How your
sources of great ideas differ from others, and why
How you can
make more time and space for creative activities
The chart above compares my scores on the 36 questions with the
normalized* answers of other respondents. If you want to create your
own chart like this, using Excel or a similar spreadsheet software,
here's how to do it:
From the IdeaChampions' survey page, copy the 36
questions, and paste them to the first column of your spreadsheet
using Paste SpecialText.
Copy your scores into the next column. Then copy the normalized
average
scores from the bottom of this post into the third column, using Paste SpecialText.
Highlight the entire table you've created and sort it in ascending
order by your scores. Then add a row at the top of the chart and type
in column headings.
Then highlight the entire table you've created and
Insert a bar chart, which
should look something like the chart above.
Interpreting your
Profile:
In my case, brainstorming, creative thinking techniques, talking with
customers, taking time just upon waking, taking breaks, and listening
to music are my six 'sure-fire' ways to generate creativity, so I
should learn to draw on one or more of them whenever creative thinking
is needed. I should keep a pencil and paper beside the bed for
waking-hour inspirations. And since I take a lot of breaks and walk
around, I should get wireless headphones so my music goes with me. I
should study creative
thinking techniques so that they become second nature. And I
should spend more time talking with, and listening to, current and potential customers.
What's more, the last three of these six creativity sources are
unusual
to me, and not effective for most others, so if I'm in a group
creativity setting I should be cautious about suggesting others take
breaks or listen to music. I should be sensitive to the fact that
happiness is an essential precondition to creativity for most people,
though it isn't for me, and also that most others will be more
creative
if they take a walk, read books, talk with friends, or spend time
thinking just before bed, even though those techniques don't work
particularly well for me.
There are some other interesting differences between my creative
places
and times, and those of most others. I find flying and commuting very
stimulating -- perhaps it's the movement,
and the fact that my commutes are off-rush-hour and hence fast-paced
and relaxing. I find television stimulates my thinking more than it
does for most others, but that's probably because of what
I watch -- documentaries, mysteries, in-depth investigative reports
and
foreign programming. And the least effective three sources for me --
internet surfing, vacationing and exercising, are all fairly intense,
focused activities for me, that don't leave many 'cycles of
brainpower'
for creative thinking, though I can appreciate that others who find
these activities more recreational could also find them more
creatively
stimulating.
Next I asked myself how I could find more time and space for the
creative activities that work best for me. To answer this I added
another column to the spreadsheet, and entered for each of the 36
activities the amount of time
each week I currently spent on each. I again used a scale of 1-5 for
this:
Activities that consume >20 hours of time a week --
5
Activities that consume 15-20 hours a week --
4
Activities that consume 10-15 hours a week --
3
Activities that consume 5-10 hours a week --
2
Activities that consume <5 hours a week -- 1
Now I added one more column that showed, for each of the 36
activities, my rating (1-5), divided
by
the amount of time I spend at it each week (1-5, using the scale
above). If you do this and re-sort the 36 activities in ascending
order
of this last 'Personal Score/Time Spent' column, the resulting chart
looks like this:
What this second chart reveals is what, ideally speaking, you should
try to spend more time doing (the activities at the top of the chart,
which you've rated as a source of great ideas, but which you spend
relatively little time doing) and what you should try to spend less
time doing (the activities at the bottom of the chart). In my case, I
should 'get out more' -- spend more time brainstorming with others and
just moving around, and less time in front of the computer. I also
need
to use creative thinking techniques more often. My 'catch-all' #36
'other source' answer was spending time in the hot tub, which I
suppose
must somehow work for me the way showers work for others. What is it
about being in the water that gets us thinking creatively? No wonder
dolphins are such imaginative creatures! Though to my surprise,
others'
top 'write-in' answer for question #36 was 'on the toilet', so perhaps
we should see whether porcelain has some mysterious power to spark
ideation.
While others spend their time in airport lounges, airplanes and
traffic
either bored or fuming, I find these activities 'transport' me and get
me thinking very creatively. Because it's dangerous to write while
driving, I've learned to use mnemonic
devices
to capture and remember ideas that occur to me until I can safely
write
them down (works in the shower, too). If I could find a dictating
machine that worked with my voice-recognition software I'd probably
use
it instead -- maybe even write a whole paper or blog post simply
thinking out loud while I drive. It's quite possible, though, that
since much of my travel is early-morning, it's actually that time of
day that's responsible for the flurry of ideas, rather than the
movement. Though since I'm a night-owl, usually miserable in the
morning, I'm not sure that my body clock, or the ones around me, could
handle it if I tried early-to-bed, early-to-rise. It hurts just
thinking about it.
What works for you, and why? Are there times and places and techniques
that aren't on this list at all that seem to surface great ideas for
you? In what ways does your ideal environment for idea generation
differ from mine, and from the other survey respondents'? And are
there
ways you could be spending your time a little differently to allow
your
right brain to get some more exercise?
* How I normalized the 'average' answers to the survey:
First of all, I double-counted the '5' scores, the proportion of
people
who found each time or place a 'sure-fire' source of great ideas,
because I think that's just as important as 'average' score. Then,
because when you average scores you get most of them clustered around
the 3 average, I 'stretched' the results so that the top-scoring
source
(brainstorming) received a normalized score of 5 and the
lowest-scoring
source (being sad or depressed) received a normalized score of 2.
Finally, I rounded the results to the nearest 0.5. The results then
more closely map, in standard deviation and distribution of results,
an
individual's scoring.
Here are the normalized scores in order for the 36 questions (for
copying and pasting into your own spreadsheet):
4.0
4.0
3.0
3.5
3.5
4.0
3.0
4.5
3.0
3.5
4.5
4.0
5.0
3.0
3.0
3.5
4.0
3.0
2.5
2.5
3.5
3.0
3.0
4.5
4.0
4.0
2.0
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
4.0
4.5
5.0
3.5
4.0
Most bloggers are part of the
Long Tail, the 600-foot long gap in the chart above that collectively
gets 80% of the roughly 700,000 hours of total blogosphere readership
each day, but which individually get miniscule attention. What if you
have aspirations for your blog to be discovered, to become one of the
2000 A- and B-list blogs on the other side of that gap that each get
at
least 30 hours of reader attention each day? How do you get your blog
'discovered', when the only established ways are to grab the attention
of either an A-lister or two, or Google, and even if you can do that
the momentary audience you draw is likely to quickly dissipate
again?
The predicament most bloggers face is much like that of athletes,
artists, models, actors, writers and those striving to be
discovered in professions where a handful are rich and famous almost
beyond comprehension, while the huge majority live on the edge of
invisibility (according to the Canadian tax authorities, average
income
for people declaring themselves to be in these professions was about
$12,000 last year). The way people in these professions usually get
discovered is to use agents.
But in a non-profit profession like blogging, where there are no
millionaire superstars, there are no agents -- so we have to help ourselves out here.
Author and writing adviser Nicholas
Sparks
suggests these steps to be discovered by a literary agent: (1) write a
great book, (2) research to find appropriate, good agents,
and (3) write a good one-page Query Letter, consisting of:
A description of previous writing experience
A
quick summation of the story
Other books that are similar to
yours, and why yours is better
The possible market for the
book
A reason why you want to work with this particular
representative
A sentence explaining that the book is
complete, with a request to have it read
The writing service Preditors
and Editors
(no great fan of using agents) recommends a Query Letter when you're
writing directly to a publisher's editor, though with the addition of
a
'hook' (a couple of sentences to grab the reader's attention). Once
you've got their interest, the publisher will often provide you with a
template for a Proposal, a 5-20 page document usually comprising:
Overview and principal ideas
Other similar
books, and what distinguishes and differentiates yours
The
possible audience(s) for the book, and selling points for each
audience
Table of contents, book length and suggested price
(often with a synopsis of each chapter and/or a sample
chapter)
Author credentials and experience, and what the
author will do to promote the book
Who will provide the
introduction and endorsements for the book
The status of the
book
Much of what you're providing to the agent or publisher will be
repeated on the book-jacket, which is what the publisher uses to get
your book 'discovered' inside the bookstores.
The world of book-buying is changing, though, with more and more
readers browsing
for books online,
where the book-jacket is, at best, harder to read. While Amazon's
'search inside' capability does let you browse the book-jacket, the
table of contents, the index and usually the introduction or first
chapter, it also provides this additional information for
browsers:
Reader and editorial reviews
Affinity
information: Other books bought by people who
bought the book, or previewed online by people who previewed this
book,
and reader lists that include this book
Books deemed by
Amazon's algorithms to be 'similar'
How could all of this be applied to blogs? There are a lot of blog
directories out there, and I've signed up for most of them, but none
of
them is prominent enough to deliver any significant volume of
readership to an undiscovered blog. Here's what I think we need
instead:
Blog-Jackets:Something
analogous to book-jackets, that would contain the kind of information
readers want to know when they first stumble upon a new
blog:
A short bio of the author(s), with your credentials
and background, and perhaps a 'why you blog' paragraph
A quick
overview of your blog content, how much/how long you've
written, and perhaps a list of your best articles or table of
contents
What makes your blog unique, different, and valuable
to readers
Who your intended audience is (almost no blogs
include this information today)
Endorsements from readers,
and/or Technorati, Bloglines or SiteMeter rankings and
data
Where should this information be
kept to attract the attention of readers? First, I
think blog software should provide this blog-jacket
functionality,
on a separate 'About This Blog page' that can be accessed from any
other blog page, just as your blog 'home' page is. This would allow
blog directories to be more complete and to be compiled automatically,
without the authors having to fill in a separate form for each
directory. It could also serve to introduce your blog to new readers,
both passively when they first happen upon it, and actively in your
other promotion efforts, such as when you e-mail someone 'cold' with a
request that they look at your blog or an article in it. I would
certainly use a standardized blog-jacket to orient myself to a new
blog, if it were available.
An Amazon
Blog-Catalogue:
No slight intended to existing blog directories, but I think we need
to
get Amazon, the cataloguers of all things written, to add blogs to
their listings. Why should they do so? Because blogs have become a
major source of book reviews and book referrals, publicists for what
Amazon sells. Because it would complement what they already do, bring
them more traffic and provide another valuable service to their
customers. Because they could add a level of professionalism and
standardization to the cataloguing of blogs that is currently missing
(International Standard Blog Numbers?) The information in blog-jackets
could supply the basic content in the catalogue, and then Amazon could
use its existing tools like its affinity engines and reader review
capabilities to make the catalogue even more useful. Why could Amazon
do this better than Google? Because Google is in the search business,
not the catalogue business. And Google is already doing a lot for bloggers in their area of expertise.
Samplers:
My third idea is to give bloggers a way to cross the digital divide
and
get their blogs and content discovered by hard-copy readers at
face-to-face opportunities. Most of us belong to various networks
where
we talk with people about many of the same things we write about. But
several readers have remarked about the disconnect between our P2P and
online networks, and that fact that many of those we meet in person
have never read what we've written, despite our attempts to get them
to
do so. Many people just don't read
stuff online
-- it isn't their 'information behaviour' to do so. And also, when you
print articles from your blog on a regular printer, the appearance is
usually ghastly -- the print size is too large or small, the
formatting
gets messed up, the graphics chopped, and the blog sidebar content is
an annoying distraction and waste of paper. And the value of the links
in the article is lost. What we need is a simple mechanism that allows
us to select (perhaps by their permalinks) a set of articles we have
written about a particular theme, and to get them indexed, formatted
and printed professionally, with a cover page that we can customize
for
the circumstances. My friend Terry Frazier
has been exploring this, and I think he's on the right track. I don't
think this needs to be a complicated or costly offering, and the
businesses best positioned to print professional-looking samplers may
well be instant printers rather than publishers. Think of it as
analogous to what the photo developers offer: You e-mail them your
photos, they process them professionally and courier or mail them out
to you the next day. Instant printers could strip out the blog
sidebars, convert the links to footnotes with the full URL listed, add
a cover page, format the results professionally for a variety of page
sizes, print it on quality stock and even professionally bind it, and
mail it out next day for a modest price (probably not much more
expensive than a comparable quantity of business cards, but a lot more
impressive). Then when you're visiting your P2P networks at Meetups,
conferences, breakfast meetings, book circles or other social
occasions, your sampler becomes your, and your blog's, calling
card.
Hard-Copy
Partnerships:
My final idea for getting your blog discovered is to partner with
hard-copy publications that have a similar audience to your blog's.
Although some publications have their own blogs, there are still
opportunities to exploit the flexibility, timeliness and interactivity
of the online world to offer hard-copy publishers opportunities and
bridges that they probably don't have the capability, imagination or
interest in pursuing themselves. You could offer follow-up forums,
research support, additional reading links, reader feedback, and a
host
of other functionalities on your blog, 'branded' with the hard-copy
publication's logo, all of which promotes the hard-copy publication to
readers online. In return, you'd get a regular mention in the
hard-copy
periodical as the 'place to go' online for latest developments and
follow-ups on their stories. Who knows, you might even build the
partnership to the point where they would publish some of your blog
content in hard-copy form, and, if they're big enough, pay you for
your
services. Even if they don't, they have nothing to lose by giving you
some free publicity, and you have nothing to lose by doing the same
for
them. It beats ads from people you don't know, and allows your blog to
benefit from their brand.
Has anyone tried any of these techniques, or any other innovative
methods to get your under-appreciated blog discovered? My audience
surged by 25% after a group of A-listers consecutively wrote about my
article on thinking differently last month, but this audience didn't
stay long, and my readership has returned to previous levels. I'm
increasingly convinced that the type of attention you get from
A-listers, and from serendipitous Googlers as well, is rarely
sustainable or terribly high quality. We need to try something
new.
HostMySite.com launches new developer forum, A great place to discuss big and small ideas
HostMySite.com launches new developer forum, A great place to discuss big and small ideas09/01/2004 04:06 AM HostMySite.com launches an online developer forum to increase
communication between employees, clients, and internet users.
HostMySite created the developer forum to provide additional industry
resources to clients, ranging from development to programming.
Although HostMySite provides extensive troubleshooting information,
24x7x365 telephone customer support, and technological solutions, the
developer forum allows individuals to post specific questions and
information, not limited to technical support, and receive a personal
reply. [PRWEB Sep 1, 2004]
Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?
Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?04/01/2005 11:00 AM The
Underground History of American Education You
aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you
are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who
process children for a livelihood.... If I demanded you give up your
television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work
you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you
to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be
outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a
government agent called a schoolteacher?
Great-Great-Grandmother Shoots Robber (AP)
Great-Great-Grandmother Shoots Robber (AP)04/15/2005 04:32 PM AP - A man accused of bursting into a convenience store demanding
money was in the hospital Friday — shot, authorities said, by the
great-great-grandmother working behind the counter.
Money and Sex: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together!
"Howard Dean: "You Can Say That It's Great That Saddam Is Gone And I'm Sure That A Lot Of Iraqis Feel It Is Great That Saddam Is Gone. But A Lot Of Them Gave Their Lives. And Their Living Standard Is A Whole Lot Worse Now Than It Was Before.""
Great Power, Great Restraint...08/05/2004 02:26 PM Anakin learns that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one
in Star
Wars: Republic #67, released this week. Randy Stradley,
Brandon Badeaux, and Brad Anderson tell a tale that balances power and
restraint as Anakin and Obi-Wan face off against the Separatist forces
on the planet Zaadja, while Master Tohno infiltrates the Geonosian
droid factory on a demolition mission she is not expected to survive.
Ever wonder why the Mandalorians are nowhere to be seen in the Clone Wars?
The answer may lie in this issue! All under a cover by Brian Ching.
You can check out an online preview here<
/a>.
Great Wall Getting Less Great (Reuters)01/26/2004 10:19 AM Reuters - The Great Wall of China is shrinking as
tourism and development take their toll on one of the world's
most famous monuments, state media said Monday.
Hostetler Great Lakes Capitol, Inc., located in the Great Lakes region of lower Michigan, just announced plans to build an enormous organization with Freelife International, using the Himalayan Goji Juice as the leading product.
Hostetler Great Lakes Capitol, Inc., located in the Great Lakes region of lower Michigan, just announced plans to build an enormous organization with Freelife International, using the Himalayan Goji Juice as the leading product.07/26/2004 02:14 AM David Hostetler, with a Master’s degree in Marketing, has been a
successful marketer on and off the Internet since 1977. Having built
several other successful businesses in the past, he is now well on the
way to building a million-dollar business and has chosen Himalayan
Goji Juice and Freelife International as the leading product. Do you
want to come along? He is looking for entrepreneurs who want to team
up with millionaire marketers under a specialized and unique Internet
marketing system. If you are a marketer/MLM distributor and think you
deserve more, now is the time and this is the place. Don't wait for
your destiny... make it happen! [PRWEB Jul 26, 2004]
Welcome to the largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics
and available on the Internet. Over 200'000 items of research can be
browsed or searched, and over 110'000 can be downloaded in full text!
This site is part of a large volunteer effort to enhance the free
dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc. IDEAS is a service
providing information about working papers and published research to
the economics profession. IDEAS stands for "Internet Documents in
Economics Access Service", which is not very good English, but you get
the idea... The data available here are contributed at no charge by
volunteers and made available freely. This service uses the complete
data from the RePEc database, which
includes bibliographic data contributed by over 330 archives, including
many of the major research outlets and publishers.
« Hung between the squeaky piggies and nylon chew bones were an
altogether different kind of squeaky chew bone. I wondered if they
were beef flavoured and if they were a hot item with women who want to
have their dog chew on them in front of an annoying boyfriend as a way
to run them off. :) »
Another product of a bad idea: the new Fi
zz Lime Cider. It tastes like someone poured cider into your
G&T. There's a reason why it's the "World's first lime cider".
Big Ideas
Big Ideas07/25/2004 12:25 PM Big
Ideas. "Eating, sleeping, procreating, laughing - and trying
to create a world in which we can do these things unmolested - have
all been far greater drivers of human ingenuity than time machines or
battery-operated scooters."
- "We may no longer hold high hopes of the state, but if the
study of individuals reminds us of our common humanity and prompts us
to reassess the merits of the collective, let’s welcome it."
The Year In Ideas
The Year In Ideas12/13/2003 12:45 PM popo writes "The New York Times Magazine has a review of the year's
most original and interesting ideas. They include "The Tornado in a
Can" ("A contained ...
Widget ideas
Widget ideas04/11/2005 04:59 PM Tom and I were talking about how useless most of the currently
existing Dashboard Widgets are, and this guy agrees: What I'm afraid
we're going to see is a huge influx of extraordinarily useless
stuff—more iTunes controllers, duplications of existing...
Surfing for ideas on the Net
Surfing for ideas on the Net06/01/2004 05:21 PM Source: CBS.MarketWatch.com - ...fund managers are finding alternative
investments to play the positive sentiment surrounding the [Google]
IPO....
Supernova
and the recently announced Web 2.0 conference are throwbacks to the
priorities of old conferences, of the eighties and nineties: sponsors,
speakers, panels, audience. Execs from high tech companies pay
sponsorship fees, not disclosed, and guarantee that the content is
paid advertising and that nothing real is said on stage. If you
don’t pay the sponsorship fee, you don’t get a speaking
slot. If you offend a sponsor, you don’t get invited
back.
I agree with Dave and Marc.
Conferences like these are more or less paid-for sales events, highly
priced ones at that. Speaker selection and attendee lists reflect this
trend, as well. We have at our hands what can be simply described as a
traveling circus of speakers, echoing a number of messages which have
been carefully selected and tailored to support the barely buried
ulterior motives of sponsors and organizers.
This is less so an issue with the speakers. Most of which are
genuine and looking to spread not a sales message but to educate and
entertain.
I disagree with Dave on the next part:
The organization of the conferences, with speakers and
panels, guarantees that the audience falls asleep or is frustrated,
waiting to make their point until they get to ask questions at the end
of the session.
Not so, I say. Conferences do their best to deliver a lively and
inductive message. Supernova, Web 2.0, and others, make generous use
of the traveling circus, add promises about financial gain or new
discoveries and developments, and keep attendees on their toes.
This is, where the true problem lies. The infusion of new material,
different speakers, or dissenting opinions is dangerous to the ideas
of events with an agenda. A controlled message requires controlled
ideas. The circus, by means of exposure, has since created celebrities
of their own makings, another benefit to the organizers – big
names draw big bucks, and big recognition for the advertised
services.
WebTV: A type of internet appliance that used a TV,
instead of a monitor, to display web pages. Initially popular with the
tech-averse when it shipped in 1996, Microsoft would buy the company
for $425 million a year later. But when sales stalled at around a
million users, someone woke up and realized that low-resolution TVs
are lousy at displaying emails and web pages. Microsoft has since
renamed WebTV MSN TV, but it's not any better. If you're reading this
on a WebTV - or an MSN TV -- I'm sorry for calling your kid ugly, but
get yourself a real computer. You'll like it a whole lot
better.
VCs Don't Invest in Ideas03/26/2005 01:20 PM SiliconBeat looks at the overhang in venture capital because interest
rates have led to a general glut of capital, and wonders if all that
supply benefits demand: So if you think you've got a good idea, you're
marginally more...
Ideas are Cheap09/01/2004 12:28 AM I've got a physical product idea that I'll probably never be able to
develop, so I figure that I'll just...
The properties of ideas
The properties of ideas10/29/2003 12:12 AM Thomas Jefferson said: If nature has made any one thing less
susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of
the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively
possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is
divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the
receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too,
is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses...
The Idea:
A summary of the importance of conversation as a catalyst of cultural
evolution, the seven purposes of conversation, some 'cultural
anthropology' on how conversations 'operate' today, and a first stab
at
some rules or principles we could learn and adopt to produce better,
more effective and productive conversations.
In
my articleSeeing
the Big Picture (Building a Bigger Frame)
I argued for the need for more expansive thinking to encompass,
understand and build on different points of view, rather than
reinforcing and polarizing those points of view through parochial and
antagonistic argument. One of the crucial tools we use to exercise and
expand our
thinking is conversation, and it occurred to me that if we want to
learn to think in ways that transcend the old, learning to converse in
ways that transcend the old might be a good place to start. Humberto
Maturana has said:
Human existence takes place in
the relational space of conversation. This means that, even though
from
a biological perspective we are Homo Sapiens, our way of living - that
is to say, our human condition - takes place in our form of relating
to
each other and the world we bring forth in our daily living through
conversation.
If you're like me, you've engaged in your share of eavesdropping in
public places -- restaurants, bars, elevators, cocktail parties,
subway
trains. What is disturbing is not that the subject matter and
arguments
are usually inane (though they are), but that the syntax, the flow,
and
the composition
of the conversational threads are so awkward, sloppy, selfish and
extravagant. It's been said that conversation is like a dance: It
requires some grace, some courtesy to avoid stepping on your partners'
toes, and agreement on who (at any point) is leading and who is
following. Perhaps this is why conversations that involve three or
more
people at once are often so clumsy, more like a sequence of two-person
conversations one after the other with (to strain the dance analogy)
different people constantly butting in, usually before the song in
progress has properly ended.
Recently I read a wonderful quote that went something like this: Are
you listening or just waiting your turn to talk?
Sound like someone you know?
A recent article<
/a> by Australian Open Space practitioner Alan Stewart
suggests five purposes for
conversation: learning, reassurance, building trust, "working out what
is important" and entertainment. Here's (I think) a more complete list
from one
of my 2003 posts:
Educating: teaching or learning
something useful or interesting
Conceptualizing: Thinking out loud,
organizing and
articulating thoughts, challenging, understanding something better,
reassuring
Rehearsing: practicing to improve language
skills
Socializing: finding people with
similar ideas, interests or ambitions
Convincing: selling, seducing, persuading, engaging,
building trust
It's humbling to note that Bernd Heinrich provides
examples in Mind of the Raven
of all seven of these purposes to various raven vocalizations. And in
his examples, ravens seem to be decidedly better at it than most
humans. Perhaps that's due to the fact they've been around longer than
we have, so they've had more practice at it. It couldn't be just that
they have better manners, could it? ;-)
In his article Stewart says:
From circles of elders around
ancient campfires to the conversations in the cafés and salons
that
spawned the French Revolution, people have always gathered for real
conversation about questions that matter. In those times and places
where innovation is born other simple conditions are also present. In
addition to pursuit of a question that really matters and commitment
to
creating the space and time to explore it, it is crucial that mutual
listening and a spirit of discovery infuse the conversations. A
certain
type of "magic" appears—the magic of a new collective
intelligence
arising from the individual minds present in the conversation. The
wisdom needed to address the concerns of any group is already "in the
middle of the circle" waiting to be tapped. These webs of
conversations
and the action commitments that naturally arise from them can serve as
the energy generator, the amplifier, the core unit of change force for
co-evolving the future in any
system.
He quotes Konrad Lorenz' on the hazards of conversation: "Said is not
heard; heard is
not understood; understood is not agreed to; agreed to is not carried
out". This is a more concise way of laying out the enormous
intellectual and emotional challenge entailed in conversation that I
described in my That's Not What I
Meantarticle
. Here is a recap of my amateur observations about conversations from
that post:
Linguistics professor Deborah Tannenbaum says
women and men (with some notable exceptions) converse in entirely
different ways, and they converse differently with members of the
opposite sex than with members of their own.
Conversations
have a myriad of complex but unspoken
cultural norms, styles and rituals (taking turns, pausing, nodding,
apologizing for interrupting or misunderstanding etc.) When two people
with different norms, styles, or rituals try to converse, or when a
third person ignorant of the styles or rituals shared by the other two
tries to enter a conversation, the result is both comical and tragic.
A
form of violence, even.
Most people don't appear to listen to what they themselves
are saying. Many conversations include someone saying "I didn't say
that" when in fact they did. I suspect if people listened to a tape or
video recording of their conversations they would be stunned. They
might never say anything again!
Most of the real communication
in a conversation is not in the words. It's in the nuances of body and
eye language. It's in the tone of voice. It's in the pauses. It's in the
physical proximity or distance of the conversants.
Many effective conversations appear to be really
interviews.
That entails specific roles for the two conversants, with the
interviewer's role being the more difficult and more important. If one
person is mostly asking questions and the other person is doing most
of
the talking, it's an interview, not a conversation.
Conversations with more than two people are generally
either parallel sequences of two-person conversations, or moderated conversations, where one
person is clearly directing the conversational 'traffic'.
Conversations would, I think, be much more effective
if we
had a ritual of having each conversant state upfront what their
personal objective for the conversation is. I appreciate that in some
cases this must be done tactfully: "I've wanted to meet you since Mr.
A
told me that you... ", or "I'm looking for some help with..." In the
absence of such a protocol, a lot of initial conversations exhaust an
enormous amount of participants' energy trying to figure this out
tacitly.
From watching online chat (the only written medium
that in
my opinion is fast and immediate enough to really qualify as
'conversation') and listening to young people especially talk, what
people seem to want most from conversation with friends is reassurance.
Everyone is always fishing for compliments and confirmation, and,
unless and until they clearly know and trust the offerer very well,
dubious of the offerer's motivation when they get them. Few people, it
seems, are really looking for advice, debate, or 'constructive
criticism' in a conversation. But many seem enthusiastic to offer
these
things anyway!
You can tell almost immediately whether participants
in a
conversation trust each other or not. If you want to observe
conversations where there is trust, go out for dinner a lot, and avoid
offices and bars.
I'm coming to believe that good conversation, like good collaboration,
is a skill, and, just as a lot of practice dancing badly does not make
you a better dancer, just talking a lot does not necessarily make you
a
better conversationalist (in fact I suspect it may make you worse at
it, by entrenching bad habits). If it's a skill it should be possible
to learn it and teach it. And, while the seven 'purposes' of
conversations bulleted in red above might require somewhat different
skills, I suspect that there is a basic conversational 'skill set'
that
is common to all purposes.
The following list of 'rules' or 'principles' or 'elements' of good
conversation constitute my first attempt at identifying what we would
need to learn, and teach, to be better conversationalists.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that the quality of the conversation
will inevitably be at the level of the poorest conversationalist, just
as the performance of a dancing couple will reflect the
least-accomplished partner. This list is the result of thinking out
loud, and I'm sure it is far from complete. Please join the
conversation!
We need to learn to do three things simultaneously: (a)
listen intently and carefully to what others are saying, (b) think the
arguments and concepts through in our own mind (and draw our own
conclusions), and (c) articulate what we are going to say before we
speak. This is extremely difficult, especially in a large group. If
all
participants do not do this, the result is a vicious cycle of poor
conversation: not listening (and disengaging), not thinking, and not
articulating properly, leading to more 'not listening'.
We need to limit how many words we say before we
allow, and encourage, others to speak, to keep the conversation 'in
sync'.
We need to allow pauses in the conversation, for
people to
catch up, and think coherently about what direction the conversation
might most effectively go next.
We need perhaps (I'm not sure)
to allow and encourage
people to pull themselves periodically out of the conversation and
facilitate it as if they were non-participants: summarizing,
time-checking, asking questions, drawing people out, even suggesting
how the conversation might be made more productive. Is that
presumptuous and manipulative?
We need, as I suggest above, a
'ritual' (protocol) by which
each participant and new entrant in a conversation begins with a brief
upfront tactful statement of their personal objective for the
conversation.
We need another 'ritual' that would allow
participants
whose objective in the conversation is not being met to leave without
excuse or apology and without other participants (even if there is
only
one!) taking offense. How else will selfish conversationalists ever
learn?
Back to the dance analogy, we need to evolve (or
rediscover) tacit ways to cede and request the floor without
interrupting the conversation or its flow, and tacit ways to invite or
welcome others to join a conversation without side-tracking it with
formal introductions. Could we evolve, as birds seem to have done,
some
graceful (good
conversation, it seems to me, has a lot to do with grace) wordless
gestures that would accomplish this, and allow us to signal that we
would like to speak, who (if we have the floor) we are inviting to
speak next, when we are finished speaking, that we understand, that we
don't understand, that the speaker should let someone else talk,
etc.
We need to learn to read and understand body
language, and
to express body language unambiguously. It's an essential part of the
conversation, and suppressing it or distorting it muffles the
conversation.
There is a new technology just announced that
captures
every conversation you participate in, records it, compresses it, and
transcribes it. I'm ambivalent about this. Recording of conversations
makes me shudder, yet it might allow us to retrieve information
(contact information, context information) later that could be
enormously valuable. We need to decide how to extract the benefits
from
such technology without incurring its risks, and without its
trust-threatening and conversation-dampening attributes.
We
need to learn to be much better story-tellers, and more
improvisational.
We need to learn effective listening techniques, and
critical thinking skills.
Prevailing wisdom is that we need to
be more respectful,
more polite in our conversations. While I don't doubt this would be
helpful, I'm not sure it can be taught or mandated. What are the
'model
behaviours' that set an example for respect and politeness in
conversations? What can we do to tactfully nudge those (especially
when
it's our boss!) who fail to demonstrate respect and politeness even
when others are behaving in an exemplary way?
OK, I've said (more than) enough. Thank you for listening. Your turn
to speak.
With every WWDC, Apple announces more and more cool stuff for
developers that make writing apps ever easier.
So that makes me wonder about the process of deciding what apps to
develop. Assuming you have a ton of good ideas for apps, there are two
basic ways to approach the decision:
1. Pick one that should be easy to implement because Apple has already
given you most of what you need.
2. Pick one that should be difficult to implement because you have to
invent a bunch of stuff from scratch.
For instance... when NetNewsWire 1.0 shipped, there was no WebKit for
displaying HTML. There was an XML parser, but there was no
object-oriented, easy-to-use Cocoa XML parser. The Cocoa bindings
technology didn’t exist. HTTP networking was poorly supported.
The XML-RPC support (for weblog editing) was so crashy at the time
that I had to write my own XML-RPC client.
(When I was a boy, we used to have walk ten miles through the snow
before we could retain an object. If we wanted to use
autorelease we had to go without lunch.)
You can’t draw a conclusion from one example, but I’ll
give it a try anyway. The conclusion might be that #2—pick
something difficult to implement—is the better choice.
I say that because it gives you a chance to be first at something, to
do something new. If it’s a good idea and you’ve done a
good job, your chances of success are good.
On the other hand, you could probably do three easy apps in the time
it takes to do one difficult app. So there’s definitely that to
consider.
However, while I can’t talk about most of what happens at WWDC,
I can tell you it’s utterly predictable that, in six months or
less, there will be 15 apps that do X, 20 that do Y, and 30 that do
Z—just because X, Y, and Z have been made so darn easy to do.
But those aren’t apps, they’re statistics.
Blogging Ideas
Blogging Ideas06/02/2004 05:01 PM I've just agreed to be the official blogger of for the first day of
Boston.com's Ideas Boston 2004 conference. The redoubtable Scott
Kirsner will be blogging the second day. The blog should show up on
Boston.com somewhere. Looks like a great conference and it should be
fun to blog......
What is the A Great Portal website about, what is so Great and what is a Portal?
What is the A Great Portal website about, what is so Great and what is a Portal?05/31/2004 01:51 PM A Great Portal, Great Links to Great websites has moved to a new
website address, of http://www.agreatportal.com This is part of
on-going improvements. The website has lots of links to various and
interesting subjects as well as a Multi-search, a news headlines
search and free website promotion. Is it a Portal and is it Great? See
what you think. [PRWEB May 30, 2004]
I'm at the Adobe Ideas
conference today, so posting may be a little slow. Or non-existant
because this is the first conference I've been to in, oh, 4 years that
doesn't have wifi available to the attendees (I had to retreat to
Bryant Park for lunch to soak up some free wireless). For all the talk
about connectivity during the keynote, there isn't much evidence of it
so far. :(
Anyway, Adobe announced Creative
Suite 2 today, as rumored. One feature that got the crowd oohing
and aahing was the Vanishing Point tool in Photoshop. It lets you map the
perspective out on an image and then place text, images, etc in the
proper perspective on that map. Perhaps some more later when I get to
a connection again.
Here's Greg Elin (Fotonotes),
Scott Mathews (Andromeda) and Amy
Harmon (NY Times) discussing Greg's new FotoWiki application.
No - Scott's not upset, it was the burning hot chili peppers at
Grand Sichuan that got to him. Amy laid off the peppers - as she's
about to give birth (go Amy!)
Turns out Amy and Scott are married (little did I know!) I guess
they're one of those NYC 'technology couples'.
Anyway - we had a great time last night, Mimi got to sing for
everyone. Good start to my roadshow.
Ideas for Social Software
Ideas for Social Software12/31/2003 09:38 AM Seconding Liz's linking to Matt Haughey's ideas for useful social
software. Matt suggests "Epinions + Friendster," which sounds a lot
like a company that Paul English, Rick Levine and I tried to start a
few years ago. Matt puts the problem well: Last summer I moved to a
town in a place far away from where I've spent the past few years, and
one of the first problems I had to solve was finding the perfect
everything. I quickly amassed a bunch of questions that took months of
trial and error to answer through a network of new friends and...
Ideas for Buyers and Renters
Ideas for Buyers and Renters08/22/2004 09:19 PM An idea to make it easier to purchase a house, and another idea to
make it easier to pay rent.
Wild & Crazy CPU Ideas
Wild & Crazy CPU Ideas07/09/2004 08:14 PM Well, nobody could call this anything
but far-fetched, but it makes for good late-Friday relief: Paul Murphy
thinks Apple should switch over to SPARC processors. Hey, I’m down
with that, think of the employee discounts. Grok Description matches for Where Do Your Great Ideas Come from? GrokA matches for Where Do Your Great Ideas Come from?
Where Do Your Great Ideas Come from?
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
The Idea:
A summary of the importance of conversation as a catalyst of cultural
evolution, the seven purposes of conversation, some 'cultural
anthropology' on how conversations 'operate' today, and a first stab
at
some rules or principles we could learn and adopt to produce better,
more effective and productive conversations.
