December 2011
69 posts
We have been badly in need of a framework that...
Taken from An essay on complex adaptive systems
For the most part, social scientists and practitioners are trained erroneously in believing that social change phenomena, much like “raising a child,” can be predicted, controlled, and achieved in linear steps and with a high degree of certainty. This problematic prevailing mindset “if we do this to people, they will behave in...
Planning the Unpredictable
Taken from An essay on complex adaptive systems
…operative planning usually follows a complicated, linear, step-by-step approach. These planning methods require that an organization plan its mission and goals in terms of actions, activities, outputs, outcomes and measurable results.
But does social reality work that way? First, not all social processes are linear, meaning that not every...
Leave best practices and pre-defined evaluation...
Taken from An essay on complex adaptive systems
Complex systems learn new strategies from experience, and they are shaped and influenced by where they have been…
Evaluations and impact assessment are another challenge for organizations…generally positive results demonstrated by impact evaluations of….strategies…have created expectations of regularity and predictability...
Complexity science provides the tools that help...
Taken from An essay on complex adaptive systems
The issues discussed here are not new. Indeed, some of the “answers” proposed by complexity science are not new. But as some complexity theorists state: “In many contexts, these ‘answers’ were not explainable by theory.” They were the intuitive responses known by many but appeared illogical, or at least...
How system SHOULD behave vs how systems ACTUALLY...
Taken from An essay on complex adaptive systems
…instead of describing how systems should behave, complexity science focuses the analysis on the interdependencies and interrelationships among their elements to describe how systems actually behave…control is distributed rather than centralized, meaning that the outcomes emerge from a process of self-organization rather than being...
Rather than seeking to change individual...
Taken from An essay on complex adaptive systems
“…while societies have to change, they have to decide for themselves how to change.”
Rather than seeking to change individual behaviour, it seeks to influence the social context in which individuals act and in which discussion about different aspects of daily life, both public and private, occurs…the system...
An essay on complex adaptive systems
Complexity science is not a single theory. It is a combination of various theories and concepts from a variety of disciplines—biology, anthropology, economy, sociology, management and others that studies complex adaptive systems (CAS).
All three terms in the name CAS are significant in the definition of a CAS:
Complex implies diversity, many connections among a wide variety of...
The bodies influence on decision-making
According to the mental number line theory, we think of numbers along a horizontal line with small numbers on the left and larger ones to the right. Rather than being specific to certain cultures, this seems to occur universally and may be due to the way in which the brain represents numbers. With this in mind, Anita Eerland and her colleagues hypothesized that secretly making people lean to the...
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“Someday all of our technology will learn to emotionally manipulate us. Your...”
– - Scott Adams
(via alysonsmediadiet:notational)
...is anybody watching TV, or is TV the new stereo...
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How does the dopamine reward system work?
Your internal “Reward System” is a collection of brain structures that regulate your behavior by making you feel good when you achieve a goal. Everything necessary for the survival of our species - eating, mating, sleeping, and physical perseverance - is rewarded by a flood of neurochemicals that make us feel good. This is a very generous biological design and at the same time...
Please don’t call it “game”-anything
My argument is, as simply as possible: What makes games fun and engaging is that they are purpose-built to afford intrinsically enjoyable activity - activity that is full of experiences of achievement, competence and learning, control and effectance, autonomy, suspense and relief, surprise and novelty, meaning and resonance, belonging and bonding. Playing games is not fun because playing is...
The difference between gamification, game...
What is Gamification?
At the most fundamental level, gamification is the use of game mechanics to drive game-like engagement and actions. The logic is dead simple. People love to play games. But in everyday life, we are often presented with activities we hate, whether it is boring chores or stressful works. Gamification is the process of introducing game mechanics into these abhorred activities...
The science of gamification - Michael Wu
- Michael Wu
Game dynamics often motivate people by positive feedbacks, such as accumulation of points, badges, status, progress, customization, pleasant surprises, etc.
How do game dynamics increase the ability for users to perform the target behavior? I’d like to clarify that, ability doesn’t always mean skills in this context. Ability can be time, attention, mental capacity, or any...
Engaged by entertainment, to self motivation, to...
The first type of games were willing to entertain kids to keep them engaged — the “just-make-it-fun” school of thought. But any standup comedian will tell you how tough it is to keep people entertained for long. It’s even harder with kids who outgrow the “fun” of a game faster than most games can evolve.
The Scratch camp is more about empowerment. Scratch...
Will gamification ruin the status quo
People already feel intrinsic motivation about their work, and games might just get in the way. Daniel Pink’s book Drive has been successful because (1) a lot of us recognize how much we want to do a good job, without reference to other rewards, and (2) as managers, we have to cultivate this intrinsic motivation in our employees.
Many developers already feel a great deal of intrinsic...
Gamification requires a perpetual bag of carrots
Gamification expert Gabe Zichermann made reference to the concept of over-justification, which refers to how children often lose their passion for an activity after entering competitions and not always winning.
In other words, the failure to maintain continuous employee rewards can be discouraging.
The majority of gamified programs are conceived and rolled out in order to achieve a goal that...
Gamification for loyalty is old news, what about...
There’s a definition of games that Jane McGonigal mentioned, that “a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Gamification comes in and removes the ‘unnecessary’ part. We’re no longer only trying to overcome obstacles merely because we want to, or because it’s fun, but we’re also trying to overcome real obstacles: how to be healthier, how to learn, how to stay connected...
Does reality exist without the mind?
Consider the famous two-slit experiment. When you watch a particle go through the holes, it behaves like a bullet, passing through one slit or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave and can pass through both slits at the same time. This and other experiments tell us that unobserved particles exist only as ‘waves of probability’ as the great Nobel...
Social bonding began as a way of adapting to a new...
Their key finding is that the main step change in social behaviour occurred when primates switched from being mainly active at night to being more active during the day. Primates started out as solitary foragers as by night they could survive by moving quietly on their own in the dark. However, once they switched to daytime activity, they could be seen and were more vulnerable to attack by...
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“Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity
The psychologist Dean Simonton...”
– Malcolm Gladwell, Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse via The New Yorker (via stoweboyd)
Gamification is a natural instinct to get by the...
A friend and I have committed to meeting weekday mornings from 6:45am – 7:15 for a video chat online where we set our agendas for the day, and review the activities of the previous day.
We started a google spreadsheet, “Daily Activities Tracker,” with each of us getting a dedicated page.
From there it’s pretty straightforward: “week of,” “expected completion date,” “status,” and “notes.”
We...
Transactions are outcomes of relationships and...
Doc reminded us of the market in the context of the Middle Eastern souk, where relationships come first, then conversations, then transactions.
Let’s look at Facebook in that context.
The Friend Graph is all about relationships.
The Timeline is all about conversations.
Yup, you know where they’re headed.
And they should. Relationship before conversation before transaction.
We’ve lived in a...
You don't have to write content to participate
In the older more established forms of internet collaboration (i.e. blogs, forums, wikis) the mapping was simple; content = value. Without new discussion threads, blog posts, and wiki pages, the 90% of lurkers would have nothing to read, search engines would have nothing to index, and the 10% of active/semi active contributors would have no audience and less motivation to contribute. Less...
We need to collaborate when no team has the...
Let’s start at the very beginning: what is collaboration?
The root word is composed of two parts: “co” and “labor.”
“Co” means “together,” and we all know that labour means work! So at its very basis “collaboration” is “together working,” or for our more modern tongues, “working together.”
Clearly that’s a very broad definition, and it needs to be unpacked to mean something. In my work, I...
An example of correlation is not causation
OK so the content of this post doesn’t matter as much as the result; but it’s a good story to illustrate how correlation is not causation.
Oxytocin gets a lot of press. And well it should. Recent findings on oxytocin have shown effects on trust, on generosity, on behaviors in austistic children even. Not to mention all the effects that oxytocin has on parental bonding and on your sex...
Offer of help can reduce anticipated effort
What can a box of potatoes teach us about the wonders of altruism? A whole lot, it turns out. A new study by researchers at Rutgers University examined perceptions about the weight of a box of potatoes when people expected to lift it themselves or with a partner. They found that estimates of the box’s weight by subjects expecting to lift it with a partner were significantly lower than the...
Active attention as opposed to passive attention
What’s the quality of attention on you by your Twitter followers…
Mine is 1.055…which means people pay attention to me…I just scraped in since the line is >1.00
I really like the idea of “Twitter lists” included into the attention mix. You could have 2000 followers or even 100, but how do you know they are reading your tweets. Just like your RSS stats (yeah...
“Influence is not like a suntan, it does not change that much based on *daily*...”
– Valdis Krebs
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“In my view, futurism (“strategic foresight,” “scenario planning”) is a...”
– - Jamais Cascio, The Future is a Virus (via stoweboyd)
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Think anew, Act anew: Scenario Planning
One of the key distinctions between military and commercial/government scenario planning is that in the latter case there is no enemy, or rather the enemy is the wider environment. Also the...
Habits and attitudes that impede collaboration
Collaboration involves two or more people coming together to share their collective knowledge, experience, and creativity to arrive at a shared understanding or tangible outcome that none of the individuals could have arrived at on their own. Collaboration is more complex than teamwork, which tends to operate in a sequential fashion to accomplish tasks or to join together to defend against...
Feel-good hormones may explain why certain...
Oxytocin, endorphins, serotonin and dopamine, in particular, are the body’s natural feel-good chemicals.
Oxytocin is an essential hormone that acts to increase each partner’s sense of safety and love in relation to the other. Endorphins are a reward mechanism inside the brain, released through exercise and other strenuous activities, to lower pain by producing good feelings. Serotonin is a...
Leaving babies to cry is a good way to make a less...
The 20th century was the time when “men of science” were assumed to know better than mothers, grandmothers and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human being. Funny how “the experts” got away with this with no evidence to back it up! Instead there is evidence all around (then and now) showing the...
The outsourcing chain reaction of decline - lose...
Take the story of Dell Computer…and its Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The story is told in the brilliant book by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription :
ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: “We’ve been doing a good job making...
Aiming explicitly to make money leads to behaviors...
The idea that going for short-term returns in these big firms is more profitable for us as investors than building long-term value simply isn’t true.
The idea that aiming to enhance shareholder value in the short-term should lead to long-term value sounds like common sense. Why not aim for the goal and go for it?
What this thinking misses is that aiming for short-term value leads firms to do...
Hedge funds: a caricature of capitalism
An extreme example of the principle that the house always wins is enshrined in the compensation of hedge funds with the “two and twenty” principle. Thus most hedge fund managers charge a flat 2 percent of total asset value as a management fee and an additional 20 percent of any profits earned. The estimated size of the global hedge fund industry is $1.9 trillion. In other words, the managers of...
Innovation initiatives fade away if you don't have...
Just the other day, a colleague asked me whether I could suggest some examples of organizations that have been successful with “innovation initiatives” in a commercial setting? He said that he had a CEO who wanted to launch an “innovation initiative” that would provide a laboratory for experiments in-house, so that his firm could become known as an idea factory in their sector.
I replied that...
Not tools, not jargon, not revolution, but...
…part of our brain that controls language is not the same part of our brain that controls decision-making and emotion. This is where social business initiatives often fall down. We start throwing language at people—words like blogs, wikis, microblogging, even the term social business itself. None of those things really matter. They’re tools and methods that enable us to do...
Design enhances value, it does not create it
Here’s my pitch. This talk of designers as the new kings of startups is becoming increasingly overblown. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Design is merely the barrier to entry to your product not getting lost in the primordial soup of startups. It is simply your ticket to a seat at the table of possible contenders.
Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create...
It's harder being number 2 than being at the...
Primatologists have documented the hazards of being the #2 guy to a powerful #1. Every monkey or ape troop has its alpha, and he/she usually has a beta or two for support. Betas have the highest stress levels in the troop, research shows. While it’s lonely at the top, and harsh at the bottom, the #2 spot is the toughest.
The beta monkey has the most to gain and the most to lose. The alpha spot...
Dopamine did not evolve to surge all the time
Unhappy chemicals evolved to alert you to survival threats. They feel bad because that gets your attention. Sometimes we can relieve unhappy chemicals by fixing the underlying problem, like eating when you’re hungry or sleeping when you’re tired. But some unhappy chemicals will always be there to remind you that life is finite and you’re not the boss of the world.
You can mask your unhappy...
Throughput accounting is more inline with purpose,...
The philosophy of cost accounting
Cost-accounting is built on the philosophy of scalable efficiency and squeezing out costs, particularly labor costs. Cost-accounting is how you measure progress or lack thereof in an organization.
As a result of this conceptual framework oriented towards reducing labor costs, we find organizations focused on, guess what? Cutting costs, often through downsizing...
Turning our attention back to the real market and...
Martin argues that, instead, the primary purpose of the corporation should be a return to management in the “real market,” not the “expectations market,” and that this means “customers are the focus, and the central task of companies is to find ever better ways of serving them.” Martin’s manifesto is: “We must shift the focus of companies back to...
“Tom Watson Jr. supposedly said, “If you want to succeed faster, double your...”
– The Value of Failure « Welcome to the Real (IT) World!
Coaching employees to feel like partners
In my travels from organization to organization, I talk with thousands of people every year who want to be treated as “partners” rather than as employees. They want information to flow up as well as down. But, oftentimes, leaders do not want to give up control.
Your employees understand their jobs. They know their tasks, roles, and functions within the organization, and it’s...
Organisational Culture - focus on what's behind...
The best way to shape culture is of course to focus on hiring the people who will ultimately make up that culture. Yet this is often overlooked, replaced with corporate values, slogans, and mission statements. It took billions of years to create and define all of the world’s great cultures — through failure after failure — so it is with arrogance alone that we executives think we can...
The ecosystem is your greatest asset
So if it’s not people, what is your greatest asset? It’s how you empower your people.
Think about it. What is the primary purpose of a business organization? To assemble a group of people, who previously may have had no association, and empower them to accomplish productive work toward the organization’s objectives. More effective empowerment typically equals more productive...
Social software doesn’t enable serendipity; it...
The idea behind serendipity is that social software enables colleagues who have shared or complementary interests and expertise to discover each other and collaborate. It’s serendipitous because, hey, who knew that Theresa in Tucscon was a certified blackbelt in Six Sigma, the very methodology that Victor is trying to implement in Virginia?
It’s true that social software teases out those kinds...
Where's the love in command and control?
In my personal life, having a loving relationship with my husband makes me a better parent, more productive at work, happier, and generally a better person. That gift of love is wonderful but it also maximizes my potential and my performance as a human.
Looking at love from that perspective, it seems that if we want to maximize the potential of our employees, customers, and partners in the work...