October 2006 - Posts
I'm a fan of IT Conversations. Recently they published the audio portion of a presentation delivered by Kathan Brown. If my view on this subject is that creativity can be approached in a systematic and rigorous fashion, it would appear (I've not yet read the book) Kathan would adopt what is at least an orthogonal view.
Here's the link to the audio: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1560.html
From Kathan's site:
The Magical Secrets
1. Cultivate Sensuality
2. Use a Lot of Time
3. Get into the Flow
4. Have an Idea
5. Don’t Know What You Want
6. Know What You Don’t Want
7. Stick Your Neck Out
8. Use Every Tool
9. Use Every Source
10. Become Skillful
11. Take Yourself Lightly
12. Go into the Ether
13. Own It
These are the Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively, from the book, "Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life."
I like Magical secrets 1, 7, 10, and 11 right off the bat. I just might like 3 depending upon whether or not we're talking about flow or Flow. I'm worried about 12. Ether? And number 4? Seems to me that's the nut.
Looks like I'm going to have to read the book.
Why is investment in online community communications -- specifically enabling social networking and social computing -- unlike most innovative efforts you'll ever undertake? Two reasons: the strategy is rock solid, and the community will do all the real innovating. How can the strategy be considered so solid, and what would ever entice the community to do all the innovating? The same thing answers both questions: genes.
(http://members.cox.net/darkened-past/evolution.html)
It is that simple. Birds flock, fish school, people associate with one another, and some of those associations we call community. We are a social species. We are a "we". Community, broadly, is among the adaptive responses our species -- our evolutionary lineage in fact -- has developed to cope with the requirements of survival in the complex adaptive landscapes we have inhabited, and that clearly characterize our lives today.
What's changed now is only the revolution in community that has emerged from the evolutionary development of several internet technologies relating to personal publishing, web20-style development, and syndication.
At least the communications world.
This makes the strategy unassailable. People are hardwired to associate and to use those associations to achieve their own goals. Give people the opportunity to interact and they will. Increase the communications capacity of your audience and they will -- in time -- make the best possible use of it. Even if you can't foresee what they'll use it for. (Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, felt the telephone would be most useful as a means of broadcasting symphonies and news. He did not anticipate it's popularity as a means of 1:1 interaction.)
Sadly, that doesn't mean that the tactics are foolproof. There's a lot of room for error in exactly how we deliver these new communications tools to our customers. Plainly, an agile methodology is called for that assumes some missteps and focuses on short turnaround iterative development. What's the right path?
To decide what to build we elected to stick with the basics:
- Know your customers as individuals
- On the basis of that knowledge help to connect them to experts and peers (emphasis on peers)
- Given them venues in which to interact
- Reward them for participation.
We have projects aligned with each of those four pillars.
Along with those basics, we've adopted the following user experience design principles:
- Every customer visit should result in a community connection
- Let customers feel the presence of others
- Customers are in control of their self expression and their consumption
- Customers should have access to the tracks they leave
- Build for the long tail
- Wed participation architecture with personal utility and a focus on a specific activity
We believe we can deliver on each of those design principles through tight integration between the components. (Will we get it right the first time? Probably not. But we're in it for the long haul.)
As far as I know, we didn't actually create any of those principles -- they're a product of the community of people interested in social software. It's our community; one which we appreciate; and one in which we make every effort to contribute to.
In part one I put forward the view that creativity could be learned. In this post I'll discuss how. Or, more accurately, how we've tried to get ourselves out of the box. Be warned, the timing of this post is not ideal. The fruits of this process, for us, won't appear in their full glory until next spring. I'm even reluctant to talk about them until they get out the door. So that leaves us with just another post about creativity from just another guy with an opinion. (You never know, perhaps in several months you'll catch us on MSNBC waving to the crowds through a blizzard of biodegradable ticker tape. Okay, maybe not.)
In any event, there are essentially two major tracks and I believe both must be followed. The first is learning the techniques of lateral thinking. We'll talk a bit about that in this post. The second is broadening your conceptual bag of tricks. That we'll save for part three.
There are no lack of books on the subject of creative technique. One of my favorites is by Edward DeBono. 
Edward is a little outspoken about his own contributions to the subject of thinking skills, but if you can look past that, he really does have a lot to offer.
Another one I enjoyed was by Michael Michalko. 
I enjoyed this because it included some interesting tidbits about several creative geniuses. I'm not sure how much you can expect to gain from trying to emulate geniuses, but it's interesting nonetheless.
I do feel compelled to add that there are lots and lots of these sorts of books, that I personally have about a dozen of them on my shelves, and they all say much the same thing. Pick one that sounds good and be satisfied. Developing the discipline to put what it says to use is by far the biggest challenge. Don't make the mistake I made substituting reading the books about creativity instead of actually working on it.
The focus, for the most part, is on techniques to get you out of your habitual patterns of thought. DeBono offers many. Which one you choose is a matter of which you can tolerate. For instance, one technique involves associating a random word with a given problem and then free associating with the random word as the starting point. I've found this to be very effective -- though it took me a long time to give myself permission to do it. I know that may sound strange, but free association is just not something traditional educations prepare you for. To my dismay, I tried it with my 15-year-old son and he was no better -- in fact, he was worse. He simply refused to participate.
On the other hand, another common tactic is to state the opposite of an assumption underlying the problem space. Then you force yourself to come up with as many working answers based upon the new, and opposite, assumption. For combative personality types, this often presents a lower barrier to entry. The point here is to force yourself to find alternatives. If you give up after one or two (or zero) half-hearted attempts, essentially acknowledging that the assumption is valid and must not be contradicted, you're not playing the game right. In other words, this is much beyond the simple admonishment to question assumptions. That's a good thing to do anyway, but rarely does it get you onto something entirely new.
We ran with the latter exercise on the subject of customer behavior information and I'm in the process of getting legal approval for something we wouldn't have considered -- would not have been thinkable -- before the exercise. I'm meeting some folks at the Web2.0 conference in SF in a couple of weeks to explore it. Stay tuned.
This OPML Generator idea is clearly right up my alley. Kudos to Andyed for pulling it together.
I've been whispering about the relevance of social network placement in every Live(.com) ear that would listen for well over a year. I took my present position at Microsoft.com in part to deliver a service of that sort to IT professionals and developers. And in fact we are heading in that direction, but that's another story altogether.
I don't want to overstate the case with the OPML Generator. It's a Live.com search using the "Feed:" filter with some very nice features added that make it easy to select which feeds among the results returned should be saved as an OPML file.
Andy's timing was personally interesting. I had just delivered an OPML file to a colleague on the subjects of social software and web20 (that was strange experience). So it occurred to me to search the OPML Generator for social software and web 2.0 and compare the results with the collection I'd just delivered. There was only about a ten percent overlap.
All of my "top of the long tail curve" entries were represented, but as I should have expected, none of my farther out on the long tail entries made the cut. I decided this was not so good.
On the other hand there were a few feeds offered that I was not familiar with and about half of them turned out to be worth further attention. That was decidedly a good thing.
There were several feeds included in the OPML Generator generated list that are popular, well known to me, and intentionally not included in my list. I was undecided about that, but in the spirit of a marketplace of ideas determined it tended towards a good thing.
So, thought I, what's going on here. Why would the two lists be so different if both were supposed to accomplish the same thing? Especially if we consider that the ranking algorithms used by search relate to hits and links (in, out, and bidirectional). That sounds like exactly the sort of data set that would describe a social network.
I think the reason is related to how strange it was pulling my own recommended feeds list together in the first place. I realized, while studying my own feed reader and the many feeds I follow, that it really was my list. I'm not talking here about greedily holding on to my secret list. It's more like the list of feeds I follow are tuned to me. They fit the contours, so to speak, of my knowledge and experience. They've evolved over time in lock step with my own development.
Let me try to put it another way. I have feeds in my RSSBandit of bloggers whose opinions make me cringe. I almost never agree with anything they say. However, I came to understand some time ago that despite the aggravation I feel reading them, I almost always end up with a better perspective having subjected myself to them. If they knew about me, I like to think they'd feel the same way. I'm sure that's true as concerns the aggravation part.
Also, lots of my feeds are from "little guys" like myself; people that aren't linked to broadly; people that are not trying for blogger stardom, but are instead just chronicling their journey. They tend to have the greatest value to me.
As I've said elsewhere, top of the long curve bloggers generally prattle on about what I call water-cooler talk. I may have a social responsibility to remain conversant with it, but it has little or nothing to do with the things that occupy me most of the day.
So where does that leave the OPML Generator and feed search generally. It is at least a reasonable place to start. That's certainly true when you consider the alternatives. And in fact, I've decided to add a feed search to my reader just in case something interesting does show up there -- you never know. But this whole area is just begging for a better solution.
It should go without saying -- but I'll make it clear anyway -- that the views expressed herein are exclusively my own. If my boss should see this, or his boss (or heaven forbid his boss), please consider this in the spirit in which it is offered. And that is pretty spirited.
Anyway, a short while ago I resurrected some old work of mine in a post called "Recasting of Citizens and Pioneers". The whole thing boils down to this:
"...my PC generation and our understanding of the internet as a reference source where the name of the game is content discovery, and my kids generation and their notion of the internet as a social space [and connection is king]."
I suspect, as is so often the case, that the greatest benefits will accrue to those that learn to leverage the best of both worlds.
It is of course true: the internet is a vast reference source. Finding your way around in it remains a skill -- sadly. Sadly in that it would be a better internet if it were easier to find the right content at just the right time. But we continue to make progress in that regard.
It is also true that the internet is a social space. And traversing that social space is no less a trial for anyone new to the online neighborhood than high powered internet research is for my WOW Commander, clan member, guild lieutenant, vent-jacked teenage son.
In the middle is the domain of the latest generation of knowledge worker. These players filter, flag, and forward content discoveries thereby contributing cycles to their social network. They are jacked into a software enabled shared human processing community that supercharges every participant. (BTW, this is the game my team and I are determined to bring to every Microsoft IT professional and developer.)
So that should make your corporate online strategy clear. You need both, and you need them in at least an even mix.
Nevertheless, it's a safe bet that if you're part of a medium to large size company that's been around for at least 10 or twenty years, you have a web presence that is focused almost exclusively upon content publication. Your entire machine is built around the notion of maintaining a display of quality content that matches as closely as possible the expressed needs of your consumers. And that is good, as far as it goes.
But right about now is the time to start making the move towards a more balanced approach. Why, is probably a good question to ask. I won't even begin to wade into the sea of good reasons. If you want to skim the surface, read Scoble's book.
He makes a number of good points and provides a wealth of examples.
If you want something a little deeper -- it's a bit dated but still tells a damn good story -- try The Cluetrain Manifesto.
Lots of good stuff and available online.
The next good question might be when. I don't think I can dispassionately answer that question given that I've clearly made the career decision to focus on social computing. Hell, to me it seems clear that you move as quickly as you possibly can.
But, the right answer might have to do with the "Clockspeed" of your industry. I while ago I read a book by that title and some of the key lessons remained with me.
I believe that generally speaking the faster your industry's clockspeed, the more likely it is you will benefit from the new internet "social" model, and therefore, the more urgent the need to move quickly. I have argued internally, and intend to prove, that Microsoft customers -- our IT professional and developer customers specifically -- have a great deal to gain from coming to understand how to navigate internet social spaces. Anything we can do to accelerate that awareness and understanding, not to mention adoption and support therein, we should do.
I was recently speaking with an associate looking for change-the-game ideas to overcome an apparently impossible competitive situation -- and still make money.
Now as a person that manages creative teams, and considers himself capable of the occasional lateral turn, I really ought to have some answers right off the top of my head -- right? I mean, don't creative types just run around wearing non-traditional clothing, and spouting zany, out-of-the-box, spontaneous sorts of things?
Perhaps some do, but I'm certainly not cut from that cloth.
No, I take a far more rigorous approach. I believe creativity can be learned. Similar to drawing, or playing a musical instrument, with diligent practice anyone can develop some real skill. In my view greatness in any field is a combination of hard work, environment, and genetics. But anyone can develop sufficient skill to significantly differentiate them from those that didn't make the effort.
I am compelled to point out that the effort to develop your creativity is no less difficult, and no less time consuming, than developing skill at anything else. You will have to work at it -- and not just a little if you expect any sort of real gain. And because part of the effort involves learning altogether new skills, you can count on frustration and frequent failures. You can count on it. In fact, it's a requirement.
And it's risky. Like playing a musical instrument, every now and again you play a sour note. Sadly, to many an ear, a lot of creative output plays like sour notes.
That is so much true, that most people never consider exposing their creative efforts. In my world, the long term result is an over-reliance upon customer input, competitive analysis, forms, process, and a "that job is done this way" mentality. And of course those results reinforce the behaviors that spawned them. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I am a lucky man for many reasons. One of them is that I get to manage a creative team, and another is that my broader group is growing more and more tolerant of us every day -- and I do appreciate it.
Coming Soon -- Part 2: My personal "free-the-mind" workout.
Korby and I have been experimenting with Opinity. You can see my Opinity badge over under my "News" heading.
Straight from the Opinity site:
Now supporting OpenID and Windows Cardspace
Opinity Profile Exchange
Share your information with others and gain trust. Securely and selectively.
Need to buy or sell something? Use Opinity Profile Exchange to gain trust.
Classifieds
Share your information with the one you want, no one else. Securely and selectively.
Dating
Put a button on your blog so that people can request your profile.
Blogs
Or any place where you want to be trusted!
I don't know about "trusted" but I can attest to verified. I failed to pass the verification test myself the first time through. Apparently they're also cardspace partners -- that makes them my partner too. Hmmm, I'd bet there are some things we could do with this.