noticing

I sat in Clapham Junction the other day in Café Nero at 6pm, at the exit to the station and managed to resist the urge to write, read, call, fiddle and instead just watch.

In the half-hour I was there, thousands and thousands of people went past – streaming back to their home lives after a day ‘at work’. It was as if the Rolling Stones were doing a free concert outside, or Scarlett Johanssen was doing an impromptu burlesque show.

Sadly, it was neither but instead just a normal day.

It struck me how singularly unusual our behaviour is and yet how quickly we become used to it. I had the urge, fortunately unrequited, to do a little dance for them, or strip naked and do some cartwheels, if only to shake this tide of humanity disgorging from the working world. (Perhaps that would have been a good incentive to head back to work).

So many looked so similar – their haircuts, their outfits, their facial expressions. Given Clapham’s demographic, we’re talking educated, intelligent and creative people.

How is it that it has become normal to work from 9-6, or thereabouts? Who invented the tie and what functional purpose does it serve other than being a flap of material that indicates you are smarter than the next person without one? When did heels become attractive? Most importantly, why would you spend all day in a job you don’t enjoy in order to earn enough money to join a sea of other people back to an expensive neighbourhood?

I’m pretty sure if there was a straw-poll, 80% of those hustling and hurtling past would admit that they weren’t doing what they dreamed they’d be doing.

So why don’t more people feed their ties into their shredders, move somewhere a little cheaper and become musicians, poets, potters, painters, writers, farmers, lovers, dancers and harness and express their individual selves?

I have no idea and these thoughts were not new. And so, I collected my disguise, in the form of a suit jacket and my own sensible haircut, and filed out to become instantly lost amongst them.

Just please remember – follow your internal path and judgement, rather than simply collate that of those around you or you too will lose yourself.

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I love this post. Similar reflections and observations that I made when I was back in London last month, though I didn't post them.

And I could never articulate them as sweetly as this.

We need to shake it up folks. It could all be so much better for everyone.

And Tom's blog rocks

I've been thinking a lot about how will humans reconnect with the more than human world when most people are living in concrete and machine dominated environment's like the city.

In cities we have mostly developed nature out of the mix. And it's clear to me that beyond the loss of biodiversity, we are suffering as humans, manifesting in depression, mental illness, anxiety and more. I'm struggling to see how we can make that reconnection at mass.

I've been reading Becoming Animal by David Abrams which is an exploration and call for humans to reconnect with the living and sentient world all around us -   as he says p127, 2010 – ‘As soon as we recognize that our bodies are always intertwined with the broad flesh of the earth and that our conscious experience is sustained and steadily informed by that very involvement, then the need for a multitude of individual, immaterial minds drops away..’

I get this, I know this and I believe this knowing is in every single one of us, but the enormous challenge is that most people are intertwined with concrete, tarmac, pollution, advertising and media.

How can we experience this reconnection in numbers?

How can we bring this knowing back into the city?

So this film just popped up, it's a project from Germany.

I'd like to know what else they have planned.

http://www.wemissyou.de/

amazing. via @brainpicker

Yesterday I went to hear Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, speak in Vancouver. I picked up a few gems of information, and also picked up his new book, The Nature Principle. I’m sure his talk would have been even more inspiring had the event website given me the correct time (I did arrive in time to hear the last half).

Last Child in the Woods is a fantastic book about the way our children are missing out on critical experiences of nature. It changed and enlightened the way I want to parent my children.  I am hoping the Nature Principle will further affect the way I want to live my life.  So far, there is something fascinating on every page.

Like the study that found a 20 percent increase in a person’s attention span and memory after spending just one hour outside?  Or the newfound condition called, “continuous partial attention.”  Essentially, the effect of trying to do too many things at once – or focus on too many tasks, computer screens, thoughts etc.  At least, that’s my interpretation.  And I should know, because I’m pretty sure I’m in that state.  All the time.

Like, right now.  Typing my blog, thinking about what I read yesterday, listening for the alarm on the stove to go off (signalling that my chocolate brownies are ready to eat!), shoulders tight as I carry the tension of spending two hours trying to put my teething child to sleep… etc.  My mind often feels like it is going in circles.  Round and round and round.  Full of ideas, but arrested by lack of time.  There I am, listening to my child talking, and at the same time my mind is off, trying to figure out the latest WordPress formatting conundrum.  If that isn’t continuous partial attention, I don’t know what is.  (Luckily for both of us, my son rarely lets me get away with this.  If I drop the ball, and neglect to respond appropriately, he’ll be sure to call me on it).

Louv suggests that the more time we spend with technology, the more time we need to spend in the natural world.  To detox and reset.  Put ours mind at rest.  I, for one, am desperately in need of this.

Finally, he proposes that we need to develop a “hybrid mind” to thrive in today’s world.  That is, a mind that is both good at technology (because who can really exist without computers these days?  Rhetorical question, but I’m sure some of you can find an answer for that), and, immersed in the natural (substitute: real) world around us. That along with this techo-blitz we must strive to connect with nature in a way humans haven’t prioritized in a long time.

So, nature is the antidote to technology.  And, if our minds can surf both waves, we will be uniquely positioned to thrive in this world.

I like these thoughts.  They make sense to me.  Because, although more than half of me wants to find a woodland hideaway and make it my glorious home, I have a feeling that I’d have to take my computer with me… Is that horrible?

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Cooperation vs Collaboration

We often use these words interchangeably, but they represent fundamentally different ways of contributing to a group and each comes with its own dynamics and power structures that shape groups in different ways …

When collaborating, people work together (co-labor) on a single shared goal.
Like an orchestra which follows a script everyone has agreed upon and each musician plays their part not for its own sake but to help make something bigger.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet common goals.
The logic here is “If you help me I’ll help you” and it allows for the spontaneous kind of participation that fuels peer-to-peer systems and distributed networks. If an orchestra is the sound of collaboration, then a drum circle is the sound of cooperation. 

For centuries collaboration has powered most of our society’s institutions.
This is true of everything from our schools to our governments where we have worked together through consensus to build systems of increasing complexity.

But today, cooperation is fuelling most of the disruptive innovations of our time.
In virtually every aspect of our culture, the old guard is being replaced by cooperative, self organizing, distributed systems.

Collectives collaborate. 
Collectives are part of the machinery of the previous era. They give priority to the group over the individual and encourage members to adopt a joint identity that unites them around their shared goal. 

Connectives cooperate.
A connective doesn’t give priority to the group or the individual but instead supports and encourages both simultaneously. There’s no shared sense of identity in a connective because each member is busy pursuing their own goals.

Collectives are breeding grounds for hierarchies and power struggles.
Even with the best intentions, collaboration often encourages pyramids of power and authority. The higher up the pyramid you are in a collective, the more freedom you have to carve out your own individual identity and direct the group’s efforts towards your own goals. The conductor is famous while the tuba player remains unknown. But if the tuba player gets up to leave someone needs to step in to replace her.

Connectives are self-organizing and self-sustaining.
No master architect, conductor, or blueprint is needed. You can join or leave a drum circle at any time and the beat goes on with or without you.

Wikipedia is a collective. Delicious is a connective.
Hence the brutal hierarchies and old school power structures that govern Wikipedia. Delicious on the other hand doesn’t have the same problems; No consensus is needed because people aren’t collaborating. Each user is free to use Delicious for whatever they want.

Since connectives support individual goals, they create value even when a group is small and growing.
Wikipedia is pretty much useless as an encyclopedia until it contains thousands of articles which requires a huge collaborative effort. But the very first person who used Delicious was able to get value from the system right away. As the system became more popular new kinds of value emerged.

By linking selfish yet common acts together, connectives are able to empower individuals while creating new kinds of group value.
Moving your bookmarks from your own computer to Delicious enhances their value because you can access them from anywhere, but the kind of value you get from them stays pretty much the same. Once bookmarks are shared and interconnected though, an entirely new kind of value is created … one that transcends the original act of bookmarking and yet fuels it at as well; bookmarks are no longer just about remembering but also about finding. And this illustrates the real power of connectives: they’re able to support individuals while encouraging the emergence of new kinds of group value.

Nature is a connective not a collective.
In a forest there is no script that all of the organisms follow. There is no conductor. Yet there are countless levels of interdependence and cooperation at work in which selfish goals intersect to sustain each other and create larger, unpredictable, organic patterns. 

Networks are fundamentally natural and organic processes. Although you wouldn’t know that by looking at the corporately controlled internet we have today. Today’s internet inherited the political and technical baggage of broadcast era networks whose mechanical architecture is completely out of tune with emerging logic of our connected culture. 

Over the past month, as I’ve been getting ready to launch The Connective, I’ve been using collaboration vs cooperation as a kind of probe to make sense of the many options available to us. I’ve also found that supplementing words like distributed and mesh with cooperative and organic   helps make the whole concept of community powered internet a lot more accessible:

We want to create a new internet architecture that’s cooperative and organic. 
A self organizing, distributed network of equals. 

We have the tools right now to roll our own cooperative networks at a hyper local level.
With a little tinkering, off the shelf wifi products will do the job. These mesh networks don’t require users to collaborate - they’re spontaneous, and self organizing.

But as these networks grow and need to be linked together over greater distances, collaboration comes into play.
It’s easy to create small, spontaneous, cooperative networks with wifi, but if you want to join these networks together with decent performance, you need to rely on point to point links to handle the long distance traffic, which by definition, requires collaboration between people on either end of the link. And the common protocols, naming systems etc that are needed to power larger networks will require some sort of governance which also leads us into a collaborative process.

Collaboration isn’t ‘bad’ but it changes the dynamics of the network.
There’s something deeply beautiful and rewarding about a community working together. In Athens Greece, point to point links are at the heart of one of the biggest community powered networks in the world and are crucial for delivering broadband type performance across the network.

But collaboration is often difficult to pull off, especially with strangers and in large dynamic groups, and, as we’ve seen, collaboration opens the doors for group dynamics that are at odds with the spirit we’re trying to capture and preserve in the first place. 

Every point of collaboration is a potential source of conflict that often gets ‘solved’ with artificial pyramids of rules, authority and power.

So …

How can we ensure that collaboration and cooperation coexist without threatening the organic, self organizing nature of connectives?

Do all kinds of collaboration threaten cooperative systems?

Can collaboration be transfrormed into cooperation?

There's no telling what can happen beyond 18 months. But designers and managers can adapt, by embracing that in their innovation strategies.

Nearly two decades ago, Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history,” the triumph of liberal democracy, and the end of clashes between political ideologies. He got it wrong: Since then, we’ve had our fair share of “history.” Similarly, a few weeks ago, no one would have predicted that the Obama administration would be engaged in three wars in the Middle East, or succeed in killing Osama bin Laden. Governments spend billions of dollars on research and analysis in order to get a grip on the future and still seem to flounder, so I’m often puzzled by the confidence design strategists exude in proclaiming the Next Big Thing.

The marching orders now are for short, dynamic processes.

Especially when such a thing is impossible to predict. Eighteen months ago, the iPad was just a rumor. When it finally arrived last February, many in the press were skeptical. I wasn’t. I guessed it would change the world -- and it did. Yet today, with Apple struggling to ramp up production to meet the overwhelming demand for the iPad 2 and Steve Jobs on another medical leave, can anyone guess Apple’s stock value three years from now? I’m guessing not.

A few weeks ago, I was visited by a senior executive from a very large tech company that is retooling its process and strategy following the iPad’s success. (Similarly, half of our work is now done in the wake of the iPhone and the Android’s success -- both of which were mere guesses just two years ago.) Cloud computing is now touted as the next great breakthrough. That just might be true. But 18 months ago, I guessed electric cars would be a reality in California -- I mean a real reality for the average Joe -- and guessed wrong. I now predict it will be at least five years before the soccer moms and dads of the world buy into the promise of zero emissions.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m guessing a lot here. Here’s why: I think the design world oversells certainty, especially when looking way into the future. This overconfidence leads many companies to invest their design energy and research in long-term programs, which could prove obsolete two years from now. Designers and thinkers take advantage of uncertainty by promising too much to executives who are eager for some clarity regarding future developments. Such promises often prove to be, at least in part, wrong -- and the design community loses credibility as a result.

We need to redefine the parameters of the future in order to build greater trust in our work. I believe the future is only 18 months away. Beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess. And if you accept my definition of the future, design has plenty of highly effective ways of shaping it.

Healthy companies should perform six-month sprints.

The other day, I had lunch with a design executive from a wonderful company that’s been doing everything right -- it has a strategic design agency (not mine), and it has had design thinking in its bloodstream a decade before the term was coined. And yet what it’s doing just isn’t working. By the time its last design strategy process ended, it was nearly obsolete -- too prescribed and too inflexible. My buddy had to start over again, and this time, he opted for a different philosophy: No design strategy would take a long time to define or be too stiff to bend to an evolving reality. The marching orders now are for short, concise, and dynamic processes, allowing products to be introduced into a marketplace that are well understood and within a reasonable forecast.

But while future-based innovation takes 18 months, any healthy company should perform six-month sprints. A six-month product-development cycle can lead to effective products, even though it leaves only a month for serious design work. That’s not bad if you’re familiar with the evolution of the fruit fly. It reproduces quickly, with many mutations and lots of mistakes, yet it’s one of the most adaptable life forms on the planet.

Being realistic about what the future holds benefits both the business and design worlds -- and reduces the risk of making painfully wrong predictions. An actionable future is only 18 months away, and by working in that timeframe, we can get things done faster and better.

Gadi Amit

Gadi Amit is the president of NewDealDesign LLC, a strategic design studio in San Francisco. Founded in 2000, NDD has worked with such clients as Better Place, Sling Media, Pa... Read more

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