Putting people in boxes

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I know I'll be dating myself, but back in the day I used to be very sensitive to someone wanting to label someone as a techie. I considered it then, and still consider it to be a derogatory term. It was an attempt to define you by a single dimension, and to limit your input to a particular element of the discourse. It was mostly used by people who wanted to tell you what to do, and who rarely wanted your input on why, what they were wanting to do, was unlikely to work. So whenever I heard the word it caught my attention as the idea that followed was often quite clueless.

I've worked pretty actively with technology since 1978. Back in those days you became a techie mostly through self-learning. I guess there were computer clubs to be found, but certainly not in the area of California where I lived. So what I learned, I learned almost entirely on my own. I had a diverse background. I had expertise in several areas, but technology was not really one of them. Granted, I knew a lot more about it than most people, but in reality I was (and still am) a neophyte. So I was most definitely not a techie, and I found people's attempts to define me as such insulting. (And I still do.)

So it was with great interest yesterday when an email crossed my screen describing a soon-to-be very important and influential person as a technocrat. My radar went up immediately. First, as I read the person's bio I didn't see any technology in their background at all. This was, by anyone's estimation an extremely accomplished person. It was a bio that quite seriously would blow you away, and yet the person was still quite young. So to describe this person as a technocrat to me seemed quite odd. It's one step worse than describing them as a techie.

To me, it spoke volumes about the author while telling me little about the subject. It was not used as a term-of-endearment. It was a very public display of a lack of respect. (Did someone forget to mention to the author that emails are public today?) What makes this particular example more interesting is that the subject is soon to be in a position of tremendous influence.

We're going to see many more of these clashes of culture as the next generation ascends to leadership. Starting-off by name calling doesn't bode well. I feel for those who think it's appropriate to begin a relationship by using derogatory terms to describe their new colleague. Having to start by mending fences is never good.

The looming clash of cultures

Yesterday afternoon the family went to see State of Play. It was an entertaining movie with an engaging and plausible storyline. I was, however, taken by the subplot which paired a veteran Washington Reporter played by Russell Crowe with a younger blogger played by Rachel McAdams who worked in the papers "online" division. It was a very subtle subplot but it worked. He had a visible disrespect for the online division, she thought he was mostly clueless, he considered her somewhat inexperienced and naive. In the end it was journalism that brought them together, and the development of just enough mutual respect that allowed them to focus on what was most important, getting the story.

The movie handled it really well. As I mentioned, it was subtle, and allowed the subplot to develop without detracting from the main plot. It also didn't take sides, or denigrate the position of either character. It was a happy ending. I'm not so sure that in real life that many of our organizations who will live through the looming cultural change will fair so well. If only life were like the movies.

I've been thinking about this a lot of late. How we're living in these two parallel worlds: pre and post the Big Change. Most know that change is necessary, but are uncertain of the path forward. I've written about this many times in the past. People aren't just sitting back and watching the change happen-- they are actively resisting. (See: The Empty Quarter November 2006)

I was thinking about this a bunch yesterday while watching the movie. I'd just read three excellent articles on this very topic. The first was from Dave Snowden on how the old-school IT departments are resisting 2.0: Beware the blanket octopodes

...it was to my mind a perfect description of how too many an IT department treats social computing. Creating net-like membranes that disproportionately exaggerate their role was a good start. However the perfect piece was ripping off the tentacles of the poor old Portuguese man of war and using them for defensive purposes. I've seen this too often of recent years, reluctantly dragged into the world of social computing which they only partially understand, the first reaction is to dismember it into something familiar and controllable, then use it as a weapon to fend off reform.

Then there was this piece from ReadWriteWeb on some new reasearch from LexisNexis: The Technology Generation Gap at Work is Oh So Wide

Yikes! Phones and PDAs are distracting and inefficient tools? Blogging is unacceptable? Who are these people? Unfortunately, they're the people who still have a lot of power when it comes to the decisions being made at the workplace. Baby boomers are the executives, the CEOs, the bosses, etc. while Gen Y is just now getting their foot in the door. But it's clear that these two generations strongly disagree on how technology is to be used.

Finally there was this piece by Xerox researcher Venkatesh Rao: Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War

The uber-cause of this war is that Knowledge Management was conceived as a top-down Boomer (born 1946 - 62) management effort, created by this generation just as it was moving into leadership positions. Social Media, on the other hand, is a Millenial/Gen Y (born 1980 -) movement. This overall generational cultural divide has shaped the ongoing corporate cultural war. This leads to vast, and I mean truly VAST, differences in how the two movements approach enterprise social engineering...

I don't know how you can read these three articles and come away with any other conclusion than, we have a serious problem here! Unless you've been living in a cave the last five years, I think it's clear to everyone that organizations have to make the transition to newer more democratic, flatter, open, and transparent ways of working. You either make the change or die. It's that simple. Social computing technologies are how we're going to get there: wikis, blogs, microblogs, social networks, blah blah, blah... AND YET, the current generation of leadership (see: The looming leadership paradox) is supposed to take us there? Tell me how this is supposed to happen?

Which brings us to the clash of strategies. There are basically two approaches being advocated-- the long-slow-one, where it happens through evolution. We know how this story ends, the current leadership eventually retires and the mantle of leadership is left to the next generation. Most people, including myself, don't think enterprises have this kind of time. The second approach, you create safe-havens for this newer and more modern style of working to emerge. Skunkworks if you will. This is exactly the approach that Venkatesh Rao advocates in this Stowe Boyd interview at the Enterprise 2.0 blog: Open Enterprise 2009: Venkatesh Rao, Xerox

Venkatesh argues that ‘culture change is hard’ may be an excuse for not pushing hard to get adoption to happen. “It’s part of people playing the Impossible Problem Game.” If you set up something as culture change, then everyone frames it as impossible, like boiling the ocean. You should look for a more ‘Darwinian survival of the fittest’ model, where various alternatives are envisioned as competing with each other.

Agreed! Forget cultural change, forget transformation, forget teaching old-dogs new tricks. Find those pockets of emerging culture within your organization, protect them, shield them, feed and nurture them, and let them set up competing models for getting the job done. You want tons of safe-fail experiments. Survival of the fittest at its best. Let them duke-it-out, and may the best model win.

The delusional news media-- newspaper version

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An interesting, but not reality-based read from the SF Gate: Web firms must pay for newspapers' work:

In France, newspapers are in trouble, just as they are here in the United States. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, wants to give 18-year-olds a free subscription to the paper of their choice.

What does he think this will accomplish? I stopped taking my local paper when I realized it'd been six months since I'd even taken it out of its plastic sleeve. Then it took me another year to get them to stop delivery. So it was essentially free, but I never read it.

The only thing that giving 18-year-olds free subscriptions is going to accomplish is to kill more trees. Guess that's good for the newsprint industry, perhaps: World's biggest newsprint co. files for bankruptcy.

The all new HighTouch book club

Image via CrunchBase

Back in December we tried an experiment with starting a book club using the technology found at BookSprouts:

I've created the Hightouch book club, the place for us to read and discuss books that touch on the intersection of technology and culture (loosely defined). I've nominated a couple of books for reading, but it's a social site, and y'all can suggest books for the club to read. The site has a database of pretty much every book ever written so adding new suggestions is super easy. I set the initial ramp-up period on the longish side--10 days.Please join, suggest books, and be ready to cast your vote for our first read.

I've pretty much declared the first book club a failure. We had a good group of people subscribe to the club, we voted on a book to read, we gave everyone some time to purchase the book and start reading, we started the discussion, and we made it slightly halfway through the book with some good discussion. At least I thought it was a good discussion. Then the conversation died.

We could debrief the failure, but I'm not going to. It'd be easy to blame it on the technology, but that is rarely the reason these things fail. I'm just going to proclaim it a failure and move on. I'm ready to announce the new HighTouch Book Club. It is quite simply a FriendFeed feed. You can subscribe to the feed here: HighTouch Book Club.

Here's how it works:

1. I pick a book. (I'm open to suggestions, however.)
   
2. I post notes about what I'm reading to the feed.
3. Anyone can read along and post their thoughts as well.
   
4. Whether you're reading the book or not everyone is welcome to post their comments.

That's it. Pretty simple. I read. You read. We comment. When we're done we move on to the next.

The club's first book is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Please join us.

Peer review inhibiting science?

Image via Wikipedia

This study from Canada helps to make the point concerning wasted dollars in the whole research cycle that might be better spent on actual science: Cost of peer review exceeds the cost of giving every researcher a grant

Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant).

The article goes on to make the point that perhaps we should be spreading the funding around with the hopes of seeing more diversity and innovation in discovery.

It's just another example of the massive overhead and waste in the current system, and how some disintermediation of the control points just might lead to better science. We need some new models that better reflect what the new technologies have enabled.

Openness and higher education-- how do we get there?

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In a great Slideshare presentation, Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education, David Wiley asks: How might we open things up? Higher education needs to figure this out.

I started giving this some thought and decided to make a list:

• Video cameras in every classroom-- Streamed and archived video of everything. The world is invited into every activity of the academy. This is a first step. Eventually we have to lose the whole concept of a classroom and even a campus. Learning is not place-bound.
• Intellectual property-- Close the university intellectual property offices. All formerly copyrightable materials are released into the commons: Creative Commons 3.0. Patentable discoveries are released into the public domain. It's that easy.
• Open textbooks-- No commercial textbooks allowed. Faculty are strongly encouraged to contribute to and participate in open-textbook projects. Every faculty member is evaluated today on a public service component. A simple question could be added to all faculty evaluations: What are you doing to support the commons?
  
• Open-courseware-- All course materials are released to the commons. No exceptions.
• Credit hours-- Anything based on a measurement of time is meaningless. Time-based learning is a throwback to the industrial age. Some things we learn fast, some things take longer. One thing is certain, none of us learn at the same pace. Openness requires freeing learning from these types of artificial constraints.
• Embrace open-learning-- Being learner centered requires the use of the tools used by the learner. So embrace blogs, Facebook , and other forms of social networking. Go to where the students are, and stop expecting them to come to us. Higher education needs to embrace the concept of Personal Learning Environments and ditch the whole Course Management System thing. Stop spending millions on Blackboard and Moodle too. There is nothing social constructionist about Moodle-- so stop the lie. The only people who should be managing learning are the learners themselves.
  
• Tuition--If credit hours are absurd then so is a system of paying for an education based on that artificial unit. Students are paying for a lot of things when they decide to attend a university. That the payment is bundled into the unit of instruction is nothing short of odd. Openness mandates that the payment for education be done entirely different.
• Peer assessment-- Faculty who teach no longer assess. Assessment needs to be separated from learning. In a world where most learning is socially constructed the competitive model of assessment is a severe impediment.
  
• Departments/disciplines-- Eliminate them entirely. Move to self organizing communities of learners and scholars that are not discipline-based. Silos are so last century.
• Open research-- Open data, open notebooks, open labs... Complete transparency from start to finish.
• Tenure-- Employment for life? Yeah right. Openness requires a much more porous movement of intellectual talent both in and out of the academy. In addition, the costs for managing the whole process are obscene. These cognitive cycles should be focused on something more important.
• ...

This was done off the top of my head. What'd I miss? What doesn't belong on the list? What can't possibly work? The floor is yours...