July 19, 2009 by sean.

Posted in behavioral economics, psychology, work | No Comments »

November 25, 2008 by sean.

The Bionic Brain slides from the DevLearn 2008 conference are now available on patternhunter.com.

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June 22, 2008 by sean.

1) What technology advances should small businesses and individual households be taking advantage of and what is the payback to them?

Twenty years ago, there was a lot of hype about Virtual Reality where you could put on a helmet and gloves to “jack in” to cyberspace and navigate virtual worlds. All of that seems quaint if not silly now in a world where always-on access to the internet is taken for granted, especially by people under 40.

High-speed internet and free wifi will increasingly become entry-level requirements to just play in the retail game [unless your core value proposition is to provide a technology-free retreat from the digital world]. Employees will seek options to work from anywhere [not just from home] and commitments to careers within a small business will likely be tenuous given the increasing range of options available. Employers will need to explore options such as eLance [think eBay for contractors] where other companies [including many outside the US] bid for work while displaying satisfaction ratings by employers and even the earnings from previous contracts.

2) How will technology shape small businesses and households five to ten years into the future?

The next five to ten years are arguably headed in the direction of “EOD” [Everything On Demand]. Want to watch your favorite television show? Hit a button and start now. Want a tailored suit with your own custom pattern? Sure, as long as I can take it home today. Want a great meal? Let me order it and have it ready when I hit the door [and don’t expect me to wait to be seated]. Oh, and let me do all of this connected to your free wifi hotspot from my mobile device!

As consumer demands expand and patience approaches zero, many people are willing to pay a premium to minimize any fuss with payments, forms and security [witness the success of the Clear program where people pay $128 a year to avoid those airport checkpoints]. Alternative methods of payment such as PayPal, eBilMe, Bill Me Later and Revolution Money Exchange are paving the way for customers paying in a ways that best suite their needs.

3) What technology trends keep you up at night that should also concern small businesses and households?

One of the most powerful emerging technology trends with the potential for changing the game of business is what many [including Entrepreneur Magazine] are calling “Marketing in the Recommendation Age.” As consumers turn away from traditional advertising and more to the web for help in deciding what products to buy and what companies to trust, businesses both small and large have less control over their brands. Sites such as Amazon, YouTube and eBay have built there success upon peer ratings of quality. And remember that criticism and scandals tend to rise more quickly to the top of Web 2.0 rankings [even if they are not true!] because they make better stories.

Not all of this will be confined to the web as we know it today. Imagine driving in your car and asking your GPS to find the highest-rated Italian restaurants within a five mile radius? Oh, and which ones have the shortest wait? The day is coming and soon!

Instead of trying to control the messages about your business, now is the time to start thinking about encouraging your best customers to be extensions of your brand, to help spread the word and advocate for you because it is in their best interest to do so. People who make excellent recommendation to their friends, family and peers earn their own version of points in the social network. Few people worry about recommending Apple products; Hotmail spread like wildfire by adding a “Want a free email account?” link at the bottom of everyone’s messages. Other successful small businesses leverage their stories to niche groups.

For example, Koyono, a small business based in Ohio, sells premium technology-friendly products to a niche audience of professionals who are fed up with clutter and want to adopt a minimalist, yet fashionable lifestyle.

One question for small business people is, “How do I make it easier for my customers to spread a good story about us?”

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June 1, 2008 by sean.

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February 27, 2008 by sean.

I saw this a while ago and, until talking with a friend of mine over lunch, forgot how truly amazing it is…

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December 8, 2007 by sean.

Which employees have access to the Tribal Knowledge Sharing tool and which group of employees use it the most?

Everyone has access yet not everyone knows about the tools, especially people who don’t spend much time in front of a computer such as installers and technicians. Most of the content available today is focused on order entry so the most frequent users are call center and front office personnel. We are working to dramatically change that in the coming months with much more content and webinar sessions focused on topics of interest to other groups.

The long-term plan is not just about helping people get immediate access to content that helps them in their current jobs. It’s really about making it really easy for anyone to learn about anything, including the tasks that other people do. This helps each of us gain a broader understanding of how complete processes [not just the part directly in our hands] get down and ultimately impact the business. When you know more about the job of someone who is “upstream” or “downstream” from your responsibilities, it’s much easier to have dialogue about improving the bigger picture.

Having easy access to everything also improves career growth through cross-training, including self-initiated learning to help you prepare for your next job opportunity. Showing up at an interview saying, “I have dug into the knowledge resources about this job over the past few weeks” goes a lot further than showing up and saying, “So what do you guys do over here anyway?”

What are the most frequently used resources?

The most recent modules tend to be the most frequently used regardless of content. Most of the content is “disposable” in the sense that it has a limited shelf-life. Given the constantly changing nature of our business, most of the content we learned a year ago is no longer relevant. It’s as if we should constantly ask our brains, “What have you learned for me lately?”

Since the web-based training module contributors are anonymous, how do you recognize the employees who make excellent contributions?

We chose to make the posts anonymous to encourage peers to evaluate content on its own merit rather than voting for friends or dismissing the contributions of “the others” [to borrow a term from Lost].

In the upper right corner of the page, the users who have the highest rankings are featured in what, over, time becomes a king of the hill bragging right, as fleeting as that may be. While getting recognized for highly-valued contributions is great, most people who add to the mix do it out of a desire to help their peers and the company. We often tend to forget that most of us are motivated to learn and grow not just for our own personal gain, but to be part of something larger that benefits the greater good.

How do you address vandalism [profanity, inappropriate humor, flaming, etc.] in the knowledge sharing system?

It’s never happened so far. All new posts are reviewed by an approver before they show on the main page. Of the few that don’t make it, most are duplicate posts [a bug we had to fix in the system]. Once a post is public, any user can flag it for review which immediately pulls that post out of circulation for an approver to scrutinize more thoroughly. While flagging is also rare, the commitment of users to keep the information accurate and valuable is what makes the tool work.

Aren’t you afraid that people will post misinformation that will encourage others to do the wrong things?

When we described the concept of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing to an executive at another large company, he was outraged by the potential of a tool like this for spreading rumors, lies, “shortcuts” and misinformation, especially at the level of front-line employees. We asked, “Isn’t is scary that the same people you trust to talk with your customers you don’t trust to talk with one another?”

Human beings are social creatures and arguably, we learn most of what we know from casual conversations. Training classes, books, videos, and similar methods are also useful, of course. At the same time, having the chance to think, verbalize our thoughts and get social feedback is an important part of internalizing knowledge rather than passively consuming information. All of this happens in what we call “six feet of separation” meaning that most of our questions go to people in the immediate physical vicinity. If I have to get up and find someone to ask a question, it’s because I think that the people immediately around me can’t give me a “good enough” answer. The truth is, most of the time, a “good enough” answer is right there in my peers.

Doesn’t this mean that subject matter experts and trainers get pushed to the side when any one can create and publish their own content?

The truth is, there is no such thing as a “subject matter expert” or “trainer.” Both of these labels represent a relationship based on trust, and trust changes over time.

As soon as the training session, meeting or rally are over, people talk to one another in the hallways, breakrooms, smoking areas, etc. and ask questions like, “What did you think about that? Do you agree? Do these people know what they are talking about?” In other words, people are always creating and sharing content with one another and evaluating the trustworthiness of everything they hear. The difference is, with tools that encourage sharing ideas and lessons with a larger audience, more people can benefit, evaluate and weigh in. Plus, our job should be to help everyone contribute to the business goals, not to protect the special status of a few people who supposedly are never wrong.

Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” We wonder if in the future, everyone will be an expert for 15 minutes.

Are there any key strategies when launching this training approach to ensure its success?

We are always “launching” these types of tools and don’t see that process as ever being finished. Like a lot of Web2.0 start-ups, we are perpetually in “beta” mode and figuring thing out as we go along.

One of our most important early lessons learned is that this type of approach is not something you can pull of with “top-down” mandates. People have to want to use tools like these for them to take off. The best way to get momentum is to provide a very intuitive interface and identify highly-motivated early adopters who contribute strong content in the beginning to get the ball rolling.

We used a low-tech version of social network analysis to identify trusted resources in the division, the people who tend to get the most questions from others. We found that these “hubs” in the social network didn’t necessarily have any special titles or formal status; they just had reputations for being approachable, knowledgeable and helpful. It turns out that most of these “go to” people are stressed by their popularity and often frustrated by answering the same questions over and over. When we find people in that situation, we say, “What if you could answer these questions once in about 5 minutes, direct other people to your answer, help them find other answers that they might have, and still get all the credit for your genius?” Most people say, “Where do I sign up?”

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November 19, 2007 by sean.

From MIT’s Ed Boyden’s recently published article on How To Think:

I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out? I just use a word processor to schedule all my events, tasks, and commitments, with resolution fading away the farther I look into the future. (It would be nice, though, to have a software tool that would gently help you make the schedule higher-resolution as time passes…). [via Technology Review]

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October 15, 2007 by sean.

New Scientist explores Microsoft’s latest software patents for “mind reading” software that evalautes the user experience:

Microsoft wants to read the data straight from the user’s brain as he or she works away. They plan to do this using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to record electrical signals within the brain. The trouble is that EEG data is filled with artefacts caused, for example, by blinking or involuntary actions, and this is hard to tease apart from the cognitive data that Microsoft would like to study.

So the company has come up with a method for filtering EEG data in such a way that it separates useful cognitive information from the not-so-useful non-cognitive stuff. The company hopes that the data will better enable to them to design user interfaces that people find easy to use. Whether users will want Microsoft reading their brain waves is another matter altogether.

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September 22, 2007 by sean.

Posted in work, software, mobile computing | No Comments »

September 15, 2007 by sean.

Bernie DeKoven of The Coworking Insitute describes “coliberation“:

How we have found a viable alternative for everything that people used to call “work.” How we join each other in some kind of virtual, actual coworking effort, coworking environment, doing something together for fun, on this particular page of the world wide web, thinking about making it more fun, and maybe even profitable for people to work together. [via smartmobs]

Posted in fun, work, social networks | No Comments »

September 6, 2007 by sean.

“Corey Phelps, an assistant professor of management and organization at the UW Business School, and Melissa Schilling, an associate professor at NYU, “analyzed the innovative performance of 1,106 companies in 11 different industries over a six-year period. They examined the pattern or structure of strategic alliance relationships among companies in each industry. They found that how firms are connected to one another influences the number of patented inventions they obtained. Those that secured more patents were classified by Phelps and Schilling as being more creative.”

According to the researchers, “companies reap greater benefits when they are part of a network that exhibits a high degree of clustering and only a few degrees of separation, both of which are characteristic of a small world network.” [via zdnet.com]

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

continuous partial attention n. A state in which most of one’s attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up.” [via wordspy]

Linda Stone who coined the term, distinguishes CP from multi-tasking: “When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing… (whereas CPA is motivated by the desire) to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.” [via WikiHome]

“CPA stems from our desire, Stone says, to be ‘a live node on the network’… The message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. ‘We’re not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything… Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible.’” [via newsweek]

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

From the Informal Learning reference on Wikipedia:

Learners get only about 25 percent or less of what is used at work through formal learning. The majority of companies that provide training are currently involved only with the formal side of the continuum. Most of today’s investments are on the formal side. The net result is that companies spend the most money on the smallest part - 25% - of the learning equation. The other 75 percent of learning happens as the learner creatively adopts and adapts to ever changing circumstances. The informal piece of the equation is not only larger, it’s crucial to learning how to do anything.

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

Seth Godin on hard work:

Sure, you’re working long, but “long” and “hard” are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn’t lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It’s about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie. [sethgodin.com]

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

Daniel Pink uses pecha kucha [see below] to describe Emotionally Intelligent Signage:

Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. [Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down]

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February 15, 2005 by sean.

“I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.” /MikeShea.Net/

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December 5, 2004 by sean.

“We want to grow the eSeminars business, and our audience is clamoring for more editorial events,’ he said. ‘What better way to give them what they are asking for than to create a virtual tradeshow that isn’t just a one-hour panel discussion but focuses an entire tradeshow on the topic?” /eWeek/

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December 5, 2004 by sean.

The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. - William Gibson

Anyone who makes a distinction between games and education clearly does not know the first thing about either one. - Marshall McLuhan

The future of game-based learning has arrived; it’s in the Army.

Tell-Test / AFTRB = Another Fucking Three Ring Binder!

We have just now, ten minutes ago, made a partnership with Apple. We want to work with them. The Edge wants to work with their scientists. We want to play withh their design team. We want to be in their commercial … And next year, you will be able to go to a U2 show and download the commercial onto your iPod… We want to do this because we like their company. It’s art, technology and commerce colliding. - Bono, lead singer of U2

We need to commit to R&D, the practice of designing educational experiences and products, with the same intensity that we give to sales and marketing.

A WOW Project is the quintessential expression of personality and character. It is not for the faint-of-heart. - Tom Peters

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