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Solving the "what you're looking at" problem with Video ConferencingSolving the "what you're looking at"
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 In previous articles I've described the Innovation Process of gurus like Clay Christensen and Peter Drucker (and my own), and a process for tapping the Wisdom of Crowds. Since then, I've talked to several business leaders about these processes, and they suggested I integrate them together to create a Creative Problem-Solving Process. The diagram above is the first draft of this CPS process. It appears there may be as many as 12 steps in the process involved in solving problems or making critical decisions, whether in a business context or a broader social context. In most cases, many of these steps are side-stepped or short-circuited, often because the problem-solvers or decision-makers think they already have the information or perspective that doing them would provide. Perhaps this is why so many unimaginative solutions are developed and so many bad decisions are made? The process of solving problems, when it's undertaken thoroughly, can involve three different forms of interactivity (conversation, collaboration and canvassing), in engaging the energies of three different aggregations of people (individuals, teams, and 'crowds'). The following table summarizes the 12 steps, and the interactivity, methods, deliverables and some facilitation tools for each:
Applying the process to a business problem: Nash Instruments makes digital thermometers and other medical instruments for hospitals. They manufacture in Mississippi, taking advantage of low labour costs, but foreign competitors manufacturing in China have undercut them. The company is on the verge of bankruptcy, and 300 employees are depending on Nash's ingenuity to reinvent their company to save their jobs. So we start by teaching the core Solution Team of Nash the process, and creativity techniques so they can imagine a successful future for their company, not limited to incremental improvements. Then, with the Solution Team, we canvass customers and end-users of the company's products and other similar instruments, and find out what untapped needs they have. We also study trends in the market, and scan across other industries, science, technologies, and nature, to surface new developments that might be adapted or applied to Nash's products, processes, platforms, technologies, supply chain or distribution channels, core competencies, customer experience, brand, service or community wrap-arounds, or business model. Perhaps we discover that what customers are most unhappy with is the poor quality, ambiguity and reliability of these instruments -- and that what customers want aren't cheaper instruments, but simpler, more durable, more accurate ones. That they are buying the cheap ones made in China only because none of them differentiate themselves in other ways. The third step is to analyze the root causes of the company's current predicament. We know from the previous step that price really isn't the differentiating factor that's hurting the company's sales, but why isn't the company, with its skilled, domestic workforce, able to produce a better product? And are there other aspects to the undifferentiated 'customer experience', such as service quality? Or a distribution or marketing problem? Or lack of product diversity or innovation? Suppose we discover that the root problems are that the company has compromised on materials quality to try to reduce cost, that it's slow to exploit new technologies, and that it has developed a reputation for unresponsive service. Once we know this, we refine the Solution Team, and develop the plan and timeline for solving the root problems.and meeting the untapped customer needs. Then we conduct Thinking-the-Customer-Ahead sessions, using an iterative 'what-if' process to enable some of Nash's most forward-thinking customers and potential customers to understand where their businesses, and instrumentation needs, are headed, which in turn allows Nash to craft a Future State Vision that satisfies those needs. Maybe we discover that the future of medical instrumentation is wireless, that displays are going to have to be flatter and sharper, that measurements in several medical technologies will need to be two orders of magnitude more precise, and that in some cases the tools will become so sophisticated that the instrument manufacturer will have to become part of the virtual medical team, on call 24/7 to assist in interpretation of the results. And then we reach out to the larger constituency, all current and potential customers and end-users, articulating the promise that Nash could deliver and fomenting dissatisfaction with the status quo, creating a sense of urgency in the minds of customers and end-users, articulating the unmet need, and also creating that sense of urgency in Nash's own people. Next we do the creative work of inventing or reinventing products, processes, platforms, technologies, channels, brands, and even business models, and growing the core competencies needed to deliver on them. But we don't put all our eggs in one basket: We develop a suite of alternative solutions. And then we use the Wisdom of Crowds process to present them to the 'crowd', as large a group of existing and potential customers and users and employees as possible, and use the crowd's collective intelligence to help us select the best of these alternatives before taking them to market. Nash's reputation is a problem -- trying to go upscale with a new generation of sophisticated, precise instruments will be a marketing nightmare. maybe a whole new division with a new name is needed? And should the company try to overcome its employees' near-total ignorance of how hospitals use its instruments, so they can offer virtual interpretation, or leave this niche to others? And should it overhaul its supply chain in favour of better-quality material suppliers, or even bring production of these materials in-house and cut out the middleman? Now, with the confidence that we have the optimal solutions, we can design working prototypes of these solutions, and we can collaboratively run parallel experiments with different implementations of these solutions, failing fast and inexpensively to winnow out the implementations that don't work in practice. How would wireless instruments avoid interference with, and from, other medical technologies in the operating room and on the patient's night-table. What different techniques can be used to increase read-out precision without a commensurate increase in equipment cost? And when medical instruments need to be made in two 'flavours', one for sophisticated hospital use and the other for patients to self-diagnose and self-monitor, how do the price points differ and how should functionality and ease-of-use be traded off? Should Nash even be in both markets? And then the implementations that succeed must pass the final hurdle, another collaborative process that encourages skeptical, critical thinking people in the organization to challenge whether this solution really is optimal, and unearth landmines and other problems the developers may not have thought about. Maybe the designers didn't consider that baby-boomer patients' eyes are weakening and the display in a new consumer product just isn't large enough? Or that one of the new suppliers of a critical material is in financial difficulty? Once the solutions have passed this final test, they're ready for launch. The launch of dramatically new products, processes and technologies is a difficult process, and if not done properly and quickly can make an enormously promising innovation into a production or market failure. The launch needs careful project management, using a rigorous, tightly-controlled, one-step-at-a-time process. It's all common sense. The reason it is so rarely used is that few organizations have the competencies to do more than two or three of the 12 steps effectively. I've worked on all 12 steps at one point or another in my career, and they are not easy to master, but when they're done well, they yield astonishing results. The answer, I think, isn't just to bring in consultants to facilitate the process and then breeze out again. Advisers need to teach businesspeople how to do this for themselves, and then steward them through the process a couple of times to ensure they follow it properly. In a world where innovation will soon again be recognized as the only sustainable competitive business advantage, learning this process may the most important education for tomorrow's business leaders. And there's no reason to believe this same process couldn't be used to effectively address broader social, economic and environmental problems as well. I'll explore that in a future article. |
Since I haven't used any videochat software, let alone multiway video conferencing system (MVCS), I am not sure if a brief inspiration I had this afternoon is implemented or not. The inspiration was to enhance the MVCS experience by emulating what movie directors do to help the audience follow conversations in movies. It's Hollywood meets video conferencing.
This is how I see the system working. When a person (A) speaks, the view changes to A. When another person (B) breaks in, the view switches to B, but the view will briefly switch back to (A) several times while B is speaking. When B finishes, the view switches back to A. When A doesn't respond immediately, the view switches to show other attendents intelligently.The intent here is to catch the facial reactions to weave the conversations into a drama so the system remembers the interaction history like who spoke when, in reaction to whom, for how long, etc. When two people talk at the same time, the screen is divided into two parts to minimize the ping-pong effect. Questions are also detected and 'the camera' scans the likely 'suspects' for reactions.
Brief overlaying of textual information about the person on the screen commonly seen in detective TV shows should be also useful when participants are not familiar with each other (i.e. community meeting with 1000 attendents). It's smartly done based on whether it helps the viewer or not.
Lastly and appropriately going overboard, dramatic sounds can be injected either automatically or by participants like sounds of suspense or those funny sounds talkshow DJs like to use (video-smileys?). Appropriate video clips (i.e. Three Stooges or Groucho Marx) can also be injected similarly by the moderator or attendence.
While I think it is unlikely someone haven't thought of this before, I thought the idea was interesting enough to share, just in case.
There are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them pessimists) believe that comments are as doomed as email and we're all going to hell in a hand basket.
I fall squarely in to the techno-optimist category. Back in September I started blacklisting domains linked to from spam comments, defending against return visits from spammers and allowing others to syndicate my block list to run on their own site. Then in October I tweaked my comment system to eliminate PageRank from links in comments, making spamming for search engine optimisation a futile exercise. Of course, this measure only works if spammers realise it's there (I know at least one has) which is why I'm personally very happy to see that the latest release of Moveable Type has adopted the technique - to mixed reviews from the MT community.
There have been a whole bunch of other technological innovations over the past few months. Sam Ruby has implemented throttling to ban people who post three consecutive comments, and has some great ideas about guarding against strangers. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist makes the blacklisting concept available to a wide audience. Meanwhile, James Seng's MT-Bayesian introduces trainable spam filters adapted from the fight against email spam.
So those are the solutions so far; the critical question is whether they work. The amount of spam I've been getting has definitely decreased, but as I run a completely custom blogging system I'm safe from the automated scripts that target more widespread systems - other sites make easier targets. Now that the less ethical search engine optimisers have started to catch on to the potential of comment spam to improve their PageRank the amount of spam can only increase. Some bloggers have already started to disable comments entirely (thankfully Dan turned them back on again shortly afterwards), setting a worrying precedent for the elimination two way interactions comments allow between bloggers and non-bloggers.
I'll put it in writing now: I will never disable comments on this blog. In the past few months the comments here have proved far more interesting and valuable than my actual posts, and I really appreciate the quality of the discussions that have arisen here. I will take whatever steps are necessary to keep this a useful environment for discussion.
Many people have hailed user registration as the ultimate solution to spam. It isn't, because the value of PageRank is just too high - and writing a script to automatically create accounts (even with email confirmation required) is child's play to anyone who is competent in an internet-aware scripting language. Even accessibility-impeding captchas are no defence against spammers who can afford to employ cheap labour to defeat them - and with search engine rankings as critical as they are there's no shortage of spam dollars.
With those ruled out, let's look at the remaining solutions:
Without links, comment spam has no purpose. To eliminate spam, eliminate links. Redirecting them through a PageRank killer already achieves this, but proves too subtle for spammers intent on spreading their links as widely as they can. Too truly eliminate spam, strip out links and anything that even looks like a URL and force the spammer to preview their carefully crafted advertisement before hitting submit. Seeing as hyperlinks are the single most important feature of the web this may seem draconian - and indeed it is. But on a site that serves more as a discussion forum than a farm and where the alternative to killing links is killing comments entirely this could be the saving factor.
For most blogs however links are an essential part of the discourse - I certainly wouldn't want to disable them here. Now only do they add huge value to the discussions, but more importantly they act as a "signature" for many commenters - knowing a comment is by "Dan" is far less useful than knowing that it's by Dan from www.simplebits.com.
Draconian measures such as the above wouldn't be necessary if spammers would wise up to the fact that their carefully crafted missives were having no effect on their precious PageRank. The real challenge then is to make anti-PageRank measures obvious to even the most brain-addled viagra peddlers. I've taken the first step towards this by turning on compulsory previewing for comments, which should have the added benefit of reminding legitimate commenters to use paragraph tags. I'll be working on ways of making the anti PageRank measures more obvious over the next few days, as and when work permits.
I've seen people argue that depriving legitimate commenters of PageRank is a poor compromise. I disagree: if the only cost of eliminating the incentive to spam is the loss of some Google ego then I see it as a price well worth paying. Of course, I say that as someone who's already built up their Google ego but at the end of the day it's my blog, my rules. One solution I've considered is creating a whitelist of sites that frequent commenters use in their signatures, causing them to be displayed without a redirect.
Comment spam is a solvable problem. Furthermore, blogging about comment spamming is almost as dull as blogging about blogging. Let's hurry up and solve it so we can go back to blogging about cats.
The ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires that you key in the solution to a captcha -- which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail -- before you can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers were able to generate captcha solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted.
Now, chances are that they didn't need to do this, since optical character recognition has been shown to be readily tweakable to decode captchas without human intervention -- that which a computer can generate, a computer can often solve.
My cow-orker Seth Schoen points out that human-generated captchas are much harder to solve: say, picking out a photo of an animal, at a funny angle, in a cage, and challenging attackers to correctly identify it. People can do so readily, machines probably can't.
Except, of course, that getting people to pick out pix of animals at funny angles doesn't scale. Unless, of course, you offered them free porn to do so ("Want free porn? Identify the animal in this cage!").
Which suggests a curious future, where commodity pornography, in great
quantities, is used to incent human actors to generate and solve
Turing tests like captchas in similarily great quantities.
BTW: there needs to be a lot of academic work done on how to make
these contests effective.
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