I hope that sharing my own thoughts on this doesn’t load too much pressure on my children but there is a lot of evidence that making a public statement of intent increases the chance that we follow through on those commitments – I’m hoping the act of writing this article will make me a better parent.

I think we increasingly ask this question with a belief that the education system, and to some extent we as parents, are focused on many of the wrong things if we want our children to flourish in a world of artificial superintelligence.

My concerns are somewhat exacerbated by the fact that I have observed an inverse correlation between the seniority of technologists and how much digital time they allow their own children. This is not limited to concerns regarding our kids, recently the designer of the Facebook ‘like’ button revealed that he has his assistant install parental control to stop him downloading apps on his iPhone.

However, I am not sure complete abolition is the answer – not least because we will all need to work alongside machines in some capacity to stay competitive, they are already virtual appendages, perhaps becoming physical ones in the future.

I believe the answer lies in helping our kids work with digital tools to hone specific skills so that they might leverage technology, including critical thinking, creativity and compassion.

Critical thinking (rather than retention of information)

Many of us are fixated on when the singularity (the point that machines become smarter than us humans on all dimensions of intelligence) will come, Googler Ray Kurzweil estimates that it will come in the year 2045.

That will certainly be an inflection point in human history that we should all think through but in the interim machines are already superintelligent on many axes of intelligence – including memory and processing speed.

But the education system rewards progress on those exact axes, for example the emphasis on learning by rote – memorising. It’s ironic that it’s often harder for computers to perfect the things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking, rather than those we focus on at school.

We need our kids to develop skills that help them leverage machine’s superhuman strengths. This is true of many professions too – many of us are shocked when doctors look up information online in a consultation. Do we really expect our doctors to recall everything they had learnt at medical school? Do we not want them to consider subsequent developments?

Instead of glamorising memory we need to place a greater emphasis on speed of learning, understanding context, adaptation and on how to frame the right question, either as a search query or indeed as a more complex algorithm. Machines (at least until the singularity) only ever act on human instructions, framing our questions is therefore our first opportunity to succeed or fail – ask a bad question and you will get a bad answer.

Similarly, we all need to remember that if you ask a biased question you will get a biased answer. It will be increasingly important for all of us to become adept at checking our sources of data, I hope that this will be a critical part of the curriculum.

I therefore try to congratulate great questioning from my kids, more so than when they find answers. I also try to flag sources of information, simplify context and point out the times that I believe services are trying to manipulate them – for example advertising.

Creativity (rather than efficiency)

Algorithms are occasionally generative but most often they are trained to complete a specific task, usually in a more efficient manner than a human operator. Those human roles that were most repetitive have been the fastest to be disrupted – weavers, book keepers, telegraph operators.

This rule of thumb applies looking forward too – instead of becoming book keepers or drivers (high repetition and therefore risk of disruption) I hope my kids find roles that are tougher to automate – perhaps as carers or entrepreneurs. And those that truly excel will harness machines to do repetitive tasks and save their efforts for more creative actions.

Creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something – this will increasingly be the point of human value creation in any domain and the most differentiating skill.

One trap we fall into is to think of certain subjects as creative – for example, we hold up some subjects such as art and design as creative but many students only become proficient at copying those that they have observed (a task that machines will always win at).

In contrast, science and maths is often perceived to be uncreative but the greatest scientists shaped human history with huge creative leaps.  Newton discovered gravity when he saw a falling apple while thinking about the forces of nature – one of the greatest acts of human creativity.

Often those valuable leaps of creativity require base knowledge, Newton would certainly not have been equipped to ‘discover’ gravity without a phenomenal foundation in physics and maths. And as technology accelerates we will need to learn continuously in order to keep this foundation.

We can therefore no longer assume an early period of learning (for example at university) can then be capitalised upon by our kids indefinitely, instead we will need to learn continuously throughout our working lives. We need our kids to learn to love learning itself. We need to celebrate the learning journey rather than the destination.

I suspect our kids will need to continuously learn a foundation of knowledge and then learn how to be creative upon it. Somewhat controversially, I therefore often wonder how useful it is for our kids to learn languages, including computer code.

After all, Google has just announced headphones that will live translate speech into 40 languages, as neural nets improve I would expect translation to be close to perfect within a decade or so. Similarly, deep learning will likely automate the writing of code relatively quickly – while it will be useful to know how algorithms work I suspect most will be written by machine against a specific human (or eventually machine) query.

So unless our kids show incredible aptitude and are therefore capable of learning faster than their peers I suspect the value in learning languages and code will be more about understanding how the world works, which as the Newton example teaches us is key.

We should value learning the basics to this end but we should place a greater emphasis on helping our kids learn how to be creative.

The good news is digital tools can help – I often watch my son playing Minecraft. There’s a lot to like in his play – he creates his own worlds, researches other players’ approaches and iterates them and invents new tools. These skills may translate well into 3D modeling and design in the future.

However, I also observe him playing small games within Minecraft which show no obvious benefits to me – I’m therefore struggle to say if Minecraft is a good or bad thing for his development, it is likely both.

In truth I think most online services and games are both positive and negative in this way – the challenge is the useful learning and creating is often less fun than leaning back and mindlessly consuming content. I like that I create photos in Instagram but hate that I often check how many like each receives.

Perhaps there is a billion dollar opportunity for someone to develop a service that takes a subjective view on products and services and blocks the more mindless elements and therefore distractions – enabling us to focus on the positive.

Unfortunately that service is likely a long way off, so perhaps we have to help our kids understand the elements of services that might impart new skills and to help them get comfortable with being bored instead of becoming dependent on filling every snippet of time with a mindless distraction. After all, there is significant evidence that continuous partial attention lowers IQ.

It’s sobering that the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal, recently shared at a conference the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.”

I hope that I can help my kids love learning which in turn will give them the foundation to be creative.

Compassion

Perhaps the last axis that the machines will supercede us will be ‘humanity’ itself but much of technology seems to be compromising our humanity.

While machines give us greater and greater leverage for impact we are in danger of being further and further removed from society. We have seen the effect of filter bubbles in recent elections. We are also socialising less –  12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009, instead they are choosing to socialise on Snapchat and Instagram. When we do socialise it tends to be more often with people just like us, perhaps this is creating an empathy gap of sorts.

I wonder if genomics will widen that gap further – in a world where a subset of society is able to genetically engineer their own offspring will they lose empathy for society writ large?

The last and perhaps most important skill I hope we might instill in our kids is empathy and humanity. This may also be the toughest to execute given that confirmation bias pulls us into homogeneous bubbles but perhaps we can harness digital technologies to weigh up the consequences of our actions and to empathise with others different from ourselves.

There is surely an opportunity for someone to design a digital product that exposes us to viewpoints different to our own, our challenge will be to fight the urge to discount those different opinions.

One experience that gives me hope is that my kids have stood in the shoes of a Syrian refugee through an incredible New York Times Google Cardboard virtual reality product, they felt they had been transported to the camp. In the future could they attend school for a day in the developing world?

Carl Rogers said there are as many different perceptions as there are people in the world, perhaps new tools will help us truly perceive the world as others do rather than just stand in their shoes.

Until then ensuring our kids spend time with people as different to them as possible will help foster the empathy they will need.

—

Our kids will stay in front of the machines and leverage them for good if we double down on our own humanity and continuously learn to create…

There is probably some correlation between how many filing cabinets an industry is responsible for filling and how significant an opportunity it might be for new digital-first entrants – the insurance industry manages to hoard paper inside but also sends plenty of it to us all.

Given this and the simple fact that insurance is important, offering piece of mind to almost all of us, plenty of startups have had ambitions to make a dent in the opportunity but most have struggled to find the achilles heels of the incumbents – not least because of the capital requirements to build a brand, underwriting infrastructure and the established channels.

Investors and Founders have to form fast opinions but the tools we use, not least our experience, may be horribly out-dated; would I have ruled out the iPod in 2000 because MP3 players “have never taken off” in the past? WebVan burned through $800 million trying to deliver fresh groceries to your door, having watched that failure from afar would I have been conditioned to think Amazon Fresh and Instacart would not stand a chance. Kozmo failed spectacularly in 1998, but today, Amazon and Google are battling to provide same-day shopping delivery.

Paul Graham touched on this in a wonderful essay recently, including the reminder “When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world”. His essay reminded me of the ‘Pike Syndrome’ – despite the crappy resolution this is a 6 minute must watch for any innovator or investor:

The video is a great, albeit depressing, example of learned helplessness. The pike has learned that he can’t catch minnows – even though he once devoured them at will in the same environment. Even when the situation that caused him to be unsuccessful was removed and the minnows swam past him, he continued to believe he couldn’t catch them.

We need to remember to not be the pike on a daily basis, asking what assumptions we’re making and whether they are still valid. We need to remind ourselves that the world is changing fast and to not be prisoners of our own experience…

…and an overview that the Design Indaba team wrote up (view the original here):

In this presentation at Design Indaba Conference 2014, Tom Hulmegets back to basics with refreshingly simple insights into using technology as a design tool. The British entrepreneur, who is now general partner at Google Ventures, shares the story of how he established OpenIDEO, global design firm IDEO’s open innovation platform.

Hulme starts with some founding principles that have steered him on his trajectory as an innovative thinker and builder of successful enterprises.

We are all designers

“Everybody has the capacity to design,” he says. “It is not the privilege of just a few people who have studied it at school X or Y.”

We achieve more through collaboration

“We push each other on, we combine ideas, we work together to create more,” he notes.

Tech is just a design tool

“Let’s stop being scared of technology,” he says. “Let’s stop saying online versus offline. Let’s stop structuring businesses with separate digital teams. To all of us, digital technology online and offline is just life. Let’s incorporate that and really understand that.”

Hulme debunks the common belief that technology makes us anti-social. “I guarantee that for the past 500 years, people have been saying the same thing,” he says, pointing to a faded photograph of a crowded train carriage carrying commuters, all with their noses buried in newspapers. “Our job is to harness technology and design with it.”

Addressing a real human need

It may seem self-explanatory but Hulme points out that new technological gadgets and applications will only be effective if they meet real human needs.

“We often think technology addresses new human needs,” he notes. “But most of the time it’s just tools evolving” to meet the same needs in a better way.

During the industrial revolution, he points out, the precursor to the alarm clock was a long wooden stick that people called “knocker-uppers” in east London used to bang on factory workers’ windows to wake them up. An entrepreneurial lady designed a pea-shooter so she wouldn’t have to carry around the unwieldy stick. This ultimately led to the alarm clock – an arc of tools evolving to meet the same human need.

Low friction

Designers of new technology need to ask how they can meet a need better. This is the determining factor in whether their products will hold their own in a crowded marketplace. “People forget that you are only as good or as bad as your competition,” Hulme says. The Revere 33 Stereo camera, which was invented in the 1950s, failed spectacularly because although it’s point of difference was that it took 3D pictures, you could only view the images on the device itself. So people had to carry the camera everywhere. This is an example of a high-friction design.

“We have to design to deliver services in lower friction ways. That’s our job as designers,” he points out.

This is one of the reasons that Hulme believes Facebook is not popular with teenagers. “Communicating in the classroom is a lower friction way of doing many of the things that Facebook promises to do, so Whatsapp and WeChat and Snapchat meet their needs more efficiently and faster than Facebook can.”

As designers, it is going to be more important to meet human needs better because, as Hulme points out, making stuff is getting easier. “There are 300 apps uploaded to iTunes per day. […] It’s no different to what happened with hand tools. They evolved. They specialised. We had to design better versions of them.”

Human needs have not changed

In his own work, Hulme keeps coming back to the most famous triangular framework of human needs: Maslow’s hierarchy that posits physiological needs as the most basic, followed by safety, love, esteem and finally self-realisation. “Technology is changing rapidly but human needs have not changed,” he says. So, before the advent of mobile technology, for example, people literally shouted “help!” to raise the alarm, and now we have mobile phones in emergencies. Similarly, to find love in days gone by we looked for a mate in our village, but now we seek out partners on social media.

Knowing what need you are meeting as a designer is crucial to driving the solutions we find. Hulme has a regular discipline of self-analysis in his work: “I try to set time aside each week to ask why the hell I am doing what I’m doing, what the human need is that it addresses. If you cannot start a project by describing a benefit it will create for someone, then don’t start.”

Facilitating open design

During his time as design director at IDEO, Hulme looked at how to use technology to improve the way social challenges are solved.

The traditional ‘town hall’ model of the community coming together to generate ideas is a high-friction solution, involving large groups of people physically meeting in person. The model of suggestion boxes – both real and online – is low friction but it doesn’t foster collaboration. “The best-case scenario is that you get lots of suggestions posted, but no discussion or exchange. It’s opaque – you can’t learn from what others are doing.”

So IDEO busted open the suggestion box model and made it transparent, so that similar ideas could be grouped together. “Then people with different skillsets could work together to come up with solutions. This was the basic observation that led to OpenIDEO,” he says.

The emergent platform is a global community that draws on optimism, inspiration, ideas and opinions to solve problems together for the collective social good.

OpenIDEO issues online calls for solutions to specific challenges. Each challenge starts with a question focussing on a particular problem, followed by a research phase where users post things they have seen that inspire them and that may help solve the big question. Next, the ideas phase is where users post possible solutions and collaborations start to form. Some of the ideas make it into a subsequent refinement stage of prototyping and experimentation with real users. Fully formed ideas are then put through the evaluation phase where users rate the ideas. The ideas are all open-source so anyone is free to take any of the ideas forward.

“It’s about open innovation and social impact,” says Hulme. Some of OpenIDEO’s successes so far include helping build a bone marrow database of over 100 000 people and developing an app for Amnesty International to reduce the risk of kidnapping when working in dangerous areas.

The final component is that regular users earn a design quotient, or DQ, based on their participation in each phase plus their collaboration with others. “The DQ Offers feedback and recognition. The idea is that it becomes a badge of honour for community members over time,” he says.

OpenIDEO and IDEO.org have launched Amplify, aprogramme committed to run 10 international aid challenges over five years. One of their first challenges has looked at how to improve women’s and girls’ safety in low-income urban areas.

“We fundamentally believe that instead of us just designing, [are there ways] can we shine a light on examples that are happening on the ground right now?” he asks. So while in South Africa, Hulme got input from local experts on safety in Cape Town’s informal settlements. He interviewed Ntutu Mtwana, a safety and volunteer coordinator with the Violence Prevention and Urban Upgrade project, to learn from her experience. Her interview was added to the OpenIDEO platform and shared with users across the world, creating dialogue with people who would never have previously met.

Says Hulme: “Creating a platform that takes the friction out of these people collaborating to me is the ultimate leverage.”

Luckily I don’t feature much but here’s the video:

The story goes full circle as I worked with Clay and 200 HBS alumni earlier this year on an open version of our software called HBS Open Forum to refine the Capitalist’s Dilemma piece, this was subsequently printed in Harvard Business Review.

危 wēi danger

Flickr started as an online role-playing game called Game Neverending.  The game featured a navigable map, real-time interaction with other users, instant messaging and was playable in-browser, breaking new ground in web application development. However, one part of the game, a tool to share photos and save them to a page while playing, turned out to be the most popular part of the experience – leading the company to switch focus and become a photo-sharing site.  As co-founder Caterina Fake told USA Today in 2006, “Had we sat down and said, ‘Let’s start a photo application,’ we would have failed. We would have done all this research and done all the wrong things.”

It’s not uncommon for great businesses to be built from unsuccessful endeavours – Fabulis relaunched as FAB when their daily deals got traction. However, when ‘pivoting’ like this often the founders stops designing for themselves and move away from their area of passion.  With this in mind surely Flickr would struggle to truly empathise with its community and stay motivated?

机 jī opportunity

Flickr’s solution was simple and smart: it ensured its employees were as passionate about the product as the community’s most die-hard fans by hiring directly from within the early community.  For example, for its international rollout it posted a call on the Flickr blog for community managers and got more than 700 responses.

We have adopted this approach with OpenIDEO – having hired two of our most prolific users who regularly appeared on our community leaderboards

TL;DR / How About…

Hiring your most passionate users to truly drive empathy for your customer?

危 wēi danger

“Each year more than 1 billion pieces of litter will accumulate on Texas highways. Of those, 13% are cigarette butts. That means 130 million butts will be tossed out in Texas alone this year.”  –Texas Department of Transportation.

In fact, several trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide every year. Billions are flicked, one at a time, on our sidewalks, beaches, nature trails, gardens, and other public places every day. And, cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate tow, rather than cotton, which can take decades to degrade. Not only does cigarette litter ruin even the most picturesque setting, but the toxic residue in cigarette filters is truly damaging to the environment. However it’s notoriously difficult to get smokers to stop smoking and change their behaviour, surely this pollution is inevitable?

机 jī opportunity

My colleague Ben in London looked at this problem and instead asked how this problem might be reframed as an opportunity.  What if this nasty habit could contribute to, rather than subtract from, the beauty of outdoor spaces? His design for Cigg Seeds aims to do precisely that. He imagines cigarettes outfitted with biodegradable filters that contain wild flower seeds, they sprout and blossom into wildflower meadows when finished and flicked, or deposited on the ground.

TL;DR / How About…

• Looking at the greatest points of waste in your value chain, how might it be reused or harnessed for good rather than simply eliminated? 

危 wēi danger

Where possible we all try to launch something in order to learn, ideally releasing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that real customers can react to. But for more complex offers often the MVP takes significant time and effort to develop and becomes diluted as big teams coalesce around it, losing site of the original vision (it’s said a camel is just a horse designed by committee.) Team members tasked with creating new products and services often suffer from “groupthink,” tending to lose the benefits of independent thought, increasingly just agreeing with each other.  Amazon prides itself on launching new products and services continuously – surely its teams lose focus and the organisation is in danger of designing more camels than horses?

机 jī opportunity

Amazon does two things that I think radically mitigate this risk:

Rule 1: the two pizza team rule: Amazon never allows one of its teams to grow too big to be fed by two pizzas, they thereby reduce the chance their teams become slow and unfocused.

Rule 2: start with a press-release, internally. In addition, Amazon starts any project “working backwards” from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it or a “skills-forward” approach (where people and companies let what they are good at determine their next steps.)

For each new initiative a product manager starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release is the new/updated product’s customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centred on the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will beat those existing solutions.  If the benefits listed don’t sound appealing to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built). Instead, the product manager keeps iterating on the press release until they’ve come up with real benefits. The press-release is often structured as follows:

• Heading – Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand.
• Sub-Heading – Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
• Summary – Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
• Problem – Describe the problem your product solves.
• Solution – Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.
• How to Get Started – Describe how easy it is to get started.
• Customer Quote – Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit.

Once the project moves into development, the press release is used as a guiding light – if the team finds it’s spending time building things that aren’t in the press release (overbuilding), it asks why. This keeps product development focused on achieving the customer benefits and not building extraneous stuff that dilutes the offer and takes resources to maintain.

TL;DR / How About…

• Minimising team size for any new endeavour? Implementing a 1 or 2 pizza team rule?
• Creating a press-release for the idea and displaying it prominently in the workspace, perhaps scheduling a weekly meeting to review and iterate it?

With this in mind, when creating new platforms we define success criteria and ask ourselves who we might attract and engage. We ask ourselves where they congregate (online or offline) and ask what might motivate them to participate.

It’s often claimed that everyone’s incentives need to be the same in any successful system. However, no communities or individuals are identical, and their needs and interests will also differ. Instead, our experience has taught us that a site’s users might have wildly differing incentives and motivations, and if you value diverse input that’s healthy.

Cash is clearly a powerful incentive but it’s not the be all and end all – just look at Wikipedia’s hundreds of thousands of unpaid contributors that have amassed over one billion human hours creating and editing contributions. These contributors certainly do not all have the same motivation to contribute – some might be editing to improve their reputation while others might use it as a learning process.

I was fortunate to go to a lecture by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School when we began imagining OpenIDEO. He did a wonderful job of showing the range of potential incentives and motivations of different community members in this framework:

Given that we agreed inclusivity was a design principle for OpenIDEO, it followed that we should design as many of these intrinsic and extrinsic motivations into the platform as possible and that our primary job was to design a system in which they were all aligned toward the same common goal.

We made a conscious decision not to use the most extrinsic of all motivators: cash. Our conclusion was that it would compromise collaboration and misalign other motivations that would be sufficiently powerful alone.

With this framework printed large in our project space, we designed OpenIDEO to appeal to multiple incentives and motivations – not least recognition, knowledge, intellectual challenge and fun. You will see that these manifest themselves in personal profile pages and testimonials, downloadable tools and a personal ‘Design Quotient’ which is a categorization and measure of the user’s participation on the site.

More recently, as we have begun applying the OI Engine platform to Enterprises we have been pleasantly surprised at the power of these non-financial motivations in driving contributions from employees. In fact, one client’s toughest challenge when selling the platform into his international bank was in convincing the managers that prizes weren’t required to drive employee contribution and might instead compromise collaboration, he was vindicated when thousands of employees actively engaged.

Tip 2:

Who really matters.

• What community do you hope to engage?
• Where do they congregate?
• What might motivate them to participate?
• Can you design for multiple motivations?

View Tip 1 here

(reblogged from my original post on Huffington Post)