist!)

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Mishmash of Mashups

In the past two years or so, one of my most popular topics and the one that I've been asked to spend most of my time on is mashups. Notably, this topic seems to be popular across a widely diverse range of my audiences and across many countries and cultures.   

My recent audiences have spanned four continents, and included such diverse group as IT professionals and CIO’s; commercial sales executives; military organizations; technology-enabled learning and e-Learning professionals; and higher education professors, deans and ministers. Given all the interest, I thought a short summary of the topic, along with some recent examples, was due. Hence... today’s post. 

If mashups (or my views about them) are relatively new to you, you can find more details by searching for “mashup” on the Off Course – On Target site. Some of my previous postings on mashups include: 

• The future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup! 
• Mashed Up Snowflakes?

The main point I try to make (and why it seems so relevant to so many) is that mashups should be thought of as a conceptual model rather than a technology. While the term "mashup" is somewhat new, the concept is neither new nor complex. In simple terms:

A mashup is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole. 

Even more simply (and a surprisingly robust metaphor for it) is that mashups are like Lego blocks; you have a lot of small components which can form almost infinite numbers of assemblies to create just about anything you can imagine.   

With mashups, the ‘bits and pieces’ or individual Lego blocks are pre-existing things that can come from any source and often from multiple sources. Furthermore, these “bits and pieces” can truly be just about anything and everything, from content to code to hardware to events to teams.

Two things that are accelerating the rise of mashups are what I call MC² (with apologies to Einstein and others):

MC² = Mass Contribution multiplied by Mass Customization

Mass contribution and mass customization are part of the deeply pervasive metapattern of mass personalization, which Erik Duval and I refer to as "The Snowflake Effect." All of us are becoming increasingly enabled by mashup technology and the plentiful availability of mashable objects.

We are becoming mashup creators ourselves. Fewer programming skills are required, and many essentially require none, so we can focus on finding and assembling the specific components we want to put together into a unique assembly. You can get a sense of the depth and diversity of mashups by spending a few minutes looking at some of the examples listed by the likes of WebMashup.com.

Perhaps because my audiences who work in information technology (IT), as well those who are CIO’s, have shown such an interest in mashups, I took note of today’s posting (July 23^rd, 2007) "A bumper crop of new mashup platforms" by Dion Hinchliffe and his previous posting from May, Mashups: The next major new software development model?. Dion’s blog, Enterprise 2.0, focuses on “leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web”. He too makes note of this shift in focus from the current practice of creating  “raw components” to creating assemblies instead.  In the larger context, I’ve noted that this is also bringing with it a rethinking about the scope of design and how we are all becoming “designers”.  As we create these assemblies of solutions to match our  unique requirements, context, and situations. we are becoming more involved in design and design related tasks.   

Dion provided this diagram which I thought was a good summary of the situation:

   

He also provided a reference to a recent McKinsey "Web 2.0 in business" survey which noted that 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups. He went on to note that: 

“...there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space.”  

In other recent news, I saw a good example of the Snowflake Effect and mashups on TV, or perhaps better put, in video content. This example is called Chime.tv and you will find a good summary and even better video coverage on David’s posting "Chime.TV’s subject-based channels cut across Internet video sources with one UI".

Even more apropos to today’s topic of mashups, Chime.TV is but one of the many examples coming out of the recently completed Mashup Camp run by David Berlind and others from Ziff Davis. David posted some of his observations on mashup trends yesterday in his posting Mashup culture shatters crusty, stodgy old approach to business app dev.   

Returning now to this idea about mashups as a conceptual model, I want to recommend that you look at these examples and consider how mashups fit into your world and work. Consider that mashups also apply to people!  Think for example about putting together a great project team. Ideally you want to be able to find just the right collection and combination of individuals who possess just the right set of skills, knowledge, experience, and attitudes (the Lego blocks) to form a new “assembly” that best matches the needs of the project and the context of the specific situation. Or consider how valuable it will be to be able to find just the right individual(s) to meet and talk with at a conference, in an online chat, or on IM. 

Rather than leaving this to serendipity (even as powerful as I believe that to be), imagine a future where you and we collectively can start to increase the probability of finding “just the right” people to create the mashup of individuals you need. To some extent, this is already happening at some “unconference” events and more broadly with the newest “dating technology” whereby changing the context from romantic to professional or other purposes, the exact same technology can be extremely effective at helping you to find the right people to talk with, work with, and meet with. 

I’ll continue to keep an eye on mashups and talk more about some specific applications and diversity in future postings. In the meantime, send me some of the ways you are going to mashup your world. This may sound “off course” but it sure is “on target” to improving our overall learning and performance, don’t you think?

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Brazil or Bust! (Part 2 of 2)

In my previous post, I told you about my adventure getting to this year's eLearning Brasil 2007 conference in São Paulo. The theme of this year’s event was The Influence of Leadership and Technology on Organizational Learning and Performance.

The conference itself was (and always is) very interesting for me and for all the attendees, based on past and present conversations and comments I have received. Obviously the majority of the attendees are from Brazil, but a growing and significant percentage of attendees are from other South American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, as well as from Europe and North America. A full range of academia, especially universities and trade schools, commercial businesses, government personnel, and technology vendors are also well represented and are similarly diverse geographically.

Along with the eLearning conference, there is an awards ceremony for an annual competition t on technology that supports the visually impaired. The results are always amazing, and this year was no exception. So you can see why this is one of the only events that I regularly attend and why I get so much out of it.

As I mentioned earlier, Elliott Masie came to the conference via Internet-based video from his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, which worked extremely well. Elliott covered a range of key issues that he sees coming up over the next few years as well as some that are appearing now.

For example, he noted how people worldwide are feeling overwhelmed and distracted and the impact this is having on learning and performance. In this context, Elliott posed the question of whether good learning can take place at your desk and particularly, at work or on the job.

Next we discussed with the audience how there are similarities between cooking and eating, and learning and training, a comparison Elliott and I have found fascinating and valuable for several years. We reached a consensus that there are deep similarities between these two very human practices, so much can be learned from comparing them. The connection between learning and the world of food and eating appears to be so strong that Elliott is having master chef Bobby Flay join him at Learning 2007, where he will be cooking while Elliott is interviewing him about the design, innovation, and evolution of cooking, and how it relates to our world of learning. Best of all, we will get to sample some of what Bobby has cooked up. Now THAT is performance and learning at their best, don’t you think? ?

Next, we kept Elliott on line and on the screen and brought two other global leaders—Dr. Alistair Benson, Academic Director of Manchester Business School Worldwide, and Eric Shepherd, President, Question Mark Corporation—onto the stage for a Socratic Dialogue on “The Influence of Leadership and Technologies in Organizational Learning and Corporate Performance”. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered observations such as:

• Contrary to the rhetoric that large numbers of workers are retiring and so we should be concerned about the “brain drain” that this would produce, we are seeing the opposite happening in several ways. First, just because people are eligible to retire based on age and years of employment, doesn’t mean they will, and indeed many are choosing not to. While in many cases, this change in the age of the population may involve a change in the kind of work and conditions, such as shorter work days or weeks, more flexibility, different roles, or more of a facilitative and consultative role, the real change is that people are living longer and working longer…A LOT longer.

Secondly we noted that this change would produce a broader range of chronological age among individuals on a team and in an organization. In many places, for example, we are seeing people enter the workforce earlier, sometimes because they are sought out by employers and are convinced to leave their education and training programs earlier because they already have sufficient skills and the knowledge that is so badly needed. Combined with the people from other end of the age spectrum, we can expect teams whose membership spans teenagers to centenarians. A good discussion ensued on what this means for learning and for working.

• An audience member from the São Paulo area talked about the challenge his company is facing from the lack of people with engineering talent and what should be done about this. The ensuing discussion found that this phenomenon is broad-based in most countries in the Americas and Europe and quite the opposite in developing regions, such as India and Asia.

The discussion included the trend of “mass contribution” by increasing numbers of people. Knowledge and expertise is now being captured through e-mail and instant messaging to blogs and wikis. There is, however, a missed opportunity to “mine” the growing repositories of such communications for the nuggets of knowledge, patterns, and other value within.

After a short break, I had the audience to myself—a wonderful opportunity. Beforehand, I had them choose one of several themes that they’d like me to talk about and to my delight, they chose “The Snowflake Effect”. We took a fun hour or so going through what is currently my favorite topic: uniqueness and the Snowflake Effect. Here are the slides from my talk:

One of the things I value about the support I’m afforded from Autodesk is being able to spend time with bright. eclectic people in different locations on this planet every day.  This gives me the chance to test just how broad and applicable are the trends that I see. This diverse range of people from Brazil and South America confirmed once again just how powerful these notions of mass personalization, mass contribution, and the Snowflake Effect really are and how well these translate into their context. 

Given this tremendous validation and confirmation from so many locations and so many contexts, my close colleague and friend Erik Duval and I are hard at work developing the Snowflake Effect into a full conceptual model and articulating this in much greater detail. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements when we will have a site dedicated to the Snowflake Effect where we will be asking for your input, reactions and critiques.

For now, I hope you find some good value from my most recent experience in the great metropolis of São Paulo. And my sincere thanks to Francisco and the super staff of MicroPower for the great job you do of making eLearning Brasil somehow better every year. It’s an honor and a privilege to be a part of the whole experience.

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Brazil or Bust! (Part 1 of 2)

Despite the travel gods’ best attempts to keep me from my goal, I finally made it to São Paulo, Brazil 52 hours after leaving San Francisco.

It all started with an emergency landing in Denver due to an electrical fire, which caused me to miss my connecting flight. I was rerouted through Newark, then shuttled to JFK, where the next leg of my journey was delayed because of fog in São Paulo.  Two flights later I finally arrived at my destination.

I had been asked back to São Paulo for the third time to emcee and facilitate the eLearning Brasil 2007 conference at the beautiful São Paulo World Trade Center (see photo at right).

And in spite of the unique challenges I faced getting there this year, once again I found it well worth all that I went through to be part of this annual event. In fact, the whole experience fit right into the theme of this year’s event, The Influence of Leadership and Technology on Organizational Learning and Performance.

Here are some extracts of how my adventure played out and how it fit into this year’s theme on learning and performance:

• While I was stuck in the JFK airport in New York, I used phone and instant messaging to contact Francisco Soetl, MicroPower CEO and the wonderful mastermind behind the “eLearning Brasil” events, to update him on my changing itinerary.

• Over lunch at a JFK restaurant, I made an Internet connection on my laptop with my Verizon wireless data card and downloaded a very effective new collaboration environment called MicroPower Presence that Francisco and his talented team have developed. We used this to provide VOIP (voice) and share some slides for a quick meeting with his team in Sao Paulo to set up a series of different plans, depending on whether I got there on time, late, or not at all.


• I also connected with Elliott Masie, who was going to be doing a keynote at this conference via video from his home base in Saratoga Springs, New York, and did some planning with him. Elliott, via his shiny new iPhone no less, was on his way to the opera at the time, but we quickly set up plans for my interview with him, whether it would be from the stage in Sao Paulo or by driving from JFK up to the Masie Center in Saratoga Springs where both of us could be beamed into Sao Paulo via video and the net.


• Boarding the plane (finally!), I sent Francisco and Elliott a text message update that I was on my way and when I was scheduled to arrive in São Paulo. (6:50 am).


• Finally on the ground in São Paulo at 6:50am local, but since no phones were allowed during the 90 minutes in the immigration and customs lines, I had a tense bit of non-communication time. By the time I was in the taxi the conference had begun, so I switched to text messages and mobile blogging using my phone.


• If you’ve never been to São Paulo (and you really should go!) then just try to imagine traffic in the world’s second (or fifth) largest city (depends how you count). Picture a city with about the same population as New York City (19+ million), but with only one fifth the land area, and about ten times more cars and trucks, and a thousand times more bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles. Got the picture?!


•   If you are imagining a lot of smog (among the world’s worst) and lots of helicopters (the most per capita in the world) and lots of high rises (7th in the world), you’ve got it about right. Oh, and did I mention this was all during morning rush hour?!!


• Fortunately a good colleague, Eric Shepherd, was also attending this conference and was in the audience. Eric is the CEO of QuestionMark Corporation, one of the world’s leading developers and suppliers of assessment systems and services for education and training related assessments. He was going to be on the Socratic Panel I would be facilitating in a few hours. Eric and I were able to do some mobile blogging while I was in the taxi, which enabled him to send me continuous updates on what was being said on the stage, what were the audience reactions, etc., and provide me with the much needed context once I was on stage (let’s hope) and facilitating conversations with the other keynoters and panelists. In return, I was able to keep the organizers updated via Eric, on my whereabouts and ETA at the convention center.


• When it became doubtful that I was going to make it to the conference in time Eric kindly offered to take the stage on my behalf and start the interview with Elliott when he finished his keynote address. Finally, in what I think is the closest I’ve ever come in almost 20 years to being late for a speaking engagement, I dashed from the taxi as it pulled into the Sao Paulo World Trade Center, caught the elevator to the convention center, and ran onto the stage 3 minutes late and in time to thank Eric as he handed me the microphone and I started the interview with Elliott.

That counts for close right? But it also counts for just doing what it takes to make things work. I thought this was a good example of how the combination of great people with the right “can do” type of attitude, and the clever use of whatever tools and technology we have around us, can overcome unexpected situations and still get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction.

I'll talk more about the conference itself in my next posting.

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