Only Dead Fish

Google Firestarters 5: Cory Doctorow - The Event

Well. I can honestly say that it's taken me a good few days to digest Cory Doctorow's amazing talk at our fifth Firestarters event last Wednesday. And I'm still ruminating on it. Cory's talk, billed as 'The Coming War On General Computation' concerned what he sees as the gross inadequacies inherent in our regulatory and copyright system in dealing with the growing pervasiveness of digital technologies. Gathered to hear it were over a hundred of the great and the good from UK planning. 

What followed was a passionate, rapid-fire, 50 minute narrative, packed with great insight, provocation and perception, and all delivered with no slides. I can hardly do it justice in a write up. But here goes.

The thrust of Cory's talk was that the last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the battle over copyright, a battle that is nearly won. But it turns out that the battle was only a skirmish, a precursor to a much greater war on general computing that will characterise the next decades.

As Kevin Kelly once said: "The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it." The early struggles have seen ever-more complex attempts to contain duplication and anti-copying and encryption strategies that only became more fraught as networks spread. Laws made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs, to tell people what you found when you did, and they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened.

As some learnt how to decrypt, this created escalating problems of containment and such laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve. Just as in the nursery rhyme where the lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, so "each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures".

Government and regulation relies on heuristics and rules of thumb, yet information technology confounds these heuristics. The test for a sound regulation are whether or not it works, and also whether or not it in the course of doing its work, it will have effects on everything else. We'd never regulate wheels for example, even though bank robbers make their escape in wheeled vehicles, since we know that the wider benefits of wheels are so profound. But if we had proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, it might be far more reasonable to have a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars. Whilst we might disagree about the rights and wrongs of the regulation, taking hands-free phones out of cars does not stop them being cars. Cars (as an example of a special-purpose technology) are complex, and you can remove features from them "without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility."

But general-pupose technology and computing renders this rule of thumb null and void. We don't create computers so that they might run any programme except one that we don't like. So, that means monitoring what we are doing with the technology. As James says in his excellent write up: "Censorship and surveillance used to be different things...now the enforcement of censorship requires surveillance of the reader, controlled access and putting restraints of the movements of the user. Censorship and surveillance have converged."

Image courtesy of Mike Phillips

Whilst it may seem that defeating proposed regulation like SOPA is the endgame in securing freedom of PCs and networks, it is a mere shadow of what is to come. As Cory when he began speaking, this isn't actually about copyright. The battle over copyright is "just the beta version" of a long coming war on computation: "We've spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been an end-level guardian."

The ultimate question here is about whether every PC should be locked so that their programs could be regulated by central authorities. As digital technologies become pervasive and begin to replace every other device in our world ("there are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals"), this becomes a huge question.

General-purpose computers are astounding. Forming groups and doing things together is fundamentally important to humans and the internet has been a great enabler. At stake is not only the future of computing, but the freedom, fortune and privacy of many different aspects of our existence: "Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will."

As I said at the start of the post, it's pretty impossible to do justice to Cory's charismatic delivery and the automatic weapon of polemic that peppered his talk with metaphor and perceptive insight. I've put together a Storify of the event which is a great commentary and is well worth a look. As Phil says, "evocative words, delivered with Doctorowian conviction, paint a thousand pictures in your mind". If you ever get the chance to hear Cory speak in person, go, listen, and be amazed.

'Drama Is Anticipation Mingled With Uncertainty'

There's a lot to take from this wonderful TED talk by the multi-oscar winning writer and director Andrew Stanton, who was Pixar's ninth employee and whose credits include Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and WALL-E. 

It made me think about the relationship between technology and creativity. One of the many interesting stories in the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs is the tale of Pixar's early days, which weren't without struggle. Under severe pressure from executives at Disney and after reaching a real crisis point in the making of their first feature film, Toy Story, they were brave enough to stick to the path they believed in.

A constant theme throughout Isaacson's book is Jobs' skill in recognising the value that sits at the intersection of creativity with technology. The story of Apple is the story of building 'a company where leaps of imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering'. This unique balance fitted well with Pixar, whose origins were as the computing division of Lucasfilm. As John Lasseter has said: "Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology".

It's a theme that has broad application in the modern world, and one that is touched on by Sir Jon Hegarty in this interview. Fearlessness, he says, is fundamentally important to creativity. The big leaps are made by those who ignore the perceived limitations of technology. Those that have the big idea, and then allow technology to find a way of fulfilling it. 

Ideas From Anywhere

"Brainstorming groups produce more ideas than an individual but fewer and poorer quality ideas than from individuals working separately. In other words, brainstorms dilute the sum of individual efforts." Diehl and Stroebe 1991

Jonah Lehrer's new book on creativity seems to be getting quoted in all sorts of places which is a sure sign that it's got some interesting thinking in it. One such thought is around just how inadequate brainstorming is for the purpose for which it is commonly deployed - the generation of good ideas. One of Osborn's original rules for brainstorming focused on quality through quantity, working on the assumption that the more ideas that are generated, the more likely a radical and effective solution would be found. Lehrer quotes Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, who says that multiple studies conducted over a number of decades have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.

Most organisations are pretty bad at harvesting and nurturing great ideas from their employees. Despite its apparent shortcomings, the practice of brainstorming has become so entrenched within organisational behaviour that it is often the unquestioned default protocol for the origination of new ideas and strategy. Such sessions, alongside the convention of the team strategy day, often compartmentalise creativity, boxing the formation of ideas and strategy into a small window of time.

A few years back, there was an interesting debate on this blog about whether the best ideas are the product of individual inspiration and toil or group effort. The context for the discussion was around music and how some session musicians who were present at the recording of famous songs have 'lit up' a record (in the words of Elvis Costello) with their contribution, yet that contribution has remained largely unrecognised (one example being Herbie Flowers' string bass on Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side"). One of the comments was that groups can't have an idea, only individuals can. But the consensus seemed to be that whilst individual vision was important, so was the contribution of others.

When I get asked to talk about Agile Planning, I often talk about Pixar and their creative process, which is empowered by a collaborative culture that combines tight team working (and marshalling talented people with diverse backgrounds around a common vision) with an 'ideas from anywhere' approach. There's good reason to use Pixar as an exemplar - there are very few creative organisations with a comparable consistency and creative strike rate. All eleven of the films they have produced since 1995 have been a commercial success, with an average international gross of more than $550m per film.

Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, talks about how (because the creative process behind their films involves thousands of ideas) the notion of an idea as a singular thing is a fundamental flaw and instead what's required is a group behaving creatively. Have a read of this lengthy but amazing HBR piece in which he outlines his vision for how to build a sustainable creative organisation. He gives the example of the head of a major Hollywood studio who told him that his central problem was not finding good people, but instead finding good ideas. This, says Catmull, is a misguided view of creativity that views it as a mysterious solo act and reduces products to a single idea, exaggerating the importance of that initial idea in creating something original. In reality, any kind of complex product development involves creativity from a large number of diverse people and disciplines working effectively together to solve many problems.

This also means ideas from anywhere. In 'Where Good Ideas Come From', Steven Johnson talks about how rather than ideas originating from lone creative geniuses that have a sudden spark of inspiration, they can mature over time, sometimes laying dormant in the form of 'partial hunches' or half-ideas for years. Since it is the collision of these half-ideas that enables breakthroughs to happen, increasing connectivity is the great driver of innovation and the creation of physical and virtual spaces where ideas can mingle a way that companies can capitalise on this. 

Steve Jobs deliberately designed the Pixar building to enable different people to run into each other, believing that the best meetings are accidental ones (so much so that, as Issaacson wrote about in the Jobs biography, he positioned the only toilets in the building adjacent to its large atrium to faciliate people running into each other). Informal, random interactions between Pixar employees are taken very seriously by the company. As Lehrer says, they have "internalised one of the most important lessons of group creativity, which is that the most innovative teams are a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected".

Another of Osborn's rules for brainstorming focused on the importance of withholding criticism, in the belief that participants will feel more free to express unusual ideas. Lehrer quotes a study from Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist from UC Berkeley who split 265 students into teams of five and gave them 20 minutes to work on the same problem - how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco bay area. Each team was randomly assigned to work to one of three different conditions: one that specified no further rules at all; the brainstorming condition that worked to standard brainstorming rules and emphasised limiting criticism; and a debate condition in which teams were encouraged to criticise and debate each other's ideas. The results for which teams did best weren't even close:

"while the brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, people in the debate condition were far more creative. On average, they generated nearly 25 percent more ideas. The most telling part of the study, however, came after the groups had been disbanded. That’s when researchers asked each of the subjects if he or she had any more ideas about traffic that had been triggered by the earlier conversation. While people in the minimal and brainstorming conditions produced, on average, two additional ideas, those in the debate condition produced more than seven."

So it seems that the 'do not criticise' instruction is highly counter-productive. As Lehrer says: "The imgaination is not meek - it doesn't wilt in the face of conflict. Instead it is drawn out, pulled from its usual hiding place". Every morning at Pixar begins the same way, with the animators debating the previous day's work ('ruthlessly shredding each frame') in sessions designed to critique, debate and improve . As well as encouraging the team to fully engage with the work of others, the sessions distribute responsibility for catching mistakes across the entire group, a lesson that Ed Catmull learned from the lean manufacturing process.

As Lehrer says, there's something counterintuitive about all the research illustrating the defficiencies of brainstorming as a process. I think its because its so embedded into the fabric of business practice. There can be little doubt, in the context of the rapidly changing, volatile, and increasingly complex business environments in which we all operate, about the growing importance of creativity for just about every organisation. IBM's recent survey of 1,500 global CEO's identified it as the number one 'leadership competency' of the future. So I think it's about time we rethink how we view creativity, stop boxing it in, and think about how we get better at embedding creative ways of working. I think its time to look beyond tools like brainstorming to how we might better facilitate debate, builds, criticism and ideas from anywhere into the fabric of what we do every day.

Image courtesy

Skeuomorphs

Thank you Clive Thompson. At last I have a word for something that has long bugged me: elements of digital design that are based on old-fashioned, analogue, physical objects. Skeuomorphs. My new favourite word. In the latest issue of Wired, Clive talks about classic examples of Skeuomorphs such as digital calendars which (in month view) force you to look at greyed out past weeks when this is completely unecessary.

Clive also mentions one of my own bete noires: digital 'page-turning' technology which mimics analogue paper page-turning and as a format is stubbornly refusing to go away despite being a universally nonsense way to navigate digital content. Compare the typical corner page-peel with something like Flipboard which pivots in the middle of the page in a far more pleasing way.

It might seem harmless but, as Thompson says, despite in some circumstances helping to orient us to new technologies Skeuomorphs are "hobbling innovation by lashing designers to metaphors of the past". Enough already. We should be bolder in our thinking.

Image courtesy The Nerd Code

System Failure

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

"Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail."

The fourth and final installment of Kirby Ferguson's excellent 'Everything Is A Remix' series eloquently deals with the inadequacies of the modern intellectual property and copyright system. The nonsense, for example, of a system that encourages patent trolling and exploitation of its weaknesses in the form of lawsuits which are associated with an average of $80 billion per year of lost wealth to defendants, with very little of this lost wealth being transferred to investors. A system that increasingly seems to be akin to a sandcastle on a beach being washed over by the oncoming tide. It's well worth a watch. If you haven't seen them, it's also worth taking a look at Part One, Part Two, and Part Three in the series.

Kirby is patently an extremely adept and entrepreneurial filmaker. His next project, This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory, is up on Kickstarter right now. Having enjoyed his work thus far, I've just funded him a few dollars.

Reinventing Libraries

According to the 2010/11 Taking Part survey published by the Dept of Culture, Media & Sport the proportion of adults in the UK who visited a public library in the past year fell from 48.2% in 2005/6 to just 39.4% in 2009/10. At that rate of decline in less than two decades nobody will be visiting libaries.

This upsets me. I remember weekly childhood visits to my local library, gathering up another small pile of books to take home. Those visits were full of anticipation. I can remember the almost overwhelming sense of wonder when I first walked into the Library at the sheer number and diversity of books in one place. But in the face of our modern day almost universal access to knowledge and information through digital means, libraries are slowly becoming irrelevant.

In response to Kodak filing for bankruptcy protection, I saw a tweet that opined that the company's long-term decline had come as a result of misunderstanding their core business: "They were in the memories business not the film business". In his Observer column on the subject, John Naughton paraphrased Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, saying that whilst big companies are often good at fostering 'sustaining' innovations (the type that enhance their positions in established markets) they are (perhaps inevitably) much less adept at dealing with innovations that completely disrupt markets. To me, libraries have a Kodak problem - they are shackled to a legacy medium and model (books and lending) from which (despite efforts to diversify) they seem unable to escape.

And yet I believe there is an extremely useful long-term role that libraries could still play in local communities. The first thought most of us have when we think about libraries is that they are places to go to to borrow books. Yet if I think back to those visits to my local library the thing I was really excited about was the opportunity to connect to amazing stories and how those stories made me feel. Borrowing books was merely the means by which this happened.

The art of storytelling is one of the greatest of human attributes. So what if community libraries became places that were dedicated to that art? Places where people could connect and interact with stories in a hundred different ways. Story centres, if you like. Places that were about inspiration and firing the imagination. Places that were equipped not only with books, eBooks, and DVDs that you might borrow, but with the tools for digital creation and the means to inspire and enable people to create stories of their own. Places that were not just about quiet, passive appreciation but active, noisy, exciting learning. Places that might connect the young to the great stories inherent in film, literature, and history in meaningful and relevant ways. Places that involve people with the stories of their local area and the people who can tell them, and maybe even lived through them. Places where people could go to celebrate great storytellers and hear them speak. Authors, film-makers, game-makers, artists, animators, illustrators. Or to be a part of a massive but very tangible story-telling network spread out around the world.

There are plenty of reasons why this might be a good idea. Some have said that storytelling is dying art, and yet the diversity and depth of the tools we have at our disposal to create stories has never been richer. The creative industries in the UK employ around 1.5 million people and their contribution to the economy is growing. Think of the ground-up innovation this could galvanise. Think of all the stories that could be brought to life that would otherwise be forgotten. Think of all that might come from people inspired not just by reading, but by doing and making. But this is also about reconnecting people to their local communities. How great it could be. Re-invigorating a national infrastructure that has enormous potential to bring even more value to millions of people. Capitalising on the amazing things that can happen when you bring people and technology together and add a dash of inspiration.

So that's what I'd do. Turn every library into a story centre. I don't think we should accept a slow gradual decline for our libraries into irrelevance. I have some sympathy for the long-suffering librarian attempting to deal with increasing expectation and dwindling resource. But instead of disenfranchising them, we should empower them. There are no doubt plenty of reasons one can think of for not doing this. But I think there's one very compelling reason for believing that there needs to be radical change - in less than a generation community libraries may well not exist.

HT to Diemkay for the DCMS link

Image courtesy

Imbalances

Frederik linked to this short video of Sir Ken Robinson. It's not a new talk but a section of his session at the RSA about changing education paradigms. Specifically the bit in which he talks about divergent thinking (it's not brilliantly shot but it gets the point across and you can also watch a longer RSA animate of the talk).

Seeing this powerful reminder of the dominance of convergent thinking (the kind of thinking that believes there is only one answer to a problem) in not just education but also in the world of work made me wonder whether in tough economic times, this imbalance within companies gets worse. My hunch would be that as pressure intensifies on reaching short-term targets, the desire for certainty and efficiency increases, leading to a propensity to favour singular solutions that often lead to incremental gain. Making decisions is no bad thing, but this leaves little room for the kind of continuous cycle of divergent and convergent thinking (or creating and making choices) of the kind that Tom Hulme of IDEO talked about at Google Firestarters, and which inevitably creates greater opportunity for real creativity.

This reminded me about that well-linked-to but exceptional Forbes piece late last year by Steve Denning, writing about the ideas contained in Roger Martin's book Fixing The Game. The article, and the book, talk about why maximising shareholder value is (in the words of Jack Welch) "the dumbest idea in the world". Not just because it encourages the worst kind of short-termism, but because CEOs and senior management are hugely incentivised to focus most of their attention on the expectations market (the market in which investors assess the activities of a company today and form expectations as to how the company is likely to perform in the future, which in turn shapes the stock price of the company) rather than the real market ("the world in which factories are built, products are designed and produced, real products and services are bought and sold, revenues are earned, expenses are paid, and real dollars of profit show up on the bottom line").

It's a compelling example of misplaced value. The kind that can lead us to focus on the wrong targets, the wrong measures, the wrong things. The worst thing is that such imbalances can have huge consequences in both education and the workplace.

HT to Tom for the Forbes link

At The Edges

Edges have always been interesting places. And I think they are becoming increasingly so.

In The Power Of Pull, Hagel, Brown and Davison talk about innovation happening at the edges of organisations. About the value of individuals who are connected to the interesting ideas being shared and who bring new thinking into a company. 

At the #Firestarters 2 event at Google, Tom Hulme of IDEO talked about how great insight can come from looking to the extremes of how people use a product or a service.

Image courtesy

I think it's perfectly valid to focus on core customers and making your product or service as good as it possibly can be for them. But I also think that an endless cycle of driving efficiencies leaves little room for the kind of ideas that really challenge existing ways of doing things. So next time you want a big idea, look to the edges. It's a little raw and nervy out there, but it's where all the interesting stuff is.

Image courtesy

Creative Futures

I agree with the sentiment expressed in this post that it's a nonsense to suggest that The Wilderness Downtown shouldn't be eligible to compete for a lion at Cannes (it ended up taking home a Cyber Grand Prix). I put out a tweet saying as much, which prompted a reply from Nick pointing me at the remarkable Pinepoint, which in turn led me to the (growing) collection of interactive documentaries, video projects and animations (alongside a bunch of other cool stuff) from the National Film Board of Canada. It is, they say, "the result of artists and storytellers of all sorts utilizing new technology, to explore new forms of creation, for a new kind of Canada". And it's rather amazing.

It was notable how far removed many of the interactive brand experiences that populated this year's Cyber Lions Shortlist were from what you might think of as traditional ads. Perhaps, as Iain suggests, it does indeed feel as if the digital transformation of our industry is almost complete. Perhaps. Either way, both of these things are manifestly reflective of a technologically creative present and future that is full of possibility. And one that should be embraced.

The Perfect Community

I loved this short film that asked one simple question: "What Does 'Community' Mean To You?". As Maria points out there are some (perhaps expected) universal needs that seem to emerge including proximity and convenience, face to face interaction but the over-riding need seems to be for a sense of belonging.

Which leads me to this fascinating question posed by Robert Dunbar a couple of months ago. Dunbar's number of-course posits that the ideal number (or put another way the cognitive limit) for a human social network  (defined as those with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, or acquaintances that are both reciprocal and have a history) is 150.

So, goes the argument, this was the typical size of communities in hunter-gatherer times, of villages from the Domesday book right through 18th-century England, of parishes in modern day Hutterite and Amish fundamentalist Christian communities. Similarly, in the military the company (usually around 120-180 in size) is the core to the organisational structure. Some companies (like Gore-Tex) have even used the principle (before it was known as Dunbar's Number) to limit the size of working units and factories to ensure a work community where everyone knows everyone else and where everyone feels real responsibility toward a shared group vision.

Yet drammatically changed levels of economic and social mobility present a drammatically changed scenario from the traditional dense, geographically confined, small-scale communities of old. One in which the mutual obligation and close-knit relationships that characterise such societies have been replaced by fragmented and distributed social networks and sub groups - pockets of friends from where we grew up, went to college, the variety of jobs we've had, who are unlikely to know each other and geographically dispersed. This, says Dunbar, means that communities are no longer as self-policing as they once were. It's easier to offend or step out of line in one community and retreat to the relative safety of another. Quoted in the current issue of Wired:

"...the price we pay for having more personal freedom is that we lose social cohesion on the larger scale. We become less committed to our neighbours and each other. If we are to survive in the global village, we must somehow find a way to recreate that sense of community."

I can see his point, but find myself wondering about the real impact of technology in all this. Technology has facilitated diffused networks and communities often on a global scale, diminishing the exigency of proximity and making it easier than ever to maintain a group of friends, or multiple groups of friends, wherever they might be around the globe. Yet many seem to derive a sense of belonging and fulfillment from online communities (however dispersed they might be) that are fluid, often overlap and are seemingly capable of self-moderation. The formation of collaborative groups has become easier than ever. And technology is as effective at bringing people together in localised, neighbourhood communities as it is on a global scale.

So is technology contributing more toward social fragmentation or cohesion? Do our own limitations, and our increasing mobility facilitated by technology mean that it is diminishing our sense of community and belonging, or might it just be providing the very connections we need to help keep it alive?