Studio Non Troppo

Photo: Banana Donuts ~ Half Baked Photography

I’ve been reading some occasional writings by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, and a vague response I was feeling when I reached the ends of a few them has become clearer, at least somewhat.  Adams wrote columns and also had a website in which he would send some of his wonderful, zany ideas out into the world and then, at the end, he would have some kind of cobbled-together, non-really-sequitor paragraph asking, essentially, “what do you think?”

It’s now obvious to me what I think was going on, because I recognize the symptoms in myself. On one hand, Adams had thought up something he liked thinking about, liked stirring around in his mind, and gotten himself to sit down and hammer the thing out, maybe revising a bit, maybe not. He complained constantly about writing but was drawn to it inexorably, too. So this bit, the part about having an idea, and playing with it, and then sitting down and writing about it, seems familiar to me.

I don’t think Adams was a greedy man; it’s not as if he would only agree to write something or send it out over the airwaves if he were guaranteed huge payments in return. That’s not how “play” works. At the same time, he wasn’t just interested in reading his own words…or in forcing people to read his words. I think of what he did as more like spontaneous, playful sharing, like an impromptu dance (I know this completely overlooks the whole editing aspect).

On the other hand, add to this, in the case of his columns and his website, which was an early attempt at this sort of thing, that Adams was looking in these cases for some back and forth. Some conversation. His H2G2 site was really trying to build an online community, as far as I can tell. And that’s where the “what do you think?” paragraphs come from. He was struggling with the ignition side of a conversation. Struggling in part because it was like a pick up line in a bar, uttered to someone he didn’t know personally but felt he wanted to know. Struggling also because it wasn’t part of the playful playing with the idea that had generated the rest of the column. So it was like this: spontaneous, impromptu dance, followed by feeling a need to deliver a pickup line to someone we don’t know but think we want to be talking with.

I recognize this now, because it is my experience with blogging. A little impromptu dance (in my mind at first, as an idea), and then it meets the constipating influences of my “responsible adult” brain and my “I’m trying to have a conversation” brain.  The “responsible adult” brain is the atavistic guilt telling me that I should be doing something “useful” or “productive.” The “trying to have a conversation” brain is my loneliness in not having more impromptu dance partners, more bizarre and brilliant half wits and one-and-a-half wits around, responding to the clearly nutso world we inhabit (frequently wonderfully nutso) by dancing at it. So that loneliness, with the carrot/used-car-salesman con of “the blog is the solution to your existential orange alert,” leads me to try to public-ify my dance, write it down in a blog entry, and close with “what do you think?”

I’ve had some generous commenters on the blog, who have made feel less silly about sending out so many pickup lines, but, and I guess I’m pretty slow to pick up on these things – shortcomings I’ve heard people talking about for years and have probably even pontificated on myself – the online world isn’t doing it for me, as far as the dance partners go. For a while, I tried to get myself around that by making an effort to find other people’s online dances, but it was still a pretty hollow feeling. I love all the context that comes from being in the same room, on the same physical dance floor, as another person. Text alone, graphics, audio, video – they don’t cut it for me.

Trying to use a computer screen as a window to the larger world sounds great, but I don’t want to be limited to making up the context for the characters I spy through that window. I’d rather be dancing in person, with people. My favorite writers make me feel that way, oddly enough. It’s lower bandwidth than my computer; it’s even completely asynchronous in that some of the writers, like Douglas Adams, aren’t alive today. But the writing can still make me feel (is it just imagining?) that Douglas and Doug would be, could have been, are, partners and friends.

I’m not going to write a “what do you think?” paragraph here. I’m not sure what I’m going to write next, or whether. It’s tempting to write, “so long, and thanks for all the comments.”

But I won’t. Or at least I’ll write this little bit more to say hmm, this whole thing sure is a tough nut to crack. I did enjoy this little chat (thanks, Douglas). Who knows what’ll come next? (That’s a rhetorical question. Don’t fall for it.)

We humans tend to use categories a lot, at least as adults. Having a category allows us to save space in our brain; it’s like a compression system. By “compression system,” I just mean that it takes less brainpower to remember “a number whose six digits are eights” than to remember “eight hundred eighty eight thousand, eight hundred eighty eight” (it’s also easier to type).

So when someone asks me, “what do you do?”, it’s easy for me to reply that I am a professor. Or that I am a conductor. Or that I am a blogger.

Of course, I’m not principally a blogger. And, frankly, I feel uncomfortable with the statements “I am a professor” and “I am a conductor,” too. They’re convenient replies; they take considerably less time and brainpower to speak than it would to figure out and communicate my existential nature.

It can be good to take the easy way out and lean on a category. After all, I don’t want to bore absolutely everyone with endless self-analysis. But categories should be tools we can use to think; we shouldn’t let ourselves be the tools of categories.

So the next time you are trying to solve a problem, consider whether the categories you’re using to describe the problem are helping you solve it…or boxing you in.

Recently, there was a big scuffle at the university where I work: should the mountain in the logo be blue (as it is currently) or yellow? All sorts of complaints and tomfoolery, made unintentionally comic by several individuals’ use of the “reply all” button to emails that had been sent out to the campus-wide mailing list.

But with all the discussion and gratuitous character assassination, one point was ignored: if a brand is supposed to represent an entity, there has to be an entity to represent. A brand can’t do all the work of standardizing and unifying on its own.

There are many different ideas of what this particular university is, what “its” goals are (which begs the question of what is “it”), and what “its” goals should be, and these different ideas are protean, in flux, none definitively unifying the constituents.

If the brand had been designed to correspond closely to one of those identities, some people would be supportive, and others would dissent, but there would at least be an active correspondence, one that the supportive folks could leverage in their work and that the dissenting folks could rally around and against. But the brand is sufficiently vague so as to avoid choosing sides.

So it doesn’t brand.

To the outside observer, the university’s brand either fails to indicate and represent an identity, or it indicates and represents a failure to create identity.

“Complexity” and “chaos” are commonly used words that have both everyday and technical meanings. In their technical incarnations, both complexity theory and chaos theory deal in part with cases in which it’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen next.

For chaos theory, think “butterfly effect.” Tiny changes in the initial conditions of a system can have (under certain circumstances) immense effects down the line.

For complexity theory, think “network.” A free, viral YouTube video can have a profound effect on the public’s perception of a company in spite of the company’s multimillion dollar advertising budget.

Even if your system is complex (and not all systems are), that doesn’t mean you can determine in advance which YouTube video will go viral, and even if your system is chaotic (and not all systems are), that doesn’t mean you can tell which huge effect the butterfly will have down the line.

When the system you are in is complex or chaotic, you’ve got to get over the idea that you’re going for mastery. Mastery, predictability, and control just don’t stack up in complex or chaotic systems the way they do in other contexts.

Instead, cultivate fluid response and resilience.

In Seth Godin’s post today, he uses an example of a fuel conservation problem to illustrate the practical limitations and pitfalls of coming across logic (in this case, arithmetic):

A simple quiz for smart marketers:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

• Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
• Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)

Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it’s more than twice as good a move).

We’re not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive.

I’ll focus on the “trick question” part and leave the math to the reader (Seth also includes a couple links in his post with demonstrations of the arithmetic.)

In all likelihood, the best answer to the problem would be c) none of the above. Replacing the Suburbans with 50 mpg Priuses – or even with cars that get just 20 miles per gallon – would be far better than either of the alternatives. And that’s obviously only one of many alternatives, including radical ones such as “walk!” These aren’t answers Seth is unaware of; he was just making his point about arithmetic, confusion, and deception.

The point I want to make in this post is this:

Optimizing a bad choice rarely gets you ahead of where you could be if you made a better choice.

Photo: davco9200

Your “power band” is where you’re most effective.

Maybe you can alphabetize the files, but with that Ph.D. in Information Architecture, maybe that’s not the best use of your talents.

Or maybe you could teach college students, but you shine with middle schoolers.

Or maybe you know you can help people solve their problems using negotiation and facilitation techniques, but you find that when people are forced to listen to you, you only manage moderate, treading-water style solutions, whereas when people come seek you out to get unstuck, you effect game changing innovation.

Working outside of your power band might not make things worse, but it doesn’t efficiently make things better.

If you have the choice to work in your power band, that’s great.  Many times, of course, you’re told to work outside of it.  Keep on the lookout for ways back in.  You owe it to yourself and to the people you can help.

It’s called “eighty-twenty” or the Pareto Principle: you get 80% of the bang from 20% of the buck. That’s one way to think of it. Here are some others:

• the top 20% of your customers provide 80% of your orders
• the worst 20% of your clients provide 80% of you headaches (OK, that might be an understatement!)
• the last 20% of “getting the job done” takes 80% of the time (whether or not you’ve budgeted that much time)

Photo: Denzil~

Eighty-twenty is a rule of thumb, not a rule of law (or even of mathematics), so instead of feeling sentenced to the consequences, you can use it as a starting point to reflect on what you’re doing and not doing.

Sometimes, it’s worth doing all 100%. Other times, it’s worth stopping after you’ve done the big-payoff 20%, using elsewhere the resources you’ve freed up by not continuing into the diminishing-returns region of the remaining 80%. Using eighty-twenty as one of your reflective tools, a tool to help to decide what to do and what not to do, can give you back the feeling that you have a choice.

Photo: PhotoDu.de

Yesterday, I saw a relatively new iPhone app called App Incubator, with which anyone can send in ideas for a new iPhone app. A development team will review the ideas and decide whether to build the application. If they build it and get it into the Apple app store as a paid application, the person who sent in the idea will get a percentage of the revenues.

I haven’t read any of the fine print, but I did start wondering about all the usual questions surrounding new “intellectual property” in the form of ideas: on one hand, it’s easy to feel protective, even secretive, out of fear that someone else will profit from “our” ideas; on the other hand, without sharing ideas, it’s a pretty sure thing that nothing will happen. A Golem-like reluctance to exchange ideas puts too much friction into the innovation process, interest wanes, and development stops.

Even though I’m versed in the issues on an intellectual level, I was surprised to discover how anxious this new application made me feel. It focused a lens on my self-perception: I think of myself as one who can come up with lots and lots of new ideas, and I would welcome rewards in return. I did immediately find myself generating many potential iPhone app ideas, even in my sleep (I woke up with my head full). But I also felt a possessiveness, a hesitation to give these ideas away too readily, even though any idea without its realization wouldn’t generate any financial compensation, anyway.

Everyone comes up with ideas. But the people whose minds seem optimized for the generation of new ideas are usually not the people who find it easy to push through the realization of any one, given idea. Idea generators are nomadic, and idea “realizers” are agricultural by temperament. App Incubator is one model for a partnership between the two types.

Certainly, other models are possible, but any ideas for alternatives will themselves need to be realized. Whether it’s called “bootstrapping,” “it takes two to tango,” “complexity theory,” or “mutual arising,” all beginnings are difficult.