Show what you mean

“Saying what you mean” may be a great way to build a strong friendship. It is not, however, a great way to build website navigation, or a presentation visual.

It is not that words are lame. They are wonderful, precise, meaningful. But they do not provide the immediate understanding visuals carry. Reading is a complex, fairly lengthy process. It involves a sequence of steps: seeing + pattern matching + pattern interpretation. Reading is also linear in nature. is perfect  this of example a sentence fact this (This sentence is a perfect example of this fact). Finally, reading requires focus, attention. One cannot read a book, and drive in busy traffic (this kind learning cost me $2600, enjoy your savings).

Seeing, however, is simpler and quasi-immediate. immediate grasp of the metric; meaning of the metric conveyed at the same time as its value; low attention requirement to observe the figure. Watching is also more parallel, and requires less attention.

These differences are the reasons why maps are visual and not long-winded tales of all the ways to go to all the places. These are also the reasons why fighter jets, military helicopters and most civil airplanes have kept analog displays in the cockpit in the Digital Age. And these are the reasons why I really liked a nice little feature in the otherwise fairly modest North Arizona University website:

 

Now, millions of websites have a map link. But most still link to maps through words like “map” or all-times-favorite “directions” or the ever-so-dreadful “click here”. Some will have a picture of a map linking to the full-fledge picture map or its Google, Yahoo, or Live mashup bread. But few personalize it to the point of making the link a tidbit of the real map. Anyway, this one triggered the thought, and hence deserved the credit. So there you go. Thanks to North Arizona University

Now, there is a limit to the power of images, and it is the meaning people put on them. If you show a knife to a cook, it is full of possibilities. It is a tool. It evokes to do’s, etc. Now, if you show the same knife to students, they may think “Scream” trilogy. So as you can see, images may be powerful ways to convey simple messages, within the confines of agreed upon context, amongst known viewers. But images are also a wonderful way to convey the wrong message, very powerfully

This is a funny and interesting topic, which we will keep for next time. In the meantime, to make a point of living by what we just told, let’s summarize our point visually:

The stroke of insight of Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist. So you will soon understand the extraordinary insight she got when one morning, she woke up with a terrible pain on the left temporal lobe. As a person, she was both living an intense connective experience and a struggle for survival against a stroke. As a scientist, she had a unique insider experience of what a stroke does, and what it means. As her brain functions (motion, speech, memory, self-awareness, etc.) were shutting down one by one, she started to experience an intense connectedness, the loss of the constant brain chatter, the loss of the sense of self and separatedness.

“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.”

Jill Bolte Taylor

If the video takes to long to load, you can go and Check TED.

Who you are guides what you do and what you are looking for

Admittedly, this title is not going to get me a Pulitzer prize, but just check it out. I just completed the Strengths Finder 2.0 survey, from Gallup. This survey is a set of 177 questions, where you need to define your position on a range between two assertions each time.

At the end, you get a list of five “natural strengths” among a set of 34. My results just came out: Ideation, Restorative, Activator, Communication, Intellection. In simple terms, it means that I have a lot of ideas that I use to solve problems, that I am better at getting started and more comfortable when everything is confusing than closing when everything is clear, that I talk, write, and draw a lot to share ideas and that I spend way too much time in my head :).

Now, what is the link with the title, will you ask? Well, there you go. Ting is very different from me. She doesn’t have 132 new ideas everyday. She doesn’t need to. She picks the good ones and follows through. Her journal/scheduler is her best friend. She has had a Franklin Covey 3-ring binder for years, and can track everything to the minute. Me, on the other hand, would never get a scheduler under control - and yes I tried, time and time again; but my favorite tools enable me to jot down, and link ideas to one another. My best friends are Moleskine notebooks, bookmarks, tagging and note-taking tools, white boards and post-its…

As you can see, it is just a quick idea. Nothing big. But just think about the impact. If who you are drives the tools you use, the things you looking for, then becoming aware of these gives you an insight about who you are. The tools you use most are obviously saying a lot about who you are, even unconsciously. So, a good way to know yourself better, if it is at all your interest, is to audit yourself this way: what tools are you using? what are you reading? listening to? watching? This is a great way to see if you put your hours where your goals or dreams are.

Why care? Because the better you know yourself, the better you will distinguish the situations to seek from the ones to avoid. You will spend your time on the right endeavors and will hone your strengths by practicing them. You will also get less frustrated because trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

To act or do nothing, that is the (other important) question

I read this morning an interesting article in Le Monde - New York Times Section. In summary, it presents a quick overview of some recent studies of preferences for action or inaction when situations arise, their impact on success and self-worth, and what may cause such a preference.

The text was informative, but one could have hoped the argumentation and supportive data would be more compelling. For one thing, one doesn’t need a PhD to figure out that people will tend to prefer action if action led them to success in the past, and conversely will stay put if this proved wise before. More importantly, the article should have pinpointed the incomplete view of the main theory presented:

• the importance of time and timing
• the discontinuity in the likeliness of outcomes
• the importance continuous learning

As far as time and timing, two aspects are at play here: the time you have to make the decision and act, but also your timing - that is, when you make your decision and act on it. In many situations, being right too late is much worse than being wrong early.  Then, action is better than inaction (see next point on discontinuity of outcomes). In many other situations, making the wrong move is altogether irreparable, and waiting a little bit rather than acting foolishly may save a lot of frustration. Examples abound in both case. When the priest asks at a wedding “Speak or remain silent forever”, you may want to remain silent at this point - for everyone’s sake please do not take it literally. Now, if you really have a point to share, you may have wanted to do so in the first place, some time before everybody was sitting in the pews, which leads us to timing.My mentor and I met in November in Las Vegas. At that time, he told me: “put your portfolio in cash, we’re heading for trouble”. At that time, the decision to sell was a good one. To do the same end of January would have been foolish.

Another point was the discontinuity in the likeliness of outcomes. In simple words, there are mistakes you can correct, and others you can’t. When it’s reparable, a bias for action will lead you further, because you can always try again or correct the course. When a mistake is irreparable, a bias for inaction may or may not be a good thing. The only thing we know for sure is that foolish action won’t get you far then. Let’s explore the example of the goalkeeper under this light, since the very physics of the situation lead to irreparable consequences. When a penalty is kicked, the goalkeeper has but a second to move towards the ball and catch it. If the ball has an effect, it may take a split second to see where the ball is going to go. Anyone who has seen the size of the goals these days could understand that you would need to be Spiderman to have the time to see where the ball will go, verify your first insight, ponder and then jump. I will need to look further to find studies on the subject, to include all the aspects at play: statistics of where the ball is going, statistics of the chance to catch the ball if you wait and see first vs. jump on one side,  which is an acquired knowledge or experience that the researchers did not take into account… but in brief, the contextual elements suggest that if a goalkeeper jumps immediately on one side, he is taking a chance to catch it, if he doesn’t he may not have the time to do anything. Who would stay put with these terms?

Finally, having been a trainer and change management consultant for so many years, I must highlight the importance of learning. Bias for inaction won’t get you anywhere, as far as learning is concerned. On the other hand, as per the very common coaching quote, “Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Bias for inaction will not allow you to acquire skills, and a bias for action without guidance will cripple you with permanent bad habits and scars.

This does not remove the validity of the theory, in the right context. It probably applies well to economic decisions such as the sale or conservation of a stock portfolio. If you are not convinced, I could give you another even more lame example, where the bias for action would be even bigger: when falling from an airplane

At the end of the day, a more comprehensive summary on the topic is: when informed, timely, reasoned, calm action is better than uninformed, emotional, erratic action. But honestly, didn’t you know that in the first place? I am so glad my tax dollars did not fund this research.

Now for your pleasure, here is the article:

When people feel pressure, the urge to take ACTION is powerful. But in many instances, the best way to respond is to DO NOTHING.

When it comes to choosing what to do, sometimes the best thing is nothing.

Consider Radek Cerny, the No. 1 goalkeeper for Tottenham Hotspur, who was facing off against Manchester United’s exuberant young midfielder, Cristiano Ronaldo, for a penalty kick during the recent fourth round of the Football Association Cup in Britain. As Ronaldo’s foot swung back for the kick, Cerny lept to the left, expecting a sharp shot to that corner. The ball barreled into the lower right. Goal! Cerny’s mistake, in Ofer H.Azar’s eyes, is that the moved to one side instead of remaining in the center, where he would have had a greater chance of stopping the ball.

Mr. Azar is not a coach or a goalie. Actually, he does not even play soccer. He’s a lecturer in the School of Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Mr. Azar, however, is interested in decision-making, and the split-second response of goalie stop penalty kicks struck him and several of his colleagues as a perfect real-life test case of why people sometimes make irrational decisions.

Classical economists often criticize experiments on how emotions influence financial decisions because they do not involve meaningful monetary rewards. Examining professional soccer players seems to solve that problem.

“Incentives are huge,’’ Mr. Azar and his collaborators argue in a paper that appeared not long ago in The Journal of Economic Psychology. What’s more, “goalkeepers face penalty kicks regularly, so they are not only high-motivated decision-makers, but also very experienced ones.’’ The Israeli scholars are not looking to break into the Premier League. Their point is that a preference for action over inaction can play a significant role in all kinds of economic choices.

When the economy has been doing poorly, officials are more likely to “be tempted to ‘do something,’ ’’ they argue, even if the risks outweigh the possible gains. “If things turn bad, at least they will be able to say that they tried to do something, whereas if they choose not to change anything and the situation continues to be poor (or becomes worse), it may be hard to avoid the criticism that despite the warning signs they ‘didn’t do anything.’ ’’

That sort of thinking can affect whether managers stick with their firm’s current strategy or change course. And, apparently, whether goalkeepers stand still or take a leap. For their study, Mr. Azar, along with Michael Bar-Eli, a sports psychologist; Ilana Ritov, a psychologist; and two graduate students, scanned the top leagues in the world, collecting data on 311 penalty kicks. According to their calculations, staying in the center gives the goalkeeper the best shot at halting a penalty kick — 33.3 percent, instead of 14.2 percent on the left and 12.6 percent on the right. Yet when the group analyzed how the goalkeepers had actually reacted to these penalty kicks, they discovered the goalies remained in the center just 6.3 percent of the time.

The reason, Mr. Azar contends, is rooted in how the players feel after failing to block the ball. Their soccer speculations build on the work of Amos Tversky and the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who explored the idiosyncrasies of decision- making. In a landmark study, the two psychologists found that people had more regrets when they lost $1,200 because they chose to act, (in this case, change an investment), than people who lost $1,200 because they left their investments untouched.

What Mr. Azar and his collaborators wanted to show was that in certain situations, those results could be reversed: when acting was the standard response — like a goalkeeper’s jumping to one side on a penalty kick—not acting would make someone feel a deeper emotional pang. The result is an unconscious bias toward action. To check, they asked 32 goalkeepers in Israel’s Premier League and National League to rate how bad they felt on a scale of 1 to 10 after missing penalty kicks.As it turned out, about half of the group said “10’’no matter where they stood. Of the remaining 15, 11 felt worse when they remained in the center instead of jumping to the side. Nothing definitive, the authors acknowledge, but it does at least suggest “that goalkeepers feel worse about a goal being scored when it follows from inaction (staying in the center) than from action (jumping).’’ Outside the stadium, Mr. Azar and company argue that “action bias’’ can influence not just goalies but also investors as they decide to sell their stocks (action) or leave their portfolio untouched (inaction) during a downturn, and whether a worker chooses to look for a better job or stay put.

Marcel Zeelenberg, a social psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has found that a bias toward action or inaction often depends on whether a previous result was good or bad. After a team has a big loss, for example, the expectation is that the coach should replace the starting players, whereas after winning, leaving the lineup unchanged is considered the normal response. In an e-mail message, Mr. Zeelenberg said he thought the Israelis’ “paper is convincing because it uses real, already existing data to test a theory that was recently developed and tested only in the lab.’’

Paul Romer, an economist at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in California, said the study illustrated an important point about economic decision-making. “How people feel about various kinds of activities means a lot about what they decide to do,’ ’Mr. Romer said.“ In many situations, we just look at the narrow monetary payoffs and we forget about the effects of preference or feelings.’’ So what do the men on the field think? Danny Cepero, a goaltender with the New York Red Bulls, a Major League Soccer team, said he could understand the emotional downside of doing nothing. If you stay put because you think a ball is coming straight up the middle and miss, he said, “you look like a fool. “Definitely it’s more acceptable to pick a side and just go.’’

Is Collaboration really the $588 Billion Problem?

Collaboration is a big word. It is in everything we do, particularly at work, except maybe for Trappist monks and hermits retired far out in the desert. So it is difficult to evaluate precisely the impact of communication and collaboration on your business, be it in terms of productivity, baseline, bottom line, or top line. It is a little bit like trying to estimate the contribution of the water you drink on your creativity: what is clear is, if you do not drink, you are not going to stay creative very long, even though you account for the hallucinations on the third day. 

In a recent article though, CIO Insight attempted to address the question in a simplistic and ultimately impressive, albeit imprecise and arguable, manner:

E-mail, instant messaging, and blog-reading are costing the economy billions in lost productivity, new research finds.

As much as e-mail, instant messages, blogs and their brethren technologies have helped knowledge workers better collaborate, interruptions and duplications derived from these forms of digital communication and content are overwhelming workers to the point of distraction.

The result is an egregious lack of productivity that may cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year, according to a report by Basex, which has tabbed information overload as the “Problem of the Year” for 2008.

“Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us,” authored by Basex analysts Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes and released Dec. 19, claims that interruptions from phone calls, e-mails and instant messages eat up 28 percent of a knowledge worker’s work day, resulting in 28 billion hours of lost productivity a year. The $588 billion figure assumes a salary of $21 per hour for knowledge workers.

The addition of new collaboration layers force the technologies into untenable competitive positions, with phone calls, e-mails, instant messaging and blog-reading all vying for workers’ time.

For example, a user who has started relying on instant messaging to communicate may not comb through his or her e-mail with the same diligence. Or, a workgroup may add a wiki to communicate with coworkers, adding another layer of collaboration and therefore another interruption source that takes users away from their primary tasks.

Beyond the interruptions and competitive pressure, the different modes of collaboration have created more locations through which people can store data. This makes it harder for users to find information, prompting users to “reinvent the wheel because information cannot be found,” Basex said.

Basex’ conclusion is that the more information we have, the more we generate, making it harder to manage.

While the research firm credited Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Morgan Stanley and other bellwethers for their attention to the attention management issues, its report offered no silver bullets for the knowledge worker, and said the information overload dilemma will only worsen in 2008.

However, Basex proposed several steps to mitigate information overload. With e-mail as the biggest offender, Basex said users can save time by not e-mailing someone, and then following up with a phone call or an instant message two seconds later (a no-brainer perhaps, but a trap many of us fall into).

Basex also said users must not combine multiple topics or requests in a single e-mail; make sure the subject clearly reflects the topic and urgency of the message; read their e-mails before sending to make sure they make sense; and will not hit reply-all unless necessary or reply with one-word e-mails such as “thanks.”

For instant messaging, Basex urged workers to show more patience and refrain from blasting multiple messages to coworkers if a response is not imminent. Also, users should keep their presence status up-to-date, so that people trying to reach them don’t waste their time.

For all communication, Basex wants to remind workers to be as explicit as possible because their readers are not mind readers. While the statement may seem like an obvious mantra, it is also easily forgotten.

Basex also urged users to choose the proper communication medium at the proper time. The researchers suggested instant messaging is better than the phone when multiple parties need to be on and do the talking, or there are a number of many-to-many conversations taking place.

Instant messaging is better than e-mail when an issue demands an immediate response, or trivial, such as lunch plans. E-mail trumps instant messaging when a note must be blasted out to multiple people and when a message must be archived.

What do you think? How would you evaluate the impact of communication and collaboration on your business?

Getting started with visual communication

Written communication has captured for centuries the lion share of communication. From the memo to the sales letter, to the meeting minutes, most interactions at work are initiated, supported or summarized through words. Yet, there are things that words can hardly convey. And as subtle, coherent, comprehensive and precise words can be, they remain a slow, selective means of communication. It is slow because the reader needs to follow the arrangement of the text predetermined by the author to grasp the message in its entirety. It is selective because one needs to know the language to understand the message, and take action if need be.

At times, you may need a more immediate or accessible means of communication. Actually, these situations have always existed and have exploded over the course of the last decades. Examples include consumer electronics and furniture installation manuals, that have dramatically shrunk from dozens of pages in multiple languages to slim illustrated leaflets, or traffic signs, which in Europe are symbols that enable clear (most of the time) understanding of what one should do, despite the language diversity.

There is no doubt that visual communication is important today. Yet, we still spend very little time learning the required skills. If it takes learning ABCs then words - later further distinguished between nouns, verbs, adjectives, then forming sentences, to communicate well in written form, what does it take to communicate visually? This is what we will see in this series.

We will identify patterns for visual communication: needs, tools, audiences, situations, etc. These will provide you with a better sense of how you could communicate visually a message to an audience in a given context.

 

The Visual Table of Elements

 

My boss sent our Strategy team this link to Visual Literacy. Usually, I keep what we do private, well, because it is, but this particular link is available on the web, and could interest many people. Also, it is not about knowing, or having access, it is about making a contribution, doing something with what you get. So I guess, I can share it:

Over the next few weeks, I will recreate a library of visuals, that you may reuse and restyle for your own benefits. I will post these as Creative Commons Share Alike.

If requirements are conversations, who’s talking? :)

Since it appears these requirements gathering and maturation efforts can be seen as conversations, let see who should be involved in these discussions in the first place.

Customers are the ones who have a need. They know what they need to achieve, and they should know what is missing in their current arsenal to achieve their goals. So they should be consulted. Customers themselves should be divided into users and stakeholders. Often their perspectives differ widely, and it is hard to say who would be wrong. Both have points, just different ones. The ones have a deep knowledge of the tactical limitations of the current solutions. The others have a more or less clear picture of where they would like to go.

Developers and designers are the ones who will build the technical solution to address the customers needs. So they should have a say. They usually know the technologies that could be used, and their limitations and constraints. These limitations and constraints are requirements in their own right. They should be included in the debate.

Finally, business people might be the customer in certain situations, or a separate entity in others, trying to get things done, somewhere in between the customers complaints and technologists rants. They have an objective, usually to meet the expectations of the customers within the technical constraints expressed by the developers and designers.

Each of these stakeholders have their own objectives, their own language, their own tools to express the requirements. A quick look at each of them shows a harsh reality: the common ground is slim to non-existent on the objectives and language standpoints, and the overlap in terms of tools limits itself to email and to some extent word and excel, maybe going as far as powerpoint.

As a facilitator of the requirements conversation, this is what you will have to tread with: three types of people with critical goals, different languages, different means of communication, all with busy agenda. Welcome to the New World

Getting things done without doing everything yourself

Yesterday, a friend of mine and I had an interesting conversation, during which we pondered some ideas that we could all learn from. He is a very successful business manager at Hewlett-Packard, thanks to an unfair number of qualities that we will not share here. He is a an achiever. He gets things done. Done right. The first time. On time!

In his success though, some might qualify him as “pushy”. He gets things done, yes. And to “get things done, done right, the first time, on time”, he will not hesitate to jump in and do things himself, to help his team. I have done the same, often, albeit with less success than him.

Still, recently, he has had some issues at home, where the entire family tends to rely on his extraordinary organization skills and energy to do anything from grocery to vacation preparation to spring cleaning. What had slowly become a set of simple but frustrating dependency relationships has recently evolved into open dissatisfaction and bitterness on both sides.

After discussing and going past the standard “It’s all her fault”, “I cannot tolerate blahblah…”, we had to go through the heart of the matter. His very success-driven, pushy, get things done attitude might be at the source of the issue. Let’s see how the dynamics operate: He asks for something to be done. Nobody does it. He insists, bugs, nags, explains, still nothing. He does it. Loop completed. What had to be done is done. Near-term, this can be seen as a success. But also people have received the message loud and clear: if they do not do it, he will. Long-term, this brings everyone one step farther from a positive dynamics in the family.

Summary: to get things done on a sustainable manner, you need to involve others in the doing. And since you cannot manipulate people into doing the things you want without hampering the relationship, you need to find another way. A powerful, indirect way is to manipulate the forces of the environment, so people want to to what you would hope for, because it is in their interest.

This thinking is not natural, but a regular practice will make you excellent at finding the forces that would entice the proper conduct, without making it a downright bribery.