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I Went to Work Naked on Monday

You know those anxiety dreams where you find yourself at school in Grade 2 completely naked. That happened to me in real life this week at work, in a professional sense.

I was running a strategy session for a client that was scheduled to start at 9am on Monday and I was there at 8 to set up. Everything was going smoothly and then I reached for my bag of post-its, markers and pens that I had purchased from Office Depot the day before. Nothing. Nowhere to be seen. I quickly realized that there was a big bag of stuff that I simply didn’t take when I left from Office Depot.

At 8:45 I told the client that I needed something from the hotel and I would be back and have to start the session five minutes late. I ran to the car, hightailed it back to Office Depot in six minutes, went to the customer service desk and sure enough there was my bag, still packed, ready to go. I grabbed it and got back to the client site by 9:05, took five minutes to set up and got started at 9:10.

All in all, it could have been way worse, but that feeling when I realized I was naked, from a supplies perspective, was just like a bad dream. What real life anxiety dreams have you experienced in a work environment?

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Demand?

On July 30th Apple launched the iPhone 4 in Canada at its retail stores, its carrier partner stores and some third party retailers such as Best Buy, Wireless Wave, etc. Obviously they knew there was going to be pent up demand for the product despite the perceived (or actual) antenna issues. Sure enough, there were long lineups on the 30th at any location that was selling the new phone.

It’s now 10 days later and not only are 99% of retail outlets out of stock with no idea when new inventory is coming in, but for the stores that do have the phone (seemingly limited entirely to Apple stores), there is still a line up that is many hours long. In fact, there are people lining up on the hope that stores will be receiving courier shipments later in the day.

As a tech fan, Apple fan, someone who is looking to get an iPhone 4 and a marketer, I’m wondering just how much is too much demand before it starts to backfire. Demand is great. Photos of long lines are a boon for the Apple PR people. But how long can that demand last before people (me) start getting frustrated with not being able to make the purchase they would like to make. Maybe given the demand from the US and other markets, Apple Canada should have made the decision to delay the launch until more product was in stock and demand could be met. For a company that prides itself on customer experience, has Apple crossed the fine line between creating hype and disappointing its customers?

Demand: How Much is Too Much?

Facilitation by Telepresence

Having “grown up” as a face-to-face event designer, I’m naturally a little skeptical of the value of remote facilitation sessions. Trying to accomplish a lot on a conference call is very tough to do, especially if you use a lot of visual communication, as I am fond of doing. LiveMeeting or WebEx adds a bit of flavour to that but it’s still lacking. Expecting that complex problems can be solved over the phone in a short meeting is setting the bar too high.

I recently had the “Jetson-esque” experience of facilitating a session with a client using Cisco’s telepresence solution. This is not your grandmother’s Skype.

I was in a room with 3 60″ High Definition screens, 3 cameras, professional lighting, 1 camera in the ceiling and a projector. The client had the same set up on their side 3000km away.

Technology Thoughts

In a word, flawless. Set up was simple on our end, in that we sat in the room until they “called” us. And when they did, the whole system lit up instantly. Lighting, audio and video were perfect from the get go. Considering we were transmitting and receiving that much data (3 high def screens, audio, screen sharing, overhead desk camera), there literally wasn’t one second of latency, digital blocking (pixelation) or out-of-sync audio/video in four hours. Astounding, really. As a bit of a geek, I’d be curious to know what kind of WAN connection they have to make that happen.

A minor quibble is that the screen sharing was happening at 1024 x 768 so I couldn’t fit a lot of content on my screen.

We did not record the session and I’m not sure if that was a choice that was made or if it’s not technically possible with this system.

Process Thoughts

As someone who relies on employing a lot of movement in a session, such as getting people to move to different work stations, physically sorting post it notes and drawing large format diagrams, those tools have to be re-thought in a telepresence situation. The way the camera system works, is that there is a narrow depth of field so people who are farther back from the camera aren’t in focus. This is because the idea of the system is to have people sit in specific spots so they appear life-size on the screen in the other room. So trying to see a wide shot of the room and collaborate with people working on the walls isn’t really an option. Having them do some work as a team using big post-its on the walls is an option but they’ll have to do that on their own and then report their work. I’m used to bringing all the required supplies to a meeting but for a remote session I had to give the client a list of things to bring so that has to be done in advance.

It’s possible to have people do work on their own and share it using the overhead camera. There is a fixed camera in the ceiling which focuses on the table below and it’s possible to have paper or other objects shared remotely and in a large, viewable size. So I had people drawing models and sharing this way. I made sure they kept their paper and had them scan and email their work to me post-session so I had a record of it.

Those are a few quick thoughts on telepresence. If face-to-face represents a “10/10″ for desired collaboration mode and teleconference is “3/10″, I would put telepresence as an “8/10″. It was very impressive for a small group (1-5). You definitely get what you pay for. The Cisco gear, WAN connection and physical space required for the set up is enormous. But for a global company I could definitely see how it could save time and money on travel while being a very productive tool.

Citizenship as a “Mainframe” Model

I recently watched Eric Dishman’s TEDmed talk on ted.com where he presents his research from his work from Intel on healthcare. He posits that basic technology combined with a mindset shift about the what healthcare is, could radically improve seniors’ quality of life. A basic example would be someone wearing a bracelet that has an accelerometer that can measure how quickly people are walking, how fast they react to the phone ringing, and other minute bits of data. In aggregate, these “behavioural markers” can show very early signs of disease that would otherwise go undetected.

While this was interesting in its own right, Dishman outlined five main sections in his talk, two of which could provide interesting fodder for the ChangeCamp conversation.

His third section (6:35) was entitled: From Mainframe to Personal Health. The idea is that the model of healthcare is similar to that of computing from the 1960′s. Fifty years ago there were huge rooms with tons of equipment that required lots of power and took specialized, highly educated people to run. They were expensive and difficult to access. Computing has since moved to be relatively inexpensive and distributed. The computing power in an iPhone, Blackberry or even some wristwatches gives lots of people access to lots of computing power. He argues that the healthcare system is the same way. Hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and the like are analogous to the mainframe computer from decades ago. It’s an expensive and poor way to provide healthcare to the North American population. He argues that a mindset shift, coupled with technology can move the power of healthcare into the home and into people’s peer networks.

While I’m not especially knowledgeable about health care issues, the idea of the “mainframe” made me think about government, governance and citizenship. With Government as an analogue for the hospital, I see movements such as ChangeCamp seeking to reassert control over the ways in which society progresses rather than relying on the institutional machinations of Government and its Band-Aid approaches to problem solving. One of the pillars of the ChangeCamp movement is technology and its ability to facilitate connections amongst people, avoiding the bottleneck that bureaucracy can represent.

The Fifth Section of Dishman’s presentation was on setting goals. His frustration with the American health care debate is that the conversation was around how public health care gets funded. He argues that there should be a goal. REFORM. Meaning going to somewhere from where we currently are. He proposed that the health care equivalent of “putting a man on the moon would be to have “50% of healthcare services to be delivered in people’s homes by 2020″.

Does ChangeCamp and other citizen-led, grassroots movements need similar “man on the moon” type of goals? Peter Block might argue otherwise, saying that the end goal of citizens working on projects is the community strengthening that naturally occurs. The argument for setting high level goals (at least from a government perspective) is that setting a quantitative goal can spur inspiration, much like the space race did in the 1960′s. The investment in science and engineering inspired a generation of people to take up the challenge.

Questions I’m still pondering:

• What is the best way for technology to enable peer to peer citizen leadership and action? What combinations of tools and processes are ideal?
• How do you bridge the gap between people who use technology and people who don’t?
• What kind of quantitative goal would one set to inspire movement towards a greater good?

Any other big questions that I’m missing? Any answers?!

Get With the Times, Retail

I am completely drawn to Swipe bookstore on Richmond Street in Toronto. They sell books on design, architecture, marketing and other creative disciplines. It has a magnetic hold over me, yet the magnet seems to not disable my credit card for some reason.

I was there yesterday with Tom Crawford. He has a device called an “iPhone” made by a company called “Apple.” Tom spied a book that looked interesting to him, took out his iPhone and started to take a picture of it. Before he could release the shutter, one of the store employees practically leaped out from behind the counter and briskly came over to Tom and asked “is there something I can help you with?”, which was clearly a euphemism for “put away your damn phone and stop taking pictures.” Her explanation was that no retail stores would permit someone to take pictures within a retail environment, presumably for competitive reasons.

That’s Retail 1.0. Get with the times, Retail.

Here is what Tom was doing: Tom was using his iPhone and an application called SnapTell to photograph the book cover and use that information to search the internet for reviews of the book. It was a fairly specialized book on infographics and diagrams so there is a good chance that he might recognize one of the reviewers and be able to make a more informed decision as to whether or not to get the book. Granted, Tom’s query also returned price comparisons from many other retailers and Swipe wasn’t the cheapest. Tom didn’t get the book.

The point is that with cool image recognition technology like SnapTell (and the equivalent for audio, Shazam), combined with ubiquitous computing and internet (see the TED talk by Pranav Mistry), shoppers will be armed with a lot more information with which to make decisions. Shoppers’ social networks will be constantly over their shoulder in the store offering advice and retailers better be prepared to be a valuable part of the real time conversation.

Creativity: “Not Required”

I was talking to a large Canadian company about their possible need for facilitation consulting services. The person I was talking to is in HR and has “collaboration” in her portfolio. She suggested that her company would most likely not be in need of my services because the corporate frame of mind was one of “retrenching” and therefore no innovation or creativity would be required.

In my view this is a very narrow and myopic view of how collaboration, visualization and creativity (CVC) can be utilized in companies. CVC does not have to be about brand new product ideas, 10 year plans, hockey stick growth or “out of the box thinking”. A well designed, facilitated workshop with CVC can allow creative thinking to be applied to extremely tactical, operational details.

Case in point: At the beginning of November I worked with the technology group responsible for delivering the infrastructure for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I’ve blogged about this project before as I’ve worked with them quite a bit over the years. On November 2nd the Olympic Opening Ceremony was 100 days away. On a project of this size, you can be sure that there is not a whole lot of new thinking going into the technology. Almost everything is locked and loaded and yet here we were with a group of 60 people representing 30 different Olympic venues applying the principles of collaborative work so that each group could rapidly identify outstanding issues, determine solutions and get the sign off from leadership in situ, before the end of the day.

The collaborative exercise began weeks earlier when a web-based collaboration tool was used to start a conversation with the 500+ technicians who will be servicing the Games with the following question: “What Issues are Keeping You Up at Night”? In other words, what are the most pressing technical issues 100 days from Opening Ceremonies. Many of the answers were around process and procedure for certain situations. The facilitation team worked in advance to identify themes and trends, categorize like answers and  and to offer insight into how the work should be tackled.

We made sure that the subject matter expertise was in the room during the face to face event and created a process where small teams of experts created solutions to the issues, filled in common templates and permeated the answers throughout the room to make sure that other teams knew what work was being done and, finally, got the requisite approvals from the executive team so that when the day was done, the work was complete. I would suggest that a typical meeting of 60 people in a hotel conference room would not have effectively solved over 40 pressing issues in one day without some process facilitation.

The point is that collaborative process doesn’t have to simply address “innovation” or “blue sky” issues but when done well can effectively accelerate the most detailed, operational, tactical work. Being more effective, more nimble, doing more with less, “retrenching” can always benefit from people’s creative power and a good collaborative process will help unleash that potential.

Novatel MiFi: Cool Device for Remote Events

Bell Canada is about to launch the Novatel MiFi 2372, a combination device that includes high speed wireless broadband on the HSPA network plus a wifi router plus an SD slot. For people who work collaborative events or conferences this is quite the all-in-wonder package. Internet service at conference centres can be really expensive or really shoddy. Being able to travel with small, reliable, reasonably priced gear is quite the boon. Of course the consistency and reliability of a wireless device can leave lots to be desired so while the MiFi might look good in theory, interference and network stability might make it less than awesome. And of course lots of conferences are in bunker like structures so the cell service is weak anyway. I’m looking forward to trying it and getting reviews of real world performance.

Chris Messina and Open Web Workshop

Centre for Social Innovation and Torch Partnership brought Chris Messina to Toronto for a 1 day workshop from which I learned quite a bit. Chris is a heavyweight, having co-founded BarCamp, developed the Flock browser and is now on the board of the OpenID Foundation. It was nice to have access to his brain for the day. While the conversation drifted into the realms of backend technology and architecture, there was enough layman stuff for me to sink my teeth into. Here are some of my thoughts from the day while they’re fresh in my head.

1. Objects+Social=Social Objects. In Chris’ parlance an object on the web would be something like a video on a website. It’s a noun. You upload it, it’s on a server, people can watch it. That object becomes “social” when verbs can be applied to the noun. When the video can become rated, shared, reviewed, commented…that is now a social object. I liked that framework. It’s a quick and dirty way of thinking about your website, user experience and company at large (which I’ll get to in a later point.)
2. The Importance of Owning Your Data and Social Residue. There was lots of kerfuffle when Facebook changed its terms and conditions recently to suggest that they would own your photos, videos, uploads, etc. The terms were changed back and people are back to owning their data. The idea of “social residue” is an interesting one. Getting back to point 1 about social objects, let’s say you want to switch from Facebook to the next big thing. Facebook might trumpet that you are free to do so and you can export your data. So you get your “objects” back but you will lose the “social”. You will lose your “likes” your relationships, comments, ratings and all of those verbs that people have applied to your nouns. Chris describes this data as social residue because it’s left behind if you choose to move your data around, but in reality it’s probably the essential glue that keep people engaged in social sites. So even though you own your objects, the company that is hosting your objects owns the social, unless there was a way to liberate the residue and reclaim ownership of it so it’s in fact truly portable.
3. What is Open Web? Chris didn’t have a fully articulated answer for this, but I thought his answer was excellent: You’ll know it when you see it. He likened an Open Web to a natural ecosystem. If an ecosystem is open for new players to emerge, for old players to wither away and the playing field is level for new entrants to come in with few barriers to entry that is a sign of a good ecosystem. If it is a closed system there are a few players who control who gets in, how much they pay to play and it seems like they spend just as much energy preventing innovation and growth as they do improving their ecosystem. Music industry, anyone?
4. Porter Airlines. Kind of Anti-Social, For Now. The last exercise of the day was to think about a business and how to make it more social. One of the folks at my table was a web developer for Porter Airlines and we thought about the entire travelling experience from start to finish and how it could leverage the social networks of its passengers. We made a couple of assumptions: 1) Porter, in its positioning and branding, has developed an active community and loyal customers who trust them to deliver a great service. 2) Travel, especially air travel, is often a stressful experience. You might be running late, traffic might be bad, flights get delayed, luggage gets lost, boarding card won’t print, security line is long and so on. Given that, here are some things we had in mind for Porter:
   • Seat assignment is an object (see Point 1). Make it social by pulling in a passenger’s Facebook interests during the booking process and if they want to be paired with someone who has similar interests, make it happen.
   • Tie seatback entertainment options to a Netflix account (movies) or Last.fm (music) so each person’s entertainment experience is customized.
   • Pull data from Facebook interests to proactively suggest an entire weekend itinerary with flights, hotels, attractions, concerts and email people with a “Click to Buy” feature.
   • Have people pay for a customized itinerary that they would receive at the gate before boarding that would suggest hotels, restaurants, etc. based on their TripIt/Dopplr data.
   • Luggage tags are objects and your bag could potentially Tweet from wherever it is in the airport.
   • Flight recommendations based on which flights people in your network happen to be on. Maybe you would switch your departure time if you knew that a contact was on the following flight.
   • Help coordinate travel to and from the airport by suggesting travel buddies.
   • To the point on stress during travel, John Maeda writes in his Third Law of Simplicity that waiting for a task to finish is more tolerable if you can witness its progress. (See the progress bar on computers, estimated hold time with customer service, wait time signs while in a line at Disney.) Is there some information that an airline could give you on a mobile device regarding traffic (geo-location), weather, checking in, security, flight delays…that would help reduce the stress of the travel experience?

Those are a few ideas generated in 30 minutes on how an airline could leverage its customers social activity streams to provide a more social experience during travel.

Thoughts on how a favourite business of yours could be more social?

Uffe Elbaek and the Project Paradox

On October 15th I had the pleasure of attending the latest Design with Dialogue session, hosted by Peter Jones of ReDesign Research and Greg Judelman of Bruce Mau Design. The special guest of the night was Uffe Elbaek, founder of KaosPilots and the CEO of the World Out Games in Copenhagen which took place this past July.

Uffe was amazingly candid and generous in sharing his experiences, good and bad, in getting a huge undertaking such as the World Out Games off the ground in just 2.5 years. Having worked on the Olympics technology planning, I can tell you that 2.5 years to get an entire event off the ground and successful is a Herculean feat.

Five things stood out for me:

1. As the organizer of a major event, Uffe dealt with many sponsors, vendors, partners, political organizations and sub-committees…and in many of those instances Uffe was asking for something, whether it was money, products, permission, support, time. There were lots of asks. However, to make the entire experience beneficial for everyone, he authentically posed the question, “What can we do for you?” He really viewed the relationships with all of the stakeholders as a true two way street. But he didn’t stop there. He also viewed his role as the “hub” in all of this activity as a connector of stakeholders. He made sure that relationships were forged between sponsors, between political organizations and really acted as a catalyst for new connections. The committee could have been in a  ”take, take, take” situation but saw the opportunity to create a new eco-system around the goal of putting on a spectacular event.
2. This is Uffe’s design process, in a sense. It starts with an idea such as “let’s host the World Out Games”. Uffe’s assertion is that all too often people skip straight to the concept, put together a team, organize the team and then execute. He calls this the “Bermuda Triangle” because the important steps of figuring out what needs the idea fulfills, what the purpose is what values are held don’t inform the concept. This can result in conflict well into the project because there isn’t a cohesive understanding of what the team is trying to accomplish. In deciding things such as which sponsors to approach, a lack of unity on needs and purpose can result in interpersonal conflict and the project can suffer. Spending time up front to work on the first few steps can save time and conflict later in the project. Uffe’s took the time to write a manifesto of this work so that anyone could go back and visit the manifesto when tough, contentious decisions had to be made. Revisiting the question of why they were doing this in the first place helped make those decisions easier.
3. Your purpose should be succinct enough so that you are able to pee it in the snow. Apparently this is a common saying in Denmark. I guess it applies more to men than women. No visuals for this point.
4. Uffe’s team wrote a run book on how to deliver an event of this magnitude just BEFORE the event took place. The rationale is that the run book shouldn’t be tainted by the perceived success or failure of the event. While things will go wrong at an event of that magnitude, you wouldn’t want those mistakes to be overly represented in the run book. With a month before an event of that size, everything is pretty much locked down. Not much will change but a run book won’t be overly influenced with the emotion that comes with delivering the event if it’s done just before launch.
5. The Project Paradox. Uffe explained that in a big project with an end date you start with tons of decisions to make and very little knowledge . You end the project with all of the knowledge but no decisions to make. The challenge is to shrink the gap in those two curves so that the project kicks off more effectively. One way of doing that is to quickly ramp up on the knowledge curve or hire people who have that knowledge before making key decisions. Curious if there are any comments on the paradox and ways in which to overcome it.

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