Month: March 2016

For those of you who are involved in systems implementation and change processes, understand that the actual meaning of your implementation project is the net sum experience of all users involved. That means that the quality of your work is a direct reflection of the change in quality of user experience. Ga!

Frightening, right? We all know that there will be a bit of aching and groaning and gnashing of teeth, so the onus is on us to make it more than worthwhile. We are in this world to provide value.

I often take inspiration from a trend that seemed to take place during the late 1990’s that involved a study of the way users and would-be users of applications experience things. Tech companies, or one company in particular, were hiring students out of social science grad programs – instead of IT or business, go figure – to study user experience to best shape application and user interface design. The practice was called Experience Modeling, sort of the Avant Gard of IT development at the time,. The word was out that the Information Age was over, and the Experience Age had begun.

I’m not sure what happened to this trend, or what past experience modelers are doing now, but if you look closely enough, you’ll see its subtle implications everywhere, and an overall mindset among tech companies to provide the maximum best experience, whether the most pleasurable, most convenient or most useful, or any combination of the three.

When I say I take inspiration from this practice, I mean it helps to form my whole approach to dealing with clients. Whether I am scoping a future implementation, streamlining current user processes, providing training or demonstrations, or actually gathering requirements and writing specs for a specific client-requested enhancement, I try as much to enter that person’s world, to step into her shoes and see things the way she does.

So we’re not talking about simply sitting down, asking a few questions about what a user wants to see on a screen, what buttons they want to press, and what results they want to see as a result of that. This goes beyond simple requirements gathering, beyond best practices and rote procedures. It is more of a holistic approach that requires all our interpersonal skills, imagination and other “soft skills.

The good news is that the basic set of core soft skills are things that are natural to you as a human being, i.e. the tendency to connect social, share experience, learn from each other. It’s written into your DNA, and manifests in our mirror neurons, and their activity. And though they are implicit skill sets, they are also things we can develop further by tuning into them more, as artists might do with the subtle connection between their visual and emotional functioning.

For a business analyst, this could mean gaining an intuition for the right types questions to ask, to gain high quality information about her client’s experience, to not only get an image of what a the flows might look like, but the experience of eye and hand movements, the sense of time passing, the adrenaline boosts that might lead to decision making. As you flesh out the experience and create a detailed fictional model in your own experience, more will come to light. You will begin to understand better what it is she is grappling with, and from that you can go beyond the mere gathering of requirements and begin partnering with her to design something that truly adds a bounty of surplus value.

My next few posts will provide approaches to developing and utilizing these intuitions and soft skills. However, in the meantime, practice by imagining what it would be like to be your client in the midst of her workday. Imagine what it would feel like to be her using your application. Ask yourself while you do so, what is it that I really want and need right now?

The more I talk to people, especially those who have been at their careers for a number of years, or decades, the more there seems to be a disconnect between what they feel is their actual performance, the value they produce, and what their management tends to see. And this seems to be more than a pattern with merely noticeable statistical consistency, but is actually quite ubiquitous. In recent years, I have seen a number of articles in business magazines about companies that are eliminating the entire annual review process, and I’m starting to understand why. It’s kind of a farce, at least to some degree. I don’t know if there’s any management school fix for something like this, a newly developed methodology of sorts, since the greater the expertise of the person being reviewed, the greater the chance that large parts of it are going to fly over their manager’s head, just as many pieces of the manager’s job would elude the understanding of those who report to her . I’ve begun to call this disconnect the Peter Parker Syndrome.

As a kid I read reams of Spider-man comic books, and I know there are different versions of the story, a TV show some decades ago, more than one animated series, and a more recent film and sequel, but it’s the Tobey Maguire Spider-man I’m thinking of, or perhaps his Spider-man II.

Peter Parker looks ridiculous on his moped in midtown Manhattan traffic, trying to get a stack of pizzas delivered on time. Suddenly something happens, there’s some crisis, and he’s off in Spider-man mode, swinging on webs, saving lives, getting the bad guys, you name it, finally snatching a slice before someone on a balcony, where his pies have landed, bites into it. He makes his delivery almost in time, but he’s minutes late, and oops, it turns into free pizza day for the customer, and because of that he loses his job.

Out of desperation Peter brings photos of Spider-man to one of the biggest city papers. The editor, J. Jonah Jameson, is like a younger, American version of Rupert Murdoch. He doesn’t care about real news, per se, but in selling papers. He’s really rather incompetent at understanding what’s really going on in the world, what real news is, and distorts everything to conform with his personal ideology and a narrative that will drive paper sales. Where his competence lies is in marketing.

Parker sells photos to him at a pittance, though he is providing a tremendous value to the paper, not only because of the exclusivity of the images, but by actually being the content of the news that is driving sales. Jameson is not only an incompetent news editor, he is completely at a loss as to this value Peter Parker is providing him and his business. Even more absurd, he is making our hero into an outlaw, the cause of the crimes and crises he’s been alleviating, representing him even as a terrorist.

Okay, the Spider-man analogy is a bit of an exaggeration, but people I’ve been talking to have come out of their annual reviews feeling sort of the same way. And this is nothing new, as I remember my father complaining about the same thing back in the 1970s and 80s, although it’s more than likely that with the explosion in technology, our jobs are more various and bewilderingly complex than they were during the later decades of the twentieth century.

At the same time, there’s more than likely an equal opportunity to be over-appreciated, rather than under-appreciated, to take credit for producing more value than we are personally responsible for, taking credit for things that occur due to happenstance, or even value that belongs to others. There are plenty of people whom I’ve known who have a talent for that sort of thing, although they have tended to vanish into thin air, after a while, seemingly without a trace. You hear stories of people who make their entire careers out of skipping from job to job, continuously, like a stone on the surface of a pond, until they eventually go plop, down to the bottom, and you never hear from them again. Maybe they’ve gone off to sell vacation shares in the Caribbean, or wall-coverings at Walmart. Who knows? But what a waste of a Wharton education…

Don’t go that route. You have the perfect right to be who you are, to be misunderstood and under-appreciated, and to provide massive value, in spite of whatever you think it’s doing to your career. The thing is, over time you’re going to accrete more experience producing excellence, doing good stuff, and it’s going to pay returns on what you are going to be able to do as you live into the future. If at some point you have to solve some ridiculously difficult problem, or perform some other absurd miracle, and you accomplish it, with perhaps a limited amount of fallout, then you have acquired the experience of performing those miracles, and nothing of that complexity will ever be as difficult again. And if you feel you are still unappreciated, take comfort in the hole you’ll leave whenever it is leave, for whatever reason.

But it’s your own integrity you’re building all the while. No matter what your manager does or says, as long as you know what you are worth, and remain the primary judge of your performance and value, you will be rewarded. If you cheat, there is something inside of you that will cheapen. If you produce gold, you’re filling yourself with gold. Feel it. It’s really up to you.

At some point, Peter Parker gives up on being Spider-man because he’s frustrated about what it’s brought into his life. He just wants to be a normal person, with normative rewards. He doesn’t want his life to be so hard. But he realizes it doesn’t work for him. It won’t work for you either. Believe me, I’ve been at this longer than you think.

Go get’m tiger.

Within the context of the way change occurs in nature, what we call “being stuck” is only a perspective of a temporary state within the oscillations of difference and repetition. Okay, before you fall asleep or flip to the next post, hear me out a moment. This has to do with managing yourself in your career, your life, your relations, what have you.

That’s right, in the overall flow of things, your work in a stuck state is only a single consistency, perhaps a grip or foothold, in natural system of random variations. It is important to the overall system for you to stay stuck so that its random generation of novelty does not go completely off the rails.

But that also means that your best practices and content of your certifications, as well as all of your current expertise, are mere grips and footholds already collecting dust as they are formed. All of this material was most valuable as it was being generated from the process of discovery, before someone isolated a set of skeletal variables and produced a methodology. We are ever taking pieces of these artifacts and attempting to gather what was suitable and valuable in a past that produced them, and applying them to a present and projected future that may have left their relevance behind.

Gregory Bateson suggested that both mind and nature proceed in similar ways, in that both produced novel material randomly, and then kept a storehouse of things that worked, or survived. Gene pools, that are constantly innovating themselves through reproduction and accidental deformities, or mutations, will be more or less useful in various contexts. It’s not so much about the survival of the fittest in the sense that the strongest animal gets a more reliable source of nutrition and reproductive opportunities, as in classic interpretations of Darwin, but particular features, as in the specific shape of a sea creature’s fin that may make it fleeter at certain  depths and levels of pressure, and not others, or the formation of an eye structure that may be more sensitive to a particular segment of the light spectrum that occurs in predators in a particular forest.

Your mind too, is a randomness upon randomness in a similar way, since it is, like the fin or the eye, that randomly, or what Bateson called stochastically, produces novelty upon stored patterns, except that it is also a bit like a complete natural system in itself in that you have the opportunity to generate endless novelty during a single lifetime, whereas the sea creature only gets a single life with a single fin.

As we amble on we need both feet. We need the foot that is rooted in the ground, the one that is stuck, and the one that is travelling through the air, unbound. They take turns. The foot freeing itself is reliant on the foot that is currently stuck, and vice versa. The pattern will then repeat itself, and we will walk ahead, make progress. The feet will also then need to know when it is time to change direction, turn a corner. But the feet cannot know when to turn a corner, something else must do that.

We are ever the feet, sticking to our familiar systems and practices, following the footsteps of others, which is good, but we are sometimes also the thing that turns the corner.

The walking that moves us ahead, the one foot before the other, the switching, these are good habits to get into. We can follow them in our sleep.

Until they are no longer good. You wake up one day and you realize that so much you have grow accustomed to, sets of patterns or behavior and knowledge that have worked for you for so long, are no longer good habits, maybe even bad habits.

But you identify with them so, after all, they are you, what you have become, and it may even be a painful realization. And to me, that’s all the Buddha meant by ego and attachment. It’s that simple, and you don’t have to burn incense and sit for hours by a golden statue to understand that. The incense and the golden statue are maybe more habits and attachments, just more steps in the same direction when maybe you need to turn a corner.

The doggy tricks you’ve learned that have made you useful, desirable, up until now, that are no longer helping you satisfy your needs, were things you had originally put on, but you have may have confused the garment for the thing the garment is meant to conceal, to cover, to protect from the cold.

I’m not saying this for the sake and hope of some greater salvation, only that we need to work, and sometimes need to be the foot that is rooted to the ground, and sometimes need to be the foot that is flying through the air. And sometimes, maybe more often than we think, we need to be neither foot, but the thing that can turn a corner.

Getting stuck is what we do best. We’re so good at pyramid building, corporate protocol, policies that outlive themselves. It manifests in our expectations of ourselves and other people, our routines, what we consider our sensible ways of looking at the world. Yet there is this fluidity of things and people we tend to admire, what we often misinterpret as rarified genius, magic even and sociopathy. Our systems, even those that are most rigid, are found to have leaks that will let minute tinctures of this substance in, this loosener of things, just to keep their bones from cracking when the ribcage needs to expand and contract just enough to keep its animal alive.

After all, innovation drives the economy. Whether it’s tablets and smartphones, and the technologies that connect them, give them something to do, as in the countless apps and games ever in production to keep them busy. A couple of decades back it was the Internet itself, the WWW, e-Commerce, operating systems that would allow you to run several applications simultaneously on your personal computers.  Before that, the game changer was the mere fact of personal computers, not to mention the technologies that underlie all of it, integrate them with larger networks of systems, secure and efficiently. And not least of all, the brilliant and innovative marketing behind it all, and all the new technologies in healthcare, sustainability, financial systems, homeland security, entertainment, infotainment, soft technologies of personal performance and achievement.

It’s dizzying to think about. It really takes one’s breath away. But how can these two tendencies exist so comfortably side-by-side, this anal retentiveness, on one side and on the other, that fountain of ever-expulsive novelty?

To Gilles Deleuze – likely the most important philosopher of late twentieth century Western Civilization, dead for two decades now, but yet to be discovered by the world at large – this sort predicament is to be expected. All of nature, he says, is made up of this relationship of difference and repetition, difference being the predominant principal, and repetition being the tendency for the flux of things to form habits. We therefore find the ever expanding and entropic universe generating patterns of star systems that begin to behave with a degree of predictability, things orbiting other things in regular spatial and temporal arcs, planets that can sustain life because they maintain consistent distances from their suns, the accretion of life itself, the repeated shapes and patterns of leaves on plants and trees, quadrupedal and bipedal forms that continually go back to the same nest, hole in the ground, home that they or someone else built for them.

Habit and structures of repetition sustain life, but life is in a sense a chaos of nonliving forms, a thinking-outside-the-box of the basic elements that might otherwise just sit there dead, like a number of businesses and ways of doing things we thought would always be there.

To be continues…

Who is the great magician who makes the grass green? – Zen Koan

Getting stuck is what we do best. Another way to put it is being consistent, or creating consistency, however you want to phrase it. We are often appraised for how well we do things the same, create sameness, get the same results, and we are often appraised by how well we maintain a level of sameness, not deviate from our course, stay focused, and so forth. It’s like a thing we worship, this habit-making adventure we call our lives in which the prizes go to the folks who become experts and masters of things by forming rigid patterns we identify as sticking to it or best practices, and even that elusive quality we call character.

But then again we also like when people create new ways of doing things, or new things entirely, and we don’t often look at how these two tendencies, that of generating consistency and difference, are essentially contradictions, and what we must do to allow for both modes of being.

Getting stuck is what we do best, at least in part because it is a thing we highly value. We build our floors in our homes with solid materials so we don’t fall easily through them into the basement or the home of our neighbor below. We put up walls to protect us from the weather, other people who threaten us, who might want to run off with some of our stuff, or our family members. We create imaginary attributes such as skill sets, knowledge, experience, and job performance, so it is less easy to steal our jobs from under us.

And yet there is this tendency in us to go breathless and giddy over words like innovation, and the English Language’s newest gumball: disruption.

I remember when disruption was a thing I would get kicked out of class for. It is also decidedly not the thing to do when meeting with a client, in suits and ties, when you’ve got something serious to do or talk about. You don’t just start singing RnB songs when you feel the pressure mount and you think conversation’s going in the wrong direction. You don’t blurt out and do your Michael Jackson moves on the conference table top. And I suppose there’s good reason for that.

But still: disruption. What a maggot that word is, that quality of letting the system breathe, bringing life back in, the starting-over-again-with-fresh-ideas approach we have been agitating against all along.

To be continued…