courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevec74/

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?

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.

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 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.

Our group became involved in the real estate discussions because as professional collaborators we thought we could contribute to the discussion based on our experience in designing for human interaction (albeit on an “intervention” basis) and in designing physical space to support those human interactions. In conversing with the architects, we learned some interesting things.

1. Research suggests that workers in large office environments tend to interact with people who are only within 150 feet (50 metres) of their own desk.
2. Up to 87% of knowledge creation is gained informally, through such means as social learning (water cooler wisdom), learning in the moment, communities of practice and other techniques. Information transfer occurs formally, through lectures, workshops and seminars.

* Farrow Partnership Architects

The conclusion I drew from this was that simple co-location does not even come close to guaranteeing increased collaboration amongst employees.

The conceptual solution that I had envisioned was threefold:

1. Apply architectural design principles that are used to build dedicated collaborative spaces to an entire office complex. It’s no secret that traditional cubicle farms don’t exactly lend themselves to lots of interesting conversations among inmates. While the initial dot-com boom accelerated the notion of a more “social” office space as a way of being more creative and productive, there are some deeper principles at play that go beyond free chocolate bars and a pool table. Innovation Labs has a whitepaper on the topic of designing collaborative spaces.
2. Train a network of specialized workers/facilitators/information synthesizers to be responsible for certain physical areas of each office floor. They would help to “design” the work that the employees are doing, facilitate small and large meetings, perform graphic recording, information visualization and other specialized tasks designed to tease out the collective intelligence of the organization. These types of workers would be part of a network of practitioners within the organization who are more in tune with the concept of social business design, the concept of which is now being put into play by the folks at Dachis Corporation. As a network of practitioners they would be in communication with each other and act as a “biological overlay” for the otherwise mechanistic organization. It is a lot to ask for a corporation to switch its mindset to being “social” but if there were networks of people within the organization acting behind the scenes to make this happen, wholesale revolution might not be necessary.
3. Implement the necessary Enterprise 2.0 software to enable knowledge sharing, insight generation, weak signal monitoring and other techniques that will allow the network of practitioners to bring the work from the rest of the organization into their areas of responsibility. They are acting as the eyes and ears to the rest of the organization (and the world at large) for the group to which they’ve been assigned. A further benefit of training these types of workers is that it adds a level of governance and risk mitigation for executives who see social media as being a risky endeavour.

I did my best to sketch out what this might look like at Bell Canada but it’s quite generic and could be applied anywhere. The idea is that with tens of thousands of employees it’s impossible to be co-located. With good design principles, implementation of a soft infrastructure based on principles of collaboration and a hard infrastructure of the right social tools it’s possible to realize a significant shift in how legacy organizations transition to becoming social businesses.

Within a few minutes someone from the store came out and asked me to move and pointed out a sign that I had truly missed, which was asking people to not sit on the ledge, not block the signage, not smoke in front of the store, etc. On one hand, I can appreciate the owners of the business not wanting people hanging out in front of the store. But on the other hand I’m wondering if they’re missing an opportunity on how to be creative with the extra traffic that they’re getting.

For example, they have lots more foot traffic now that a place like a coffee shop has opened up. Maybe setting up a small table giving away free samples in the mornings would be one idea. Maybe setting up chairs in front of their own store, providing seating for the overflow customers in exchange for free coffee for all of the spa employees might be another. Perhaps setting up a “Morning Jolt” program where you get make-up done and an espresso for a bundled price.

Frankly, I don’t know if any of these ideas make sense but the point is that the spa’s “environment” had changed and rather than seek out opportunity in this change they had taken a more adversarial approach with its new neighbour and its neighbour’s customers.

Read the article.

Here’s a quote from Joel Spasky that I JUST picked off Twitter, from @ibmdesigns, which I think is relevant to the article in the MPI magazine: “Design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremybrooks/

“Why would I care when my friend brushes his teeth?”

It hasn’t taken very long for that response to become pretty tiresome in response to a suggestion that someone should check out Twitter. As Howard Lindzon, a hedge fund manager and angel investor, said at the Mesh Conference, “there are 250,000 people joining Twitter every day and 245,000 have no idea why.”

Here’s where I think Twitter fits into my world and into the world of organizations and collaboration. It starts with a quick introduction to the notion of BioTeams. A writer by the name of Ken Thompson has been writing about how we can a learn a tremendous amount about team and organizational work by studying the behaviours of animals. From his site, it looks as though he first started publishing about BioTeams in 2005, a full year before Twitter debuted, but I’m sure he had lots of unpublished work before that.

He writes that pheromones are part of nature’s oldest and most advanced signaling system. Even dinosaurs, who had comparatively small brains, had highly advanced senses of smell in order to hunt prey. Most people associate discussion of pheromones with human sexual attraction but in the bigger picture pheromones are really about communication. Ants and bees use very elaborate systems of tastes and smells to organize themselves very quickly and effectively and with great ability to be flexible and innovative within their changing environment.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/omar_eduardo/

In his BioTeams book, he notes 13 characteristics that make a pheromone based communication so effective. I will list them here and then make some of the more compelling connections to Twitter, if you don’t make them by yourself as you go through this list.

1. Broadcast and Individual
2. 1-way
3. Whole species
4. Simple vocabulary
5. Intraspecies and Interspecies
6. Robust Delivery
7. Low energy
8. Longevity potential
9. Message Range
10. Multichannel
11. Quick and Slow Responses
12. Anonymity of sender
13. Location Information

And now for a discussion on how some of these principles are manifest in Twitter:

1. Broadcast and Individual: Pheromones are predominantly broadcasts to many but can also be used between individuals in a species. The Twitter analogue here is pretty obvious. When you tweet, all of your followers know it. Or you can take the Direct Message route but I’m sure that most people would find that functionality to be used less often than a broadcast tweet.

2. One Way: Messages through Twitter don’t have the same level of expectation of a return note. A Tweet is simply a piece of information that is put out into the world with no expectation of reciprocity. People can do whatever they want with that info. Eventually, if I’m not being valuable to my followers, I’ll become noise or unfollowed. How many useless emails have you sent to people just to show them that you have read their note. Highly inefficient.

3. Whole Species: This is a bit of a stretch because if we consider Twitter users to be a sub-set of the human race, it certainly isn’t the case that everyone on the Internet is a regular user of Twitter. And of course not every human is on the Internet. If you consider Twitter a “universe” unto itself than the syntax is pretty simple and universally understood. @, #, and a few other symbols make up almost the entire grammar.

4. Simple Vocabulary: Here’s what Ken wrote in 2005 – “You should as try to put the essence of the message into a short amount of characters (100-200) or even to use a set of abbreviated message types e.g Feedback, Vote, Opportunity.” RT, FTW, Fail. ‘Nuff said.

5. Intraspecies and Interspecies: Some species’ pheromones can be interpreted by other species. This is useful if two species share a common predator or one species can send out propaganda in order to fool a predator species. The analogy that popped into my head is that I automatically cross post my tweets into my Facebook status and I get notes from people all the time on Facebook wondering what the hell my status is and wondering why it contains strange code.

6. Robust Delivery: Good communication should be multi-platform so that if a message is blocked on one path, there are multiple ways of that messaging finding recipients. This smacks of annoying spam to me so I’m careful to not send out too many messages in parallel just to ensure that one gets through. I don’t like receiving an email, followed immediately by voicemail and a txt msg. We’re social animals and there are relatively few messages that require quite as immediate a response as messages about food and predators.

7. Low Energy: Pheromones take little energy to create or receive, relative to other forms of biological communication such as chirping. The nice thing about the 140 character limit of Twitter is that the simplicity is built in. Long, redundant emails and voicemails are naturally curbed. This fits in nicely with the smartphone form factor as more and more people will be using devices such as Palm, Blackberry and iPhone as their computing platform of choice.

8. Longevity potential: Pheromones have the potential to stick around in the environment for a period of time. This can be good, so long as the information is still relevant. An ant colony wouldn’t want to mobilize forces to collect some food long after it has been harvested or scooped up by a competitive colony. Twitter can have a bit of a problem in aligning to this principle in a practical way because with a lot of tweets streaming past a moderately connected user (100+ followers) it’s very easy to miss lots of relevant information. The search feature on Twitter works well to counteract this phenomenon as do any number of clients that have sprung up to deal with Twitter streams. Tweetdeck being one example.

9. Message Range: Thompson writes that some messages are more important to certain members of a group than others. I’m sure you’ve experienced projects where there is a core team and extended teams where members of the extended team might not receive all correspondence, just some of the more strategic messages. Again, Twitter by itself doesn’t have the ability to group messages, but some of the more advanced clients do so organizing the people you follow into different groups is key to adhering to this principle. As well, I do pay more attention to any @ messages on which I’m included. There is also a certain amount of natural selection. When I see a tweet from people whom I know personally and trust, they command more of my attention than people whom I have never met but still enjoy following.

10. Multichannel: Similar to point 6, I tend to not overwhelm people with multichannel broadcasts. That’s just my personal style. What I will do is use Twitter to offer up a 140 character teaser of information. For example, I’ll tweet about this blog post in order to share a bit of information and to provide a link to the full text. An amuse bouche, if you will. Two platforms, but not used in parallel.

11. Quick and Slow Responses: Some types of pheromones are designed to inspire immediate action such as “attack!” Others are designed to initiate longer term action such as caste transformation. The “High Priority” exclamation point in email was a good indicator of what type of response the sender of the message was looking for. I personally haven’t come across a particular structure within Twitter that’s designed to attract attention and immediate response. I find that I’ll come across people who are looking for specific information and if I see it will respond immediately if I have the answer. Is there a symbol or hash tag that I’m not aware of that is like a “911 call”?

12. Anonymity of Sender: This has pros and cons, as we’ve seen. Lack of authenticity and trust (not to mention spam) are synonymous with anonymity, at least on the sender’s part. However, anonymity can be helpful when requesting feedback from colleagues. Some people argue that within an organizational context anonymity can work in hierarchical, fear driven organizations where people are afraid of bringing up unpleasant news for a boss. At best, this anonymous approach is a weak band-aid on a significant problem. I feel as though if that dynamic exists there are better, more sustainable, healthy ways to address it.

13. Location Information: Pheromones can be used to create trails to food. I’ve used Tweets to mark out my trail on a busy Saturday night going from bar to bar. This may not have much use in an organizational context (at least from a physical geography perspective) but I’ve also found it interesting to witness someone’s thought process through Twitter. I’ve followed people’s tweets from conferences and seen the evolution of their thinking on certain topics in near real time. But the time and geography trail is also in the here and now. You can automatically post the time and GPS location of your tweets so people can follow you. And with Google latitude it’s possible to have an aerial view of your entire colony’s whereabouts.

OK…so that was a quick synopsis on how Twitter is a tool that is a great analogue for complex biological systems. What does that have to do with collaboration and team work?

With so many virtual teams and virtual organizations evolving out of more traditional, mechanistic organizational structure, Twitter is a great tool for keeping track of your colony. Where are there job opportunities? Who has written a compelling post? Who likes shade grown organic coffee? These pieces of information when viewed on their own, and in aggregate, represent a real time picture of predators, food supplies and partners. As well, long term information (primer messages) can be communicated and we get things like #hohoto and #twestival.

As Karen Stephenson writes, there are the formal structures of organizations that are rigid and the informal networks that are amorphous and flexible but bisect every organization. Twitter represents a way of connecting outside the formal structure of an organization and tapping into the power of a network. It’s a way of developing weak ties within a network. It’s a way of discovering who are the “hubs”, “connectors” and “gateways”. And because Twitter is asynchronous (ie. people aren’t necessarily “friends” and don’t have to mutually decide to follow each other)  more types of connections are possible versus networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

There are many executives who don’t yet believe in the power of “older” social media tools such as blogs or wikis to super-charge collaboration within organizations and it will be some time before they’re the rule in an organization rather than the exception. “Micro-blogging platforms” such as Twitter in the enterprise are still a few years behind them because Twitter represents a very clear opposite to the command and control structure, but it will get there in some form or another.

And that’s why you should care when your co-worker brushes their teeth.

@danielrose

P.S. I can’t believe you made it to the end of this monster post.

Examples of a 3D metaphorical expression of a "problem" courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/intelleto/

One of the more intriguing workshops that I attended was by John Ward on the topic of Kinesthetic Modeling (KM). In short, KM is a process by which people attempt to communicate a particular issue and solutions by creating metaphor out of physical objects. John’s attempts to elicit “pre-conscious” information is impressive and I actually had a bit of a breakthrough moment in the first five minutes of the workshop.

John asked each of us in the workshop to select four or five objects to which we were attracted from the big pile in the middle of the table. Without even realizing it I selected four objects that were all circles. It took me one second to realize the significance of this and it’s that I see my whole series of personal and professional relationships as a series of concentric and overlapping circles. I’m attracted to the circles that are part of Open Space methodology. The fact that I subconsciously selected a few parts that were all circles was quite a moment for me.

In short, the methodology for going through one of these exercises goes a little something like this:

1. Define the problem. For example, “The economic crisis threatens our entire business model.”
2. Identify key words or phrases from the group that come to mind when that problem is described.
3. Model silently. Everyone at the table creates a common model using the pieces at the table but does so silently. This is an important aspect of the process because it taps into the “pre-verbal” intelligence that rarely gets used.
4. Identify the literal pieces in the model, such as “that piece looks like a bridge” versus conceptual ideas such as “that piece looks like a threat”.
5. From there you can extrapolate to the conceptual ideas in the model but it’s important to start with the literal.
6. Each table comes up with a few solutions to the problem based on insights gleaned from creating the model.
7. Map the solutions versus the work of other groups and see what insights emerge.

It seems as though John equates KM to three dimensional modeling. In a broader sense kinesthetic exercises are ones where people are learning/creating by doing, not by listening or reading. So I would put the act of modeling on a whiteboard as a further extension of kinesthetic modeling. Doing the exercise with physical objects in three dimensions is a more powerful exercise, to be sure, but both exercises are on the same continuum of activities.

One of the benefits of making models is that it allows for relatively inexpensive hypothesis generation and testing. Models can be easy to scrap and redo. But one of the traps of models is that the more polished you make a model the harder it is to redo it. Think of the difference between a sketch of a new car and a clay model or a full blown concept car. The concept car contains much more detail but is harder to change while the napkin sketch contains very little information but is easy to change. Obviously both types of models are useful in the right circumstances.

Whether working with tangible ideas such as a car or conceptual models such as a business plan it’s always best to incorporate visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences to fully maximize a group’s creative potential.

The very first draft of Bell's Olympic network

The Vancouver Sun published an article on January 24th highlighting how the technology that will underpin the Games’ results, television broadcast, staffing and back office functions is ready to go a year in advance. The article alludes to how the team started off small and skunkworky, out of the top floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Small team work

We worked in small groups, large groups and individually for a period of months developing narrative, financial and visual models of possible solutions even as the world was shifting under our feet with respect to changing technological and political landscapes. We did scenario planning around what our competition would do and say. We tried to think of what some of the outlier competitors might do (eg. “What if Cisco went after the sponsorship?) We looked at sustainability issues and evaluated the project from a “Triple Bottom Line” perspective.

The reason we did all of this is because the Olympic organizations, local organizing committees and the IOC, are extremely risk averse. They don’t want any organizations or technology that aren’t completely reliable. 99.999999% reliable. Being the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) in British Columbia meant that we weren’t the 100 year old phone company like we were in Ontario and didn’t have the decades of infrastructure to back up the bid.

Small team work

This meant that we had to bring the brightest people together to devise a solution to an opportunity that we didn’t fully understand for an event that was years away. These aren’t they types of problems that you solve in traditional organizational ways. The key to developing the winning solution was making assumptions on design, constantly testing those assumptions and having the flexibility and vision to be able to iterate and change very quickly. In essence, not only was the technology designed, but the way in which we worked was designed. It was a powerful way of working and the team has grown a lot since the early days but there has been very little turnover and I’m proud to say that elements of working collaboratively have become part of the team’s modus operandi.

In the Vancouver Sun video below, Norm Silins, the General Manager of the telecom solution for Bell Canada and the first person to begin work on the project displays the results of the collaborative work as he shows off the telecom gear that will power the Olympics Games in Vancouver.