Off Course-On Target

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" <[email protected]> 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.