Off Course-On Target

My Dad

A doubly unique post from me today; it's short and it's personal.

I just wanted to say thanks to all of you who have been so patient and supportive as I spent the past 2 weeks up in Vancouver with my father, Bert Hodgins. I was able to be at his side for his last days and as he passed on gently last night. He was able to leave this world for the next just as he wished; quietly in his sleep.

     I’m beginning to accept,

     the idea of a world without Bert.

     But, it’s a world without my Dad

     that really makes my heart hurt.

Thanks again for your patience. It's been a learning experience and I'll be back to blogging more regularly again next week with some new perspectives.

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Is Sustainable Design in YOUR Near Future?

My previous posting, “Is Enlightened Self-Interest the Key to Sustainable Success?”, ended with a challenge for “product and packaging designers to create fabulous designs that appeal to us visually, emotionally, and ecologically.”  In other words, to adopt sustainable design as the norm.

First, let me disclose that I work for a great design company, Autodesk, Inc., and that I’ve had a lifelong fascination and inclination towards design. So, with that in mind, I’ll expand briefly on this newer form of design, something I plan to discuss over several postings on the future of design.

Sustainable design is powerful example of enlightened self-interest and it will play an increasing role in the future of design. One of the great things about design is that no matter who or where you are, if you look around you, everything that is not living matter had to be designed by someone. So, if everything has to be designed, why not design everything to be eco-friendly as well as effective?

Sustainable design produces no waste, uses renewable energy, supports biodiversity, has low energy requirements, etc. In the past, most people agreed that this approach was too expensive, too slow, not possible, and not demanded by the marketplace. However, in every case, these factors are being reversed or erased. We are now entering a time when what’s good for the environment can also be what’s good for the economy…and for us.

We can also have designs that delight us emotionally and aesthetically. In the past, many so-called “green” products, such as clothing, buildings, and vehicles, were very much a compromise. Those who chose to use them had to overcome their innate sense of what they really liked or wanted, in order to achieve a greater purpose. Now, we have the opportunity to have our proverbial “cake and eat it too” with products (and services) that we respond to emotionally as well as cognitively. It looks great AND it’s good for our planet and for us.

Sound impossible or too good to be true? No doubt some still believe this.  However I’ve always been a “glass half full” type of person and I note that throughout history, we’ve been wrong about things. It used to be a “fact” that human flight was impossible. So too was the notion that you could talk to and see anyone anywhere in the world. I’m sure you can add many other “impossibilities” to this list.

These "impossibilities” turned into realities because WE made it happen.  We came up with new discoveries, new approaches, and new solutions. Each of these are examples of new designs. Since everything around us, except for living things, has to be designed by us, WE can choose to design, buy, live in, and use products that are as good for the environment and the economy as they are for us. This is my definition of sustainable design.

Even if you still have your doubts and see the glass as “half empty”, hopefully you are intrigued enough by the concept of sustainable design to want to learn more.  Best of all, you don’t have to settle for just my version of this. I’m delighted to say that there are many people currently exploring sustainable design. For starters, you can:

• View a set of six 30-minute HD TV series on PBS (sponsored by my company Autodesk Inc.) called “design: e²” and narrated by Brad Pitt. This original HD multipart television series explores the economics of being environmentally conscious.
• Learn more about sustainable design on both the PBS site and the design: e² site. Both provide great examples and offer downloads or subscriptions to audio and video podcasts.
• Read the article  “Can sustainable design save money and the environment?” (PDF format) by Philip Bernstein.
• Check out the Autodesk web site's “Stories” section where you can read how designers are addressing some of the challenges I mentioned above.

After you read a few of these stories, and watch or listen to some of the video and audio podcasts, please send me your reactions and comments. 

Keep in mind, that as more choices become available to all of us, we all become “designers” in a sense. A future of increased choices requires that we also increase our “design skills” in order to make better individual choices about how we create our personal surroundings and how we choose to buy and use products and services.  More to follow on the future of design in future postings.

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Living in a World of Exponential Change

In human terms, our experience of change has been so gradual that we've had little awareness that the rate of change has been growing more rapid. In fact, the rate of change has been increasing exponentially and we're totally unprepared for it.

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DOWNLOAD Size: 7.9 MB Duration: 22:44 Transcript: 432 KB

In this podcast, Living in a World of Exponential Change, I show you how our inability to see today’s rapid change for what it is—exponential rather than linear—keeps us from adjusting to the challenges presented by technology and other factors. Understanding that difference now can help us develop new strategies, take control of our lives, and design a better future.

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Melting your way to creative thinking

In my last post “Building teams with tires?”, I introduced you to PIT Instruction & Training's award-winning program "Inside the Box” where two teams compete against each other to successfully change all four tires on a real NASCAR race car. The program teaches participants about critical elements such as feedback, process improvement, and breaking everything down to small steps—all  to improve the process and the team. How might you use this information to do some “outside the box” thinking to come up with similarly effective forms of learning and performance? 

In a former life I was an Industrial Technology instructor. One of my favorite areas to teach was metalworking, and specifically the foundry where you learn how to create hollow molds into which you pour molten cast iron, aluminum, bronze, and other metals to create any forms or shapes you want. Similar methods are also used to create jewelry using gold and silver or creating toys and kitchen goods with plastic.

What’s my point?  I learned that there seems to be a real difference between people who have this experience and those who don't—differences in how they THINK and their degrees of imagination and creativity. I don’t have any scientific proof but there seems to be something quite profound about realizing that something most people assume to be  “solid” and something you can only change or shape by cutting or gluing or welding, can actually be temporarily turned back to a liquid and then suddenly almost ANY shape or form becomes possible! This seems to have a deep effect on most people as far as their ability to be more creative in solving problems and in their ability to “design” simple and complex things.

Many seem to transfer this experience out of the physical realm and use it, often unknowingly, in a conceptual sense to help them create solutions to social issues, teams, and other applications. So just as the PIT group has come up with this very effective way of building more effective teams and learning six sigma concepts, I think it would be a great idea to offer similar short programs in foundry or jewelry-making as management and leadership or as creative thinking and problem-solving courses.

Think about it and see what you can come up with for other novel approaches. Send me your great examples of being “Off Course and On Target”. Post your ideas here in the comments field and let’s see what kinds of fun and effective learning approaches we can come up with. Or perhaps you know of other examples you can post as links or provide information about? 

Thanks for tuning in. More to follow.

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Giving Thanks for the Past and Giving Back for the Future

Over the years, I’ve received a surprising number of requests for my popular 2002 blog post that is no longer available online. Since it was about giving thanks and because the Thanksgiving holidays have just wrapped up in North America, I thought it would be fun to repost this old message. It still seems very relevant.

I also want to use this post as a jumping-off point. Several topics mentioned within it are worth exploring in depth in posts and podcasts that I’ll put together in the coming weeks. These include:

• Dealing with the wonderful but nonetheless challenging problem of more and more choice
• Living in a world of exponential change, such as increasing choice
• Equalizing the distribution of choice
• The economy of abundance and plentitude (as opposed to scarcity)

But for now, I hope you enjoy this earlier post and that you will use it to reflect upon your situation, and give thanks for the things we all have to be thankful for. Let's make this a source of new energy for improving our decision making and our abilities to deal with our exponentially increasing choices. And use it to work on equalizing the distribution of this wonderful problem of choice and abundance. I know I will.
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Friday, November 29, 2002

Giving Thanks for Living in the Land of Plentitude

If you are reading this, it is likely safe to assume that you too are blessed to find yourself living in a world of plentitude. I am noting this for two reasons. First, having finally made it back home for a few days, I am with my family in California where we are heading in to my only favorite holiday, American Thanksgiving(I'm Canadian and "up there" we celebrate it in October. It's an agricultural-based holiday, remember! Winter arrives much sooner in the northern climes) So one of my reasons is to simply take advantage of this special day to give thanks for all that I and so many of us truly have to be thankful for. As we are easily reminded if we look around us, we truly do live in a world of great plentitude and have SO much to be thankful for.

Secondly, I have been struck for several years by the degree to which living in plentitude in general, stands in such stark contrast to times not too long ago when scarcity was the norm and what made things valuable. The more scarce it was, the more valuable it was. Now to be clear, this value by scarcity certainly remains true: think of gold, diamonds and rare minerals, think of time! What could be more rare and thus more precious to us that the gift of time! Surely we have all come to realize that Human Attention is becoming the scarcest of all resources(to say nothing of my severe form of ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder, but that is a whole other story!)!

Yet many of us, (well I guess in light of the population of the planet of 6.27 billion and rising, it is really the chosen few), live in a wonderful world of plentitude where choice is almost all there is. We are coming to understand as someone once remarked, that choice can be its own prison. Now, lock me up in this one please(!) but to be sure, when put into this situation of great choice, the new problem becomes how to make fast, smart decisions. Tried to buy a new stereo system lately? A new car? A new computer? If so, you know this all too well. Tried to help someone else do this? You also know this situation as you face your job and try, on a daily basis, to choose the right things to spend your time on from the infinitely expanding list of very good choices. Do I send that e-mail out? To how many others? Is that meeting really the best use of my time right now?

Hence, you hear me talk so much about "decision support" as a key category needing to be addressed for learning. Isn't it wonderful WE say that there are all these growing number of choices for learning; from books, classrooms and tutors, to virtual classrooms, online learning, synchronous, asynchronous, chat, IM, and more arriving by the minute. However, spend a moment imagining what this looks like to the learner or their facilitators (a.k.a. teachers, instructors, managers). It's like going to a restaurant when you are really hungry and being given a menu that has 138 pages of choices!! Arrrrrrrrrrggggggggg They all sound great, but which one is best for me to choose right now??

To make matters worse, eating choices are much easier to make than learning choices. NOT because they are any easier or less complex, rather because the food service industry has been able to reach a state where the choices are well understood and differentiated. We know what to expect at a fast food outlet compared to a full service restaurant. We know the pros and cons of frozen foods, microwave, toaster ovens, instant meals and home cooked ones. We know cuisine categories like French, Italian, Vietnamese, Thai and Californian (well, OK that latter one is still a question mark). As a result, when presented with a need to eat, we quickly factor in all the variables from how much time we have, how hungry we are, what we "feel like" what we ate yesterday (no more turkey please!) etc., and we make a decision relatively quickly and relatively well.

Now think about the equivalent learning need and related decisions: how much time do I have, how long will it take, where will it take place? Paper or on screen? Text or video? Synchronous or non? At my desk, on the airplane, in the car, on the train? Just the facts, a full explanation, the concepts, etc. Not so clear nor so easy is it? Now, "do the math": every person needs to be able to do this (= 6.27 Billion), several times every day (n X 365), in changing conditions(add another multiplier) and pretty soon you have a REALLY big number with LOTS and LOTS of zeros behind it!!

Enough for today, let's go back to my initial purpose: to take the time to give thanks and be thankful that we should have such problems! Let's all tell someone how much we care for them, how much we appreciate them and what they do. Let's take this time to remind ourselves how truly fortunate and blessed we are in the grand scheme of things and how much we need to work on equalizing the distribution of such choices and opportunities to everyone everywhere. Then let's start next week with renewed vigor, conviction and passion to go after making it easier to make decisions, keeping it simple (and YES the important things really ARE all very simple!) and making it easier and easier for EVERYONE to make better, more informed and competent decisions on a daily basis!

You can start by adding YOUR comments, ideas, questions here (click the comment button below).

In future posts I will put some focus on these issues of "Decision Support", keeping it short and simple (KISS), dealing with choice and on making every learner a competent decision maker.

In the meantime, I sit here thankful for being THE most privileged individual on the planet. I have forums like this filled with peers and, I have a great family, I am surrounded by great teachers and learners, I live in a world that makes me more curious every day and one with great problems in life to pursue. Could one ask for anything more? I think not and I thank you all!

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Virtualization and UNLearning

One of our biggest challenges going forward is the need for all of us to “UNLearn” our lifelong habit of putting things in the right “categories” or places. We were often told while growing up, "A place for everything and everything in its place." We’ve consciously or unconsciously transferred this metaphor and model to our digital life in the form of files with well-thought-out names that are filed in well-named directories (folders) and subfolders. We have done this for everything from e-mails to documents to photos.

This works well enough for a while, but at some point, the volume exceeds the model. Do you have problems finding the e-mail, document, or photo you need? Do you have problems remembering what you called the file or directory that made SO much sense six months ago? Most of us do, and the solution is to STOP trying to solve the problem through well-named files and directories and take a metadata or “tag”-based approach instead.

With this in mind, I thought you would enjoy checking out a recent video that ZDNet (Ziff Davis Network) posted as part of its At the Whiteboard series (see my next post for more on these whiteboard sessions). This session by Jack Norris, EMC's director of virtualization marketing, explained how file virtualization allows storage administrators to do more with less. However, even if you don’t have “storage administrator” in your job description, aren’t we ALL desperately trying to manage our storage more efficiently? In the few minutes it takes to view this worthwhile video, you’ll learn more about the suggestions I outlined in the podcast on how to change your thinking about files and how to store them.

Jack actually has two sessions and I’d recommend that you watch the one on File Virtualization first  and then if you like that, learn a bit more about Global File Virtualization. Jack does a very good job of outlining why we are all facing the challenge of how to scale our solutions as we start to have stores of millions (and soon billions) of files.

Our challenge though is not so much about how to manage the information, since this will increasingly be done automatically. Rather, it is about how to UNLearn what we have spent lifetime learning about how to put everything it the “right place” and instead adopt a model of assigning all the characteristics and attributes about everything. Remember the point is NOT searching, its FINDING!! Moreover, to do that we all need to do a LOT of UNLearning and relearning.

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Trust as a competency?! - Part 2

In Stephen Covey’s book The Speed of Trust: The one thing that changes everything, he focuses on the role of trust in the context of leadership and business or professional situations. One of his most fascinating points is the notion of treating trust as a competency—something that we can do something about. Covey makes a strong connection between trust and confidence (as opposed to suspicion, for example).

His reference to “speed” in the title is about how he relates trust to speed and cost. Specifically, he notes that as trust goes down, cost goes up and speed goes down. When trust is low or absent, things take longer because more time is spent gaining sufficient confidence to make decisions and move forward; hence costs go up accordingly. This is what Covey refers to as a “trust dividend”.

Continuing with my common theme about the value of breaking things down into very small parts, I want to point out how Covey breaks trust down into 13 behaviors that can help to build trust. These include:

• Talk straight. Be honest and tell the truth. The opposite of spin for example
• Create transparency. Operate on the premise of "what you see is what you get."
• Demonstrate respect. Treat everyone with respect, especially those who cannot do anything for you.
• Show loyalty. Acknowledge others' contributions. Speak about others as if they were present.
• Deliver results. Accomplish what you are hired to do on time and within budget.
• Practice accountability. Don't blame others when things go wrong.
• Keep commitments. When you make a commitment, you build hope. When you keep it, you build trust.

In his onstage interview, Stephen picked out the first two of these behaviors (Talk Straight and Create Transparency), and when we talked  later he added two others:

• Get better. Seek feedback. Staying current.
• Listen first. We usually listen with the intention to reply, not to listen to understand.

There is nothing new or revolutionary about any of these behaviors and in spite of the more questionable actions we see around us, most of us were brought up learning about these constructive behaviors from parents and others, yet their application seems all too rare. I'm reminded of one of the great book titles of all time, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum.

However, one of the major benefits of breaking trust into all its constituent pieces is that you can deal with each one individually or in smaller groups. Treating trust as a competency enables you to identify those components that can be learned or are “trainable” and use these to actually build and improve upon the trust in a relationship or within an organization or group.

What I particularly like about Stephen’s perspective on trust is how he challenges the age-old characterization of trust as some vague social virtue. I found it particularly positive and empowering to remove trust from the constraints we often attach to it—as being something people have a fixed amount of or they are born with and thus is something you can’t do much about.  This view renders us helpless to do anything more than look for as much of it as possible. Instead, by treating trust as a competency, trust can be a solid economic driver as well as a learnable and measurable skill. While the focus in the book is largely on the professional application almost all of this can be applied at the personal level and produces deeply advantageous and sustainable success in all dimensions of life.

This is all very much worth reflecting upon.  Read through Covey’s list of trust behaviors above and consider the rating for:

• Yourself personally in your dealings with family and friends
• Yourself professionally at work and with your business colleagues and dealings
• Your team or department
• Your overall organization or company

And most importantly, what can you do to improve these? Given that almost all of our interactions with others—our communications and our leadership abilities—hinge upon trust, don't we want to have this as one of our greatest competencies?

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Trust as a competency?! - Part 1

I had the great pleasure of meeting with Stephen M.R. Covey at the Learning 2006 conference last week in Orlando, FL. Stephen is the son of Stephen R. Covey, the best-selling author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Stephen was one of the featured speakers at Learning 2006, and Elliott Masie did his masterful job of replacing the typical keynote model with an up close and personal interview with Stephen. Afterwards I met up with Stephen for some additional discussion about the points he raised on stage and in his new book called The Speed of Trust: The one thing that changes everything.

Frankly, the book has its ups and downs, BUT the points that Covey raises are extremely important and very worth considering. The whole area of trust is becoming more and more important it seems, and I think this is great and long overdue!

In spite of how often we think we are more enlightened, intelligent, and evolved than ever before, and “Oh so high tech”, isn’t it interesting how often we end up coming back to basic human attributes and values as the thing that really matters and makes a difference. Along with values such as honesty, integrity, and authenticity, TRUST seems to emerge at the top of the heap. Consider, for example, something as seemingly technical as the Web. Tim Berners-Lee, the acknowledged father and parent of the Web, has always had the vision for what he refers to as the “Semantic Web” wherein the Web incorporates not just data and information, but meaning.

There isn’t space here to go into more details on the Semantic Web, but if this concept is new to you, it would be well worth your time to do a bit of research on this topic. My point, however, is to note that when Tim lays out his explanations and blueprints for the future of the Semantic Web, you will find that at its foundation or pinnacle is what he calls the “web of trust”. 

Perhaps what is more readily visible to most people today is the fundamental role that trust plays in our so-called new economy and new world. Examples include needing to know how much we can trust what we read and who we interact with on the Web. Is that entry in Wikipedia true or fictional? Which of the millions of blog postings can you believe? When is the e-mail you receive really from your bank and when is it a thief trying to get you to divulge your account information or other personal identification details? These are all very real issues that bring us back to trust.

There's lots more to say about this topic of trust and Stephen's new book, so I'll talk more about it next time.

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444 Steps Leading Onward and Upward

The university campus where I gave the keynote to the first Latin American Conference on Learning Objects (LACLO) is located at the base of a hill. On top of this hill is the original lighthouse for the area. Since another part of the city's work is to improve conditions, they created a set of wide and winding stairs all the way up the hillside to the lighthouse—444 steps in total. This I know, because each one has a numbered tile on it, and I climbed up and down each one on a beautiful equatorial evening. However, putting in these steps cut a path through hundreds of small, ramshackle homes where many of the city’s poor were living.

In many other cities, this would have meant that these people were evicted, but in Guayaquil the government did two very different things: they rebuilt the frontages of all the houses that were now on either side of this walkway, and they provided training for each of the families on how to start and run small businesses. As a result, when you climb up the stairs, there is a wonderful variety of shops, restaurants, bars and bookstores all the way up. What a great model for all of us to learn from!

Till next time,

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Personalization Pervades Even Taxes (in a Very Good Way)!

Personalization is a word I use a lot and it is the best summation of what I see as the "grand vision" for learning and performance. I'm constantly finding more and more examples of just how pervasive personalization is becoming in our world.

My recent visit to Guayaquil, Equador showed me yet another example in the form of personalized distribution of taxes—of all things! In this photograph, which I took on my brief walk along the riverfront "Malecón," is a set of individual sheets of thick clear glass framed in stainless steel and each measuring about 1.5 meters by 3 meters tall (about 4 ft. x 10 ft. for you measurement challenged Americans! :-) )

As you can see, each glass panel is edge-lit to create a striking visual sculpture. What you can't see in the first photo is that each plate is engraved with hundreds of thousands of names of the individuals who have essentially "paid" for the very expensive riverfront renovation. Here's how it works: each citizen is allowed to direct up to 25% of their personal income taxes toward any number of projects. This is, IMHO, just brilliant!

What you are seeing is a dedication to each and every person who chose to direct some percentage of their income taxes to creating this Malecón river walk. Contrast this with the much more complex, often corrupt, and largely unknown process of most other countries. This same mechanism works for corporate or business taxes. For example, the University where I gave a recent keynote address is able to set up mutually beneficial projects with businesses. As  part of the agreement, the business will direct a percentage of its taxes to the university.

For me, this is a wonderful confirmation that the dream of mass personalization of our world is being realized and delivering unexpected results everywhere and for everyone.

Till next time,

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