SFH Blog

Designing for Action: Can Montessori inspire us?

2015-08-13T18:24:00.002+05:30

A colleague shared the HBR article titled Design for Action in our internal Yammer group on Design Thinking. And when I read the introductory paragraphs on the great designers I couldn't help but find myself chagrined that Dr. Maria Montessori doesn't find a mention at all. And to add salt to the hurt, the article talks about IDEO helping design cafeteria experience in all the schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. Nothing wrong with that actually, in fact it's great, but ignoring the work of a designer who directly lend to purpose of a school? Got my goat.

Wonder why most Designers & Design Thinkers are either ignorant of the work of Dr. Maria Montessori or ignore her?

Have they looked at the materials she designed and developed for the children or the broad guidelines she left behind for the setup of an environment?

Or the design of the work day and work hours of the children? The granular details that she has taken care of for the better of the children at various points of the day, right from the moment the children are dropped off by their parents at the gate, is what you would compare with Mobile Moments if you were designing the mobile experience for the Digital Customer today.

We are in an increasingly losing battle for Attention. Our fixation with gaining the attention of the user has in fact made the user attention deficient. Contrast that with a Montessori environment where children focus on the work they are doing all on their own.

Children aged 2-6 years in a Montessori environment in Hosur, India, engrossed in their work

Take a look at the attached image where the children are all into their work. And these are all less than six years old. It is all intrinsic, not forced by a supervising adult.

No industrial/corporate designer has been able to achieve the state of Flow (as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) in the employees that Dr. Montessori is still achieving decades after her death in children worldwide.

We still do not design/build our apps to let us know that we are either entering some wrong data or taking some wrong action. We could find inspiration for that if we were to design our apps in a Montessori way. Control of Error is a quality that is inhered in the apparatus that Montessori built by first anthropologically observing the children, then devising the apparatus, then giving it to the children, and based on the usage, refining them. And she refined them for six decades.

If that is not the hallmark of a great designer, I do not know what is.

BTW, before I forget ... Freedom to Move (Action) was one of the freedoms that Montessori enabled for the children in the design of the environment for the children to learn. Freedom to Choose and Freedom to Repeat an activity as many times as the child wanted were two other action oriented freedoms that she built into the design of the running of environment.

No sitting on chairs with folded arms or with fingers on the lips for the children who, in their small lives, have learnt only two things pretty well by the time they come to school - walking and talking.

Have you considered learning design from Montessori?

Changing systems with something you don't understand

2015-07-27T02:49:00.000+05:30

When I asked my colleagues if they agreed or not with the recently published findings of Deloitte on Digital Transformation - that it is driven by strategy, not technology - the conversation veered towards the trinitarian concept of Change - the alpha, beta & gamma change typology:

Alpha change corresponds to absolute quantitative change.
Beta change results from the respondent's subjective recalibration of the measurement scale.
Gamma change results from the respondent's reconceptualisation of the measured variable.

The assumption was that Digital Transformation corresponded to Gamma change and that failing to reconceptualise or redefine the phenomenon you are measuring will take you the way of Blockbuster.

And a very thought provoking question was asked assuming you are a business leader:

"What if you do not understand something, would you want it to change your system in unknown ways?"

Not a savory question for most business leaders in this day and age actually. ;-)

So I tried something that people still don't understand, including me - "Social". But before I get there, a bit of a prelude.

I have been influenced by Ranjay Gulati's Reorganize for Resilience for some years now, and the key aspect I believe since then is that we need to make silos permeable (not break them down, for their original purpose is to increase efficiency).

I have also been a fan of Adaptive Systems, and also attracted to Complexity science - emergent order & self organization being 2 Utopian ideals for a corporate world.

But now I want to understand a bit deeper about Antifragility (the book is ordered, but not yet delivered). Wikipedia tell this about the difference between Adaptive & Antifragile systems:

"An adaptive system is one that changes its behavior based on information available at time of utilization (as opposed to having the behavior defined during system design). This characteristic is sometimes referred to as cognitive. While adaptive systems allow for robustness under a variety of scenarios (often unknown during system design), they are not necessarily antifragile. In other words, the difference between antifragile and adaptive is the difference between a system that is robust under volatile environments/conditions, and one that is robust in an previously unknown environment."

As you might understand from above paragraph, it shows the abject inadequacy of system design as we do it in all of our work, as is built into all of our platforms, organization structures.

While Taleb might implore us to build Antifragile systems - those that become better when chaos hits - we must at least mature from static systems to adaptive ones; to at least build resilience if not antifragility.

How do we do this? Through strategy? Through technology? Is that even the promise of Digital?

I see scope for adaptive systems in "Social" (which has been subsumed into Digital), but not in the manner it exists today. At the risk of sounding pompous, I must say I have not seen any good example of a system that incorporates "Social" in a way that it has grown contextual to work, that it is not merely yet another screen to go to accomplish something.

A simple manifestation of "Social" in the context of work, that shows some reflections of an adaptive system is probably if you add a conversation layer to a simple process like expense report approval that can actually be quite a pain in the neck.

Let's take a live example that I am living with as of now (Design Thinking encourages discussions around recent real life experiences rather than hypothetical ones).

I traveled to Coimbatore in March this year in my own car and stayed one night in our company guest house. I could not raise a travel request in the system since I was travelling by my own car. Since I had to submit an expense report for the guest house stay I included my Per Diem also in it and thus now I have to receive money from the company, not just give justification for the guest house bill expenses via the corporate Amex card. But my report was rejected stating that I should provide Travel ID.

I had selected the generic Travel ID given explicitly for such purposes where none exists (an erstwhile exception scenario that has now been incorporated under predefined workflow) and I also had written that I had traveled by my own car and hence there's no travel ID in the report description.

I had to update the individual line entry for the Per Diem and mentioned in it that I had no travel ID. The expense reviewer summarily skipped the report description altogether!

It was then again sent back, after taking cognizance of the comment about the lack of travel ID, asking me for my manager's approval mail to be attached which should state that I had indeed traveled on those dates (as if the guest house bill of staying overnight is not proof enough).

Now given this situation, let us consider a hypothetical scenario. If we could add a conversation layer, say a Yammer Embed, then the reviewer and me could have had a conversation around that particular expense report. And for the manager approval, my manager would see it whenever he logs into Yammer, or maybe he has configured for emails to be sent to him when he receives a private message, and then he could have said "approved" there itself, saving me the trouble of sending him an email, he responding to it, me saving that email and then attaching it to the expense report because now the conversation is hypothetically stored in the audit trail too.

Next let's consider any other situation which is non standard, an exception, a barely repeatable process. Such a conversation layer that forms a part of the audit trail stands a chance to allow us to navigate around the scenario that was unknown during design.

So if the above scenario with the expense report is indeed built out, I guess you might put in the alpha change. And then let's assume that even the next scenario of allowing any kind of exceptions be addressed via such a "social" workflow process, I guess you might put in beta change since the scale keeps re-calibrating with every new exception that crops up.

But now consider leveraging "Social" for more than conversations (used to process exceptions), like for Connections and Collaboration (under my 3Cs model), would it amount to a gamma change? Since the business would most probably be now a Social Business, with a deep dependence on communities.

So was this hypothetical change driven by technology or strategy?

I don't know, I don't care. I want that scenario play out in reality, not just my mind. And that journey has merely begun now for me. I have just shifted from abstract conceptualisation to active experiementation, need to wait till I gather concrete experiences.

Kolb's Learning Cycle

On performance management and obsoleting middle managers

2015-05-13T13:54:00.001+05:30

I read two slightly related blog posts that made me come up with these thoughts that I lay out in the post below. The blog that triggered this post was by SAP's Sameer Patel on why Performance Management needs to be disrupted right now. But these thoughts were brewing in my head based on a few incidents at work as well as this blog post on how middle managers are going to be replaced by machines.

Performance management has two key aspects to it in the Indian IT industry:

Feedback on the past performance with suggestions to improve or sustain
Metering out promotions and incentives based on performance

When we were young, it was all the fad in the industry worldwide to link salaries to performance.

But now, there is a CEO in the USA who has raised the minimum salary of every employee so high that it almost doubled the salaries of some. All because he learnt from an article on happiness what the minimum amount required was to take care of all the mundane costs of supporting a family. Somewhere in the range of $70K. He has proved that money is only a hygiene factor, not a motivating factor.

And then there is Zappos, exemplar of holocracy, whose CEO gave very good severance packages for those who would not like to work in the new org structure based on Holocracy. 210 people (~14%) took it and left the company. Where are promotions when the org structure looks flat?

Trends like these decouples rewards and recognition, compensation and benefits from performance.

Performance feedback, coaching, mentoring, reverse mentoring all happens for the intrinsic value of improving one's performance. Not to justify an extrinsic reward of money.

And then there are companies like Uber and Lyft where performance management is all automated. A taxi driver can be fired automatically by the system if his rating falls below a threshold. No need for middle managers at all.

But these companies can afford to do these things because they do not face the issues of data quality that we face. We do not even have a proper handle on our org chart, though our SoR is supposed to have tackled it. There are folks at lower levels in the department reporting to people outside of it who then report back to people in it.

With data like that in the single source of truth, SoR, how are we to even conduct proper performance appraisals?

People who claim that advances in software APIs and AI will obsolete the middle managers might be true, but that future is far, far away. While there are a lot of people based hurdles to overcome, the meanest hurdle of them all is the data quality in the systems of record.

The best research report I have read on that topic is from the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, titled "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?" [PDF]. The researchers think that it is still a decade or two out until most of the US Jobs existing in 2010 will be obsoleted, they do give us clear indications of what skills would be required to protect ourselves from getting jobless thanks to the machines: perception and manipulation, creativity and social intelligence.

Since this is probably a decade or two out, I think it is better to equip our children in schools with these skills right from the ground up. And I think that Montessori is already well placed in that respect. But not in the manner that the Silicon Valley thinks about Montessori right now.

The real promise of Altschool, a Silicon Valley startup into which Mark Zuckerberg is investing, is in documentation automation and management. My.Altschool is nowhere close to Montessori 2.0 as the article claims it to be. Make the software & content open source and creative community licensed and then we can talk about it. But then, without obliterating what Montessori is in the first place. The whole article is mute on the whole aspect of tangibles and many other key aspects of Montessori. Montessori in the Digital Age needs to be revisited, but not in the typical VC backed Silicon Valley style. And that is a whole different post altogether (that I published in a magazine more than couple of years back).

On farming, education and organisation structures

2015-05-04T10:19:00.001+05:30

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity - Walden Labs - http://waldenlabs.com/permaculture-and-the-myth-of-scarcity/

Here is 👆a case against control based systems that rely on mono cultures to improve efficiencies and give rise to various ailments as a side effect and then efforts are spent to suppress these ailments.

Farming. Education. Healthcare. Corporates.

All of them are built to be robust or resilient. Not antifragile. (https://medium.com/@aarondignan/the-last-re-org-youll-ever-do-f19160f61500)

Autopoiesis. Emergent properties/behaviors. Ecosystems.

They never have a chance.

Just imagine, 1.2 crore houses lie vacant while there is a demand for 1.88 households in India. (https://teekhapan.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/1-2-crore-vacant-homes-this-one-number-tells-us-all-that-is-wrong-with-indian-real-estate/)

All thanks to mechanised farming that had forced people out of villages into urban centres. So much so that the cities will just be huge slums soon.

Instead, if we had tried to improve upon the traditional methods of farming without replacing them with the new ways, we could have had homesteads in the villages that are gentler on the environment, give higher yields per acre (rather than higher yields per unit of labour), done away with the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides. All without making slums out of cities.

Designing Apps the Montessori way - Attention & Control of Error

2015-03-24T13:39:00.002+05:30

Montessori's control of error is a design element that allows the child to figure out that he/she is doing it wrong by themselves and then they strive to correct themselves. There is nobody to tell them that they are doing it wrong and thus they are more prone to improve themselves. Watch this video to get an idea of how it is helpful for a child of two:

And this principle has been tested in a Kinematics Robot: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/tpt/53/4/10.1119/1.4914557

“In a Montessori preschool classroom, students work independently on tasks that absorb their attention in part because the apparatus are carefully designed to make mistakes directly observable and limit exploration to one aspect or dimension. Control of error inheres in the apparatus itself, so that teacher intervention can be minimal. … when correction occurs by the teacher and/or in public (e.g., returning a graded assignment or pointing out student misconceptions during class), students all too often treat the event as the endpoint to inquiry.”

Can we build this design element into Apps, especially Enterprise Apps, too? Would reduce support calls drastically!

In that above video, notice how the child corrects herself throughout and keeps repeating the activity. That day she repeated it 20+ times! And can you also notice out how focused she is on the task? Attention. Flow. Naturally.

In fact, Montessori materials have been used to improve attention spans in children diagnosed with Attention Deficiency: http://www.academicjournals.org/journal/ERR/article-full-text/EBB5CBC51414

“In this research with the aim of improving the attention gathering level; eye-hand coordination, development of tactile, visual and auditory senses and for improving their acquired distinctiveness “tactile boards, sound boxes, binomial cubes and color tablets” are used from Montessori materials. FTFK Attention test is applied to children before and after the intervention. After the training, when scores are compared, the significant improvement is seen in their post test scores.”

Can our apps do that? Can they help us stay focused? Get into a state of flow?

What is the Keystone of the education system?

2015-01-19T23:48:00.001+05:30

Pretty sad to hear in the Bangalore Schools group on Facebook that two classmates of the child of one of the parents in that group have succumbed to depression just ahead of the tenth board exams. And one of them was topper material.

Lots of parents blamed the education system and wanted change. Some advised parents to stop pressurising their children to be achievers in exams. And some blamed the schools who in spite of the RTE still conduct exams in lower classes.

I think they are all right in what they demand and are not contradicting each other actually.

Change must happen at personal, social & systemic levels for it to be very effective.

And it is the systemic change that is the most powerful, since it can induce the social and personal changes too.

Think of the swachh bharat abhiyan & The Ugly Indian movement. While the later was a social change effected through personal choices it was the former that galvanised the whole nation.

We need liberation of the education sector too. Liberation from archaic and arbitrary rules and regulations. Even the RTE, which while laudable for its goal of providing education to every child, is beleaguered by its ageism, one size fits all, misguided measurements of inputs as outcomes & other such half understood and poorly drafted legislations (long post required). And not to mention the continuation of the license Raj in this sector even after it was driven out in all the other sectors.

It is equally important for the parents to not just comfort their own children in the face of peer & societal pressure but also to not pass remarks on other children either.

And a big change is needed in the employment sector too. They choose marks as an easy proxy to recruit while it is widely known that it is not an indicator of employability in any manner. Only rarely does it prove right and that too mostly for brain dead routine jobs.

Remove the need for marks by finding a better indicator for employability and the chain reaction would ensure that children are not put under undue stress. Such factors which when changed can lead to cascading effects across systems is called the Keystone as per systems theory. And this employability measure is, I believe, the keystone to change the education sector.

In fact, if we can remove the fixation with employability and rather focus on helping our children be contributing citizens of the society, either by becoming employees, professionals or entrepreneurs, we should have a great future for the country.

[Yes, it is for all these reasons that I am a strong advocate of the Montessori methods, even in high school, called Erdkinder level in Montessori parlance.]

As a person who has recently come out of depression I empathize with those children and wish them speedy emergence to life.

Getting started with "The Intention Economy" & #VRM

2015-01-14T07:30:00.001+05:30

Kolam, made by a staff member of Vismaya Montessori for Pongal

Today is the beginning of the harvest festival, Pongal. Pongal literally means overflowing.

Today is called bogie pongal where old items were put into a book fire and the mud houses were given a new coating of lime plaster, new flooring, etc. back then.

Recently Paul Greenberg wrote on what's happening in the CRM world and how we failed to shape up Social CRM the way we had defined it. And he has moved on. Now time for me to move on too. So today I give up Social CRM and begin with Vendor Relationship Management or VRM. No, this has nothing to do with companies managing their vendors as part of their supply chain management.

VRM is all about us normal people, whom the industry calls customers, taking back control on all that is ours - our personal data & our cookies - and rather than the vendors vying for our attention we will let them know of our intention. Business should happen because we let our intention to buy known, not by grabbing our attention by hook or crook and then providing us whatever the vendor deems fit.

Since it is just a beginning, I started by reading Doc Searls' book The Intention Economy.

This isn't a professional thing nor does it have anything to do with Cognizant. It is something I will do outside of that contract. There is a change happening in India in the IT industry. There is a growing wave of product development. Probably I will kindle that space to make them build VRM products. Or probably I get into policy making or standards and protocols defining.

Only time will tell. But it doesn't mean I am divorced from the CRM world. To the contrary in fact. VRM is intended to be complimentary to that world. So it would mean that I continue to keep track of what is happening in that world.

As Doc Searls tweeted to me, "For the R in #CRM and #sCRM to mean what it says, both need a #VRM hand to shake."

Also, this time I intend to do more than I talk about VRM. Since, as they say, the best way to predict the future is to make it.

As you can see, I do not have any plans laid out since I do not know in what manner and in what capacity would I contribute. I only know that this space needs some action and I need to be there. But that only make this journey more exciting for me.

Wish me luck my friends. And wish you all a happy & prosperous Pongal. :-)

Technology, Culture Change and HR - my take at #XLHR15

2015-01-12T00:12:00.001+05:30

Interestingly, the very week that an obituary is written to our definition of Social CRM by Paul Greenberg (but there's something exciting emerging from the flux), I got pulled back into the speaking circuit by Gautam Ghosh.

Gautam is a recognized HR thought leader in India who puts social media to very good use both personally and professionally. He is recently appointed as the director of talent branding at India's fast growing e-commerce Flipkart. A distinguished alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, Gautam pulled me in as a co-panelist at SAPPHIRE, XLRI's National HR Conference.

A pleasant surprise! :-)

The conference, in it's 7th edition this year, was focused on the theme of "Social HR and HR Applications in Technology" and our panel's topic was "Relevance of technology in driving change".

View of the Sunday morning audience from the stage.

Professor Jitendra Singh introduced the both of us to the audience and Gautam shared his presentation on the topic. He pretty much covered the whole landscape of what is going on due to the digital technologies which made my talk that much more difficult. ;-)

My picture tweeted by Sylvia Francis.

Given a busy week and a long journey (thank you XLRI for sponsoring it) I could not prepare any presentation deck and instead had to rely only on the mindmap I had prepared to collect my thoughts during my journey.

Mindmap as notes/pointers for my talk

My talk had very little in terms of immediate takeaways from my talk, but lots of experimentation ideas mentioned under the branch "Potential", if one were to follow Henry Mintzberg's model which states that "Emergent strategy originates not in the mind of the strategist, but in the interaction of the organization with its environment." These are again some thought leading stuff in this area, if I may say so myself, but not without precedent in my own recent work.

Web of Life

2014-12-24T21:31:00.002+05:30

Panoramic view of Belakere village

Belakere, a small habitat inside the Cauvery North Wildlife Sanctuary with no metaled roads leading to / from it, is surrounded by ineffective Elephant Proof Trenches and houses a small Government Primary School where around 20-25 children go to study and get their free mid day meals. Barely 30-35 KM from Electronics City in Bangalore you would expect to be able to reach there by following Google Maps directions. But you can't even find this place on Google Maps unless you know where to look for.

Elephant Proof Trench between Zero Point and Deverabetta

I first got to know about the existence of such a village earlier this year when I joined as a volunteer of Kenneth Anderson Nature Society (an NGO committed to the conservation of the forests in Melagiris) in a survey of the Elephant Proof Trenches (EPT) dug up by the Tamil Nadu Forest Department to prevent the elephants from venturing out of the forests and into farm lands. These are deep and wide trenches that an elephant cannot cross. But the trenches tend to get silted up, or their walls can slide in, or some shepherd or cattle grazer can place logs across the EPT to gain access into the forests for their cattle, sheep and goats. Free fodder you see. That it is at the cost of taking away the food of the elephants and other herbivores of the jungle is not their issue. They don't own farms which might get raided by the elephants after all. Thus these EPTs are made ineffective due to the breaches through which the pachyderms can come into human habitats and thus the survey was conducted to help the Tamil Nadu Forest Department find these breaches.

The road over the hills to Belakere (from Gummalapuram)

Reaching Belakere is a tricky business. You can either walk, take a motorbike or take a four wheeler with a high ground clearance. Provided it has not rained. The terrain is hilly and the track is strewn with stones and soil. Lots of soil that can quickly turn in mush and stones that will be all wet and slippery in rains. And then there is the perennial danger of crossing paths with the elephants. Interestingly though, electricity reaches Belakere!

Our rides into the jungles to reach Belakere

So we, a bunch of volunteers from KANS, some children from TVS Academy, Hosur and their teacher, went to Belakere in two Tata Safaris, a Chevrolet Tavera and a Mahindra Scorpio after parking the hatchbacks in the Gummalapuram high school from where we were joined by the headmasters and the circle head for the National Green Corps. We drove very slowly and carefully since there was lot of loose soil and stones on the paths, with deep narrow gullies formed by the water from the rains in last two months since we went there for a recce.

Children of Belakere Panchayat Primary School

The children all welcomed us with their loud sing song chorus of "Good morning Sir" and there was a brief intro. There were less than 25 mixed age group children in total, with a few under aged children too, probably since there was no anganwadi (govt. preschool cum creche) in the village. It is a common practice nevertheless in the hinterlands to send the young child along with their older sibling(s).

Forming teams for the nature walk

We started the day's program with a nature walk wherein groups of children were formed, each with 4-5 children, led by a student each of TVS Academy, Hosur. The children from both the schools introduced themselves to each other and they were explained what was to be done. Unsurprisingly, the children all mingled within minutes and were eager to head out.

A stroll through the woods

The objective was to take a nice leisurely stroll through the village, their farms and thereon to the edges of the forest to collect leaves, twigs, fruits, flowers, interesting stones, etc. that the children find along the paths they walk through.

The children with their collection.

The children led us all through their village and I asked them to identify a few birds which were either flying nearby or calling from afar. And they collected quite a good lot of stuff only children have the innocent curiosity to find interesting. :)

After coming back to the school the teams started making things out of the stuff they picked up. A tree out of twigs and leaves, a camp site, etc. And by this time the children had broken ice with the all of us and were quite enjoying all the attention and novelty. And then it was time for all the adults to admire their creations. :)

Pictures of Flora & Fauna on a lanyard being distributed to the participants.

This was the perfect time to rope in all the adults present for the next activity, Web of Life. Everybody, including the adults, were asked to stand in a big circle and each one of them was given a chart with the picture of a tree/plant/grass or animal/insect/fish/bird on it, with a lanyard to wear round the neck.

It was so beautiful to see the elder children helping the younger ones put the lanyards round their necks. There was a lot of laughing when even the teachers, headmasters, forest department staff and KANS volunteers started wearing the charts.

The oldest and the youngest members of the Web of Life!

The highlight was the octogenarian joining the game and standing right next to the youngest of them all, who incidentally got an Elephant. There was quite some cheering and laughing at that. :)

Children were then asked to identify the flora & fauna they had all got. And then beginning with plants, the children were asked what/who ate (preyed on) them. At this point a spool of twine was passed around to connect the food to its consumer. From the flora we moved onto the eaters of the herbivores, and so on until we connected every living thing to the other as a web.

The big Web of Life.

Soon we had a huge web of crisscrossing twine and everybody could see how we were all interconnected. Fabulously too! And now came the final act. To show the grim consequences of the dastardly acts of man to rip out the forests in the name of progress.

When man destroys the forests, the Web of Life begins to shrink.

First the children representing the trees and plants were asked to leave their end of the twine and sit down. Next children were asked to identify which are the animals that could no longer survive due to unavailability of their food. Now these children had to leave their end of the twine and sit down. And after that the animals dependent on these felled animals. Soon nothing much was left except the tiger and man. Top predators of the food chain. And without food, they too perish. A serious concept very beautifully explained to the children. And when asked what they learnt from this activity, pat came the response - forests are our life. Mission accomplished!

Quiz in progress

There was a lunch break where free mid day meals, cooked in the school premises, was served to the children. Post this Girish, our project lead, conducted a short quiz where the children identified different animals, birds, reptiles shown on the laptop screen. A correct answer was rewarded with a Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate. And soon everybody had a chocolate in hand. ;-)

The returning TVS Academy, Hosur team.

This was immediately followed by a movie show on Nagarhole National Park that ran for an hour. And then it was time for the team from TVS Academy, Hosur, to leave after enriching the lives of us all. Thank yous were exchanged and byes were told.

KANS President Sanjeev distributing the books to the children.

Finally Sanjeev, president of KANS, distributed a book on animals in Kannada to all the children. A few were given to the headmaster of Gummalapuram school to be kept in their library.

Ragi mudde, saaru - our lunch

But that was not all, we were invited by a village resident for a sumptuous lunch of Ragi Mudde (huge balls made of boiled flour of millets) and saaru (spiced up stock of boiled leaves) along with avarekai palya (fried beans and leaves tempered with seasonings). And then it was time to disperse.

We KANS members stopped for a while in the jungle for our committee meeting, on a lookout for elephants which were apparently being driven over to Tamil Nadu side by the Karnataka Forest Department, we did hear loud crackers being burst. Then we went to the Gummalapuram school to pick up our vehicles and dispersed from there with promises to take this model to other schools in the Melagiris.

Politics, Governance & Execution vs Sophistry, Chicanery & Corruption

2014-11-25T19:23:00.001+05:30

This is a short essay I had written some eighteen months ago, to the young Housing Association we had formed in the neighborhood that was formed/developed by a single builder/developer over around 27 acres housing some 310 individual houses. This essay was in response to a discord in the new social body that was beginning to take shape. I was one of the office bearers who had the formidable responsibility of forming the Association and setting up the rules and regulations, policies, processes, etc. With a considerable amount of money involved, there were already allegations against us. Probably because many members were far away, perhaps because the members were unable to see impact of our work on the ground as yet. But any groundbreaking, pioneering or formation process faces these issues I guess.

With that as the context, I reproduce the text of the essay I had emailed to the members without any edits or changes. Including the P.S. & P.P.S. but without my e-mail signature. ;-)

—————————————————————————

Politics comes from the root word 'polis', which is the Greek word for City State. Actually related to Sanskrit & Tamil words 'pur' or 'puram', other words like Metropolis, Police also come from the same root word.

If the archaeologists and scientists are to be believed, we humans have been on the face of the Earth for nearly 2 million (20 lakh) years now, roaming around quite a bit in search of game and food, but it is only the past 10,000 years or so that we started settling down thanks to the advent of crop cultivation and animal husbandry. Even most mythologies agree to the pattern if not the timelines.

So instead of making temporary shelters we started building more permanent abodes, roads/streets, drainage, etc. and slowly villages sprang up, mostly along river banks. But it took many more years before we started living in cities, next to people whom we did not know as well as when we used to live in settlements in tribes. When we lived with our tribe alone a lot of things were taken for granted and there was inherent trust. Of course there were rivalries even within a clan, we are an aggressive species, but there were many others whom the rivaling faction respected and held in high regard and thus they were able to diffuse the situations many a times without violence. To be able to diffuse a tension required tact and wisdom, which is obviously available with the elders in a society. Thus strong ties are very important and integral to our social fabric.

There is a limit to the number of people we can intimately know, but apparently for a proper social structure we need to know how each of those intimate relations are related to each other too. Anthropologists have actually studied the brain cavity volume in the skulls of fossils as well as modern man and other primates and figured out that there is a correlation between the size of the brain and the number of people we can know intimately. A larger brain meant a larger tribe. We modern humans can apparently, on an average, not have more than 152 close relationships (though the minimum & maximum estimates range from nineties to low 200s). This is called the Dunbar number.

But we do not form strong ties alone with people, we often have acquaintances, old friends, etc. whom we can call upon at times of need. They form our weak ties. And social technologies these days seem to be very well adapted to help us maintain these weak ties very well.

While the weak ties helps us get things done in the face of resistance and what economists call as market friction, the very fact that the Cities have now grown larger than a tribe brings in the market friction in the first place. While commerce helped us to collaborate across borders, it was these strong and weak ties that usually helped remove the market frictions.

A large city also necessitated the need for a governance model. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, wrote ta politika"affairs of state," a book on governing and governments and it is indeed from this title that the word politics apparently is derived from. While we have seen various forms of government forming, growing and collapsing over the millenia, we are not yet done with its evolution. For while the Earth has existed for nearly 4,600 million years, life on Earth for nearly 4,000 million and man a mere 2 million years, governance came only very recently, not more than 10,000 years.

But Governance is mostly policy making. The execution of it depended upon armies of executives who were probably the main reason why alphabets and numbers got a written form. Our ancient wisdom was transmitted orally. The vedas, puranas, etc. were not written down for many centuries. But we did need the written form for governance - of property & commerce. For cities needed money to function and taxation was the only means to fund the cities. Taxation meant measuring and recording. Ditto for tenders and procurements.

Now, while the formation of Cities, governments and executives was for the common good of all, man has many fundamental flaws in his design/evolution, which are what make him the 'animal'. And every philosophy & faith identified them as sins or undesirable traits that needed to be overcome by oneself. That which was conducive to the social structure was regarded as virtue or desirable traits that was to be the ever present goal of a human being. The primary quality every faith advocates is love, which encompasses a lot of other virtues like trust, helpfulness, charity, etc.

But, man being man throws a spanner in the larger scheme of things all the time. A society being such a complex mechanism, sometimes all it takes is a few people to do a few things here & there and a large catastrophe is perpetrated. This is the political manifestation of his innate corruption. Forms of corruption vary, but include bribery,extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, andembezzlement. And to achieve these corrupt needs does one resort to chicanery, the use of trickery to achieve a political, financial, or legal purpose.

This is a universal phenomenon, not limited to any particular group or race, and thus there are means to check these. Primary of these is a written law or codified rules which explicitly limit the powers entrusted to the governing bodies. While concentration of powers is the first step to enable governance, explicitly limiting them is of paramount importance too. However, no set of rules or laws are good unless there is a system of accountability. And accountability is both in the design as well as the culture of the government body.

The most important question now then becomes how to inculcate a culture of accountability in the EC and the Office Bearers, which is the governing body for our association? While the powers have been entrusted for a smooth functioning, limits have also been set in the Bylaws of the association. The very fact that this first set of office bearers and the EC has not even a year to operate should be reassuring to the members, since elections are a means of enforcing accountability too. The habit of constantly sharing the deliberations and decisions taken as well as an update on the status in the spirit of being transparent is an added overhead for the EC & OB who are sacrificing their work & family life for the betterment of the society. But they do it, because it is habits that form culture when shared by many. And it takes a long time & a dogged effort to create habits, let alone culture.

Accountability is enabled by transparency, however too much of transparency hinders the pace of work and the time & efforts involved too. Asking transparency to be the goal rather than accountability is nothing other than sophistry, the use of fallacious arguments, even if with no harmful intentions. While the advent of technology has given newer capabilities, the problems that need to be solved are age old and require many levels of solutions. And while technology is a great enabler for the early adopters, it is important to take along the whole community together, which might necessitate taking them step by step towards a required state from the current state they are in. Technology needs to be inclusive, not exclusive, but when new systems are being put in place, perforce we need to be cautious about its roll out and try to bring in the various levels of users turn by turn.

The elders in the society who have bestowed us with their wisdom and acumen towards legal, accounting/financial and auditing requirements need to be considered as do the near illiterate labourers & security guards on the ground with respect to the processes & systems first. Without which the technology, with which we middle aged members are so comfortable, makes no sense and only will cause a wider rift between the haves and have nots.

As an office bearer I can only submit to you our inability to progress faster, however, we do so not in sloth but because of unfamiliar territory and the fear of setting wrong precedents, for what we do now might, unbeknownst to us, become part of the culture of future EC & OB and hold the future to ransom.

Sincere regards,

Prem

P.S.: Sorry about the long essay, but even this has taken me nearly two hours to draft. A shorter one would take nearly a day.

P.P.S.: The intention is not to ridicule anybody, faith or race. Neither did I intend to be condescending. If however, I have transgressed in error, I seek your kind pardon in advance. The sole intention of my long post was to request patience and help with the way things are progressing and evolving, not disrupting it at this early stage.

Amazon's Echo Bluetooth speaker could be its #NoUI Nirvana

2014-11-07T10:20:00.001+05:30

Amazon was disruptive because it removed the need for a brick and mortar store. It created a new business model where the brick and mortar store is replaced by a website. Taking the concept of No UI to the extreme, the best thing that could happen to Amazon is remove the need for the website altogether. Sure, they already have mobile apps, but that is still a UI. They still need a screen.

But this new Bluetooth speaker from Amazon called Echo, an always on Siri like assistant you can shout at across rooms, will remove the need for any UI as we know it. It *IS* still a UI, but it is purely voice driven, there are no screens and doesn't even look like a computer.

Currently it can get you the local weather, tell you names of the current chief ministers of India, store shopping lists. But if this device sells well, it could mean that Amazon might enable it to place orders for you.

The Arabian Nights might indeed come true. Speak to the House and it will bring you your desires to your doorstep. And reduce your bank balance, but that's just in the way of conserving the energy in the universe. (The wives might be adding to the entropy but let's not get into stereotypes here.)

Read this article to know more:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/06/lets-call-the-amazon-echo-what-it-is/

Of digital marshmallows & Montessori

2014-09-16T09:58:00.001+05:30

I read this on the HBR today:

"Originally conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s, the Stanford marshmallow test has become a touchstone of developmental psychology.

Children at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, aged four to six, were placed in a room furnished only with a table and chair. A single treat, selected by the child, was placed on the table. (In addition to marshmallows, the researchers also offered Oreo cookies and pretzel sticks.) Each child was told if they waited for 15 minutes before eating the treat, they would be given a second treat. Then they were left alone in the room.

Follow-up studies with the children later in adolescence showed a correlation between an ability to wait long enough to obtain a second treat and various forms of life success, such as higher SAT scores. And a 2011 fMRI study conducted on 59 original participants—now in their 40s—by Cornell’s B.J. Casey showed higher levels of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex among those participants who delayed immediate gratification in favor of a greater reward later on."

This post was the prelude to the information overload we face and the resulting attention deficiency in us as adults. Our inability to exercise restraint when a new alert or notification comes up on our mobile or laptops is aptly compared to our inability to control ourselves from eating high calorie foods.

But I was left wondering if the scientists could also find out if there was a way to teach self restraint to those children in the original sample who could not wait for those fifteen minutes and lost out on the second treat. For we as parents are faced with the dilemma of giving our smartphone or tabs to our children when even Steve Jobs did not look favorably where it came to his own children using iPhones or iPads.

And that is when I realized that it has already been considered by a lady who was an anthropologist and a physician, with technical training, and worked with children, both normal and mentally challenged, for decades and designed some of the best apparatus and methods for development of children.

Long before these tests, based on her decades long observations in thousands of children across continents, Dr. Maria Montessori was aware of the benefits of self restraint and the sensitive period when this develops in children. It is with this objective that there will not be multiple copies of the same apparatus in the environment.

Combined with the basic rule that children should pick an apparatus they want to work with only from the shelf this forces the children to wait for their turn. It is so endearing and satisfying to see these tiny tots sitting next to the child who is working with the material they too want to work with. Nudging them when they get distracted to get back to working with the material and finish it. :-)

There is still a lot that the scientists have to figure out. They have merely figured out, after nearly forty years, that there is a correlation between the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex as adults and the ability to exercise self restraint as children. They still haven't figured out how to teach self restraint to everybody.

We wish these scientists luck with their endeavors, for it will be yet another proof of the genius of Dr. Montessori. We parents on the other hand can already benefit from the works of Madam Montessori and help our children learn this crucial and critical behavior of self restraint.

Teaching the Teacher

2014-09-05T14:12:00.001+05:30

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

I thank you for the inspiring, albeit compulsory, speech today on the occasion of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan's birth anniversary, hitherto called Teacher's Day or Shikshak Diwas, being observed as Gurutsav.

You do bring out a key concern with today's Education which is so focused on memorizing facts/information and mastery over certain specific skills and not on critical & holistic thinking. And you implore the teachers to be the care givers and role models for the children that will make them the able citizens for future India.

Mr. Prime Minister, there is an urgent need to help the teachers learn the very aspects you ask them to impart. Teachers today are generally ill equipped to practice critical thinking on their own. And given the rapid changes in the technology and economy in our country, the rift is widening in the quality of the teacher training being provided. I implore you to focus on improving the curriculum and quality of these teacher training institutions. Without an understanding of the developmental needs of the children and their various sensitive periods in which they pick up a life skill the teachers unwittingly do much harm than help. Help them to learn about these aspects.

Mr. Prime Minister, I am also deeply disturbed that you have made it very conspicuous by omission, the daunting task of protecting our environment. The responsibility of safeguarding Mother Earth and its voiceless denizens. This thought is disturbingly absent also in the way the environmental affairs are being conducted in the new regime. Bio-diversity is as important as, if not more than, mere green cover, and maintaining it should be of our prime priority, if not increasing. Without a sensitivity towards the nature the children will grow up to build even more powerful machines and infrastructure that only gouges the Earth rather than replenish it. Pro development need not mean anti environment.

Regards,
A concerned father

Deciphering the Hype around Digital for the Indian IT Industry

2014-08-18T10:19:00.002+05:30

Gartner's Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies, 2014 | Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918

I finally find myself inspired all over again by a Gartner report in years!

This press release about their latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report discombobulates some of my thoughts around this whole digital transformation thing.

Having played a role in the creation of the Nexus of Forces (social, mobile, cloud, information), as Gartner calls it, I wanted it (Social CRM) to stand for something more than mere hoodwinking the hapless customers into 'liking' my brand. BTW, we call the Nexus of Forces as SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) at Cognizant and Code Halos is akin to a wide angle lens to look at the a large part of the spectrum. You can read more about in in Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business.

In the report, Gartner does a good job of dividing the Digital into two distinct eras - Digital Marketing & Digital Business. Where Digital Marketing is about leveraging the Nexus of Forces for tapping into the buyers influence, Digital Business is about the blurring of the physical and virtual worlds in business. Digital Marketing is more closer to Digital Business if Code Halos can be leveraged rather than merely increasing likes on Facebook or trending on Twitter.

Would be very interesting to see how the Indian IT industry positions themselves to leverage the digitization of physical assets to drive transformation in our clients business. 3D printing, cryptocurrencies, Connected Homes, Consumer Telematics, etc. by themself might not be an area where the Indian IT industry would operate, but drawing up frameworks to assess the current business & its supply chain and manufacturing, providing a roadmap for incorporating 3D printing in it to bring in new models of business, building systems to manage these new businesses; those could be areas where the industry could position itself.

Probably what we might see could be similar to what Toshiba did in partnership with UPS a decade ago for servicing their notebook computers, but going a step further. Whereas in case of Toshiba-UPS the servicing was outsourced to UPS but the location was still centralized. All the Toshiba laptops requiring repairs could be dropped at a local UPS shipping location but it would be sent to a centralized facility in Louisville, Ky for the actual repairing.

With 3D printing, manufacturing might happen in such partner locations closer to the customer premises. Probably at a UPS or Amazon delivery center closer to the point of consumption. Or may be a small mom & pop kind of store or the gas station with a 3D printer. Only the design and blueprint of the physical product needs to be developed at the headquarter like in the case of Apple (or that might be distributed too). Once the blueprint is ready it can be put on a cloud database and the 3D printing shops could print the end product.

This transformation of physical assets to digital (the blueprint is the asset in the above hypothetical example and it is digital) is where the Indian IT industry can get into to grow up their value chain and cement their position at par with the IBMs & Accentures of the world. This is where the puck is going to be.

Given that my focus area for the past three years, Design Thinking (along with Jobs To Be Done / Outcome Driven Innovation & Lean Start-up methodology), is gaining steam here with news of Infosys' new CEO, Vishal Sikka, taking his leadership team to his alma mater to get them acquainted with Design Thinking, at the Stanford D.School, I do see a convergence of the B school frameworks for doing As-Is assessments, Gap analysis, Roadmap creation with SMART goals, etc. with the whole Design Thinking framework that may or may not help the Indian IT industry's clients gain a leadership position in the Digital Business & Autonomous era.

"The most successful business man is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good and grabs the new just as soon as it is better."

- Robert P. Vanderpoel

Kicking the technological can down the social road

2013-11-18T13:32:00.000+05:30

That's what you are doing if you are getting caught in implementing social communities or social bars for intranets for the engagement and social ads/campaign managers and content+marketing automation tools for the eyeballs.

Do NOT mistake the current trend of Social Business and Social Technologies - the over reliance on a few software elements - as the adequate path to get Social Intelligence (I like Daniel Goleman's flavor of the term better than the silicon valley's flavor) into your business ecosystem. And unless and until you are investing in understanding human psychology/anthropology/sociology and architecting your business and technology around it, you are like the man who tries to get to the moon by climbing a tree: “One can report steady progress, all the way to the top of the tree.”

Are you investing in basic research of social too or only that R&D in social which has practical implications for your business?

On school desks and measurement

2013-07-31T16:46:00.001+05:30

Source: Why we should rethink school desks

From "The Discovery of the Child" by Dr. Maria Montessori:

"A principle of repression that amounts at times almost to slavery has a firm grip on both schools and education.

A proof of this may be found in the use made of desks and seats to match. Here we may see a striking examples of the mistakes made by earlier materialistic educators who stumbled badly in their efforts who use the scattered stones of science to rebuilt the crumbling walls of the school. Children were formerly seated on long, dreary benches, then science came along and perfected the desk. Al the discoveries of anthropology were drawn on for this task. The age of the child and the length of his legs were used to determine the right height for the seat. The distance between the seat and the desk itself was calculated with mathematical precision so that a child's back might not become curved. Then, finally, with a really profound insight, the desks were separated from each other and made so narrow that once a child sat down he could not stretch himself from side to side or move close to his neighbor; and the desk itself was so constructed that a child could be seen as far as possible in all his immobility. The hidden motive behind all this separation of the children was to prevent immoral actions in the classroom, even in kindergartens! What should one say of such excessive prudence in a society wherein it would be scandalous to teach principles of sexual morality for fear of corrupting the innocent? And yet we have science here lending its support to this hypocrisy by building machine-like desks. And this is not all. Complacency goes still further. Science has so perfected the desks that they guarantee a child's immobility, or , if one prefers, spare his every movement. Everything is so arranged that, when a child is firmly fixed at his desk, he is forced to assume a position thought to be conducive to his health. We find seat, footrest, and desk so arranged that a child cannot stand up. But then, when the seat is tilted, when the top of the desk is raised and the footrest turned up, he has just enough space to stand erect.

This is the way in which desks have gradually been perfected. All experts on the so-called "scientific system of education" have a model scientific desk. Not a few nations are proud of their own national desks, and their various refinements have won them patents and awards.

Many sciences have doubtlessly contributed to the construction of the desk. Anthropology has provided the measurements of a child's body and described the natural characteristics of his age. Physiology has explained the movements of a child's muscles. Psychology has described the precocity and perversion of instincts. And child hygiene, above all, has prevented curvature of the spine. The desk was, therefore, scientifically constructed according to the data furnished by anthropological studies made upon children and has thus furnished us with an example of a literal application of science to the school.

But it will not be long before there will be a change in this attitude in every country where there is a revival of interest in the welfare of children. In the face of so much progress made in the first decade of the twentieth century, it will seem to be incomprehensible that so many students of child hygiene, anthropology, and sociology did not bring to light the basic error of the desk.

It will not be long before people will run their hands in amazement over these model desks or look at pictures of them and read the reason given for their construction, hardly trusting their senses.

The desks were adopted to prevent pupils from getting curvature of the spine!

And yet these same children were subjected to such a regime that even if they had been born healthy their spinal columns could have become twisted and they themselves humpbacked! And this could have happened to the spinal column, which, biologically speaking, is the most primitive and essential part of the skeleton, the main support of the living organism! It was something that could stoutly endure the fierce struggles that engaged both primitive and civilized man when they fought lions in the desert or hunted mammoths or quarried stone and bent iron and extended their dominion over the earth. And yet this spinal column cannot stand up but bends under the yoke of the school!

It is incomprehensible that "science" should have perfected an instrument of slavery in the school without being in the least enlightened by the thought and efforts given to the creation of a free society.

Everyone knows the direction that has been taken by this reform. The poorly-fed workingman does not ask for tonics but for an improvement in his economic condition that will help him to heat better. The miner, who must work for many hours a day stretched out on his stomach, can easily rupture himself, but he does not ask for a truss. Instead, he looks for shorter hours and better working conditions so that he can lead an ordinary healthy life like other men.

And if during this same period of social reform we find that children are working in such an unhealthy environment in the classroom, and won so opposed to their normal development that their very bones become bent, we find an answer to this sad condition is an orthopedic desk.

Sometime ago a woman with obvious satisfaction, imagining that I approved of all of these scientific innovations in the schools, asked my opinion about a brace which she had invented for school children to complement the protective features of the desk. Physicians, as a matter of fact, have various means of treating curvature of the spine; orthopedic instruments, braces, and traction, that is, the periodic suspension of a child by the head or shoulders so that the weight of his body stretches and straightens the spinal column. And now that someone has suggested employing the brace, it will not be long before someone advises traction for the pupils!

All of this is a logical consequence of the material application of scientific methods to a decadent system of education. The same could be said of the use of anthropology and experimental psychology in contemporary schools.

The rational way to prevent scoliosis in children would be to change the type of work they do so that they would no longer be obliged to remain for many hours a day in a harmful position.

What the schools need is more liberty, not such a contraption as a desk."

If you have made it thus far, thank you & congratulations. Evidently you are concerned about the child. Possibly you have given a thought to the results of improper application of science. The same holds good for mindless fixation on measurements & analytics. Especially what I see in the social & digital world, be it for marketing or otherwise.

Instead of all those goosebump inducing (or not) numbers around fans, followers, Likes, RTs, engagement, best time/day to tweet, etc. can we think about how well is the job of the customer done, or how well are their expected outcomes met or say their cognitive costs for reading your "content" or using your app/product/service?

What do you think?

#OccupyTime - From #RealTime to #RightTime

2013-07-25T18:41:00.001+05:30

I am breaking a self-imposed (though unannounced) radio silence to make a short comment about something that hit me very deeply, more deeper than viscerally.

I was winding up for the day when I got an email that went like this:

It seems like every brand has become obsessed with real-time marketing.

Everyone wants to be Oreo at the Super Bowl, but let's be honest - it's not that simple.

Your content programs were likely built for a slower moving time, not today's "always-on" pace driven by social conversations.

Want to get ahead of the trends and uncover how real-time insights from social data can drive your content?

We wrote this whitepaper to explain what it takes.

Please read it and let me know what you think.

This came on a day when me & my new boss (I have a new boss since my last post in this blog) were discussing on measurement in the corporate ~~jungle~~ world. I had passed him a link yesterday to an article which talks about the philosophy of measurement and differentiates between ontic & ontological measurement. And today I was talking to him about how time is perceived/measured - chronological and kairological.

Simply put, chronological time measures out time in a linear and absolute sense, whereas kairological time is all about the moment and the opportunity. And it is Time to reclaim Time. #OccupyTime

Relating it to the enterprise world is pretty simple. It is that dichotomy about Real Time and Right Time brouhaha. Personally, I have moved on from a #RealTime mania to seek #RightTime bliss. I can't truthfully say I have attained that bliss, but it would be great to have some pilgrims along with me on this search for the #RightTime nirvana.

So dear reader, without the marketing bull, what do you think it takes to get #RightTime right, instead of splitting your hairs about #RealTime marketing, customer service, sale, whatever?

P.S.: I still haven't read that whitepaper, it probably needs my email id, etc. Probably it holds some answers for me.

Good management can be better than new tools & inventions

2013-02-21T12:39:00.000+05:30

Sometimes all it takes is better management, not new tools/solutions. Management of oneself, one’s methods, thinking, practices, habits. However, that requires a shift in behaviour, and a bigger effort up front. Newer technologies most often than not are developed to give instant improvements in productivity, gratification, etc. without thought to or regard for overall sustainability or long term implications.

I remember in patches a conversation I had one evening with my father when I was a young teenager where he was at pains to defend the industry he had grown old in. A micro celebrity in the Indian fertilizer industry who brought in many commercially successful incremental innovations to the production process & technology of DAP, a kind of chemical fertilizer, my father had been motivated to enter the chemical industry thanks to Mr. M.S. Swaminathan’s evangelizing of the Green Revolution in India and the patriotic fervour that it triggered in the son of a freedom fighter.

After nearly two and a half decades in the industry believing that chemicals (fertilizers & pesticides) and hybrid seeds were crucial to solve India’s, and the world’s, growing hunger problems he was beginning to doubt the sustainability. Probably it was triggered by what the science text books where nudging me to ask my father that evening; that chemical run-offs were poisoning the ecosystem and making the soil unsustainable. Probably because he was hearing too, first hand, from his farmer brothers-in-law the problems with hybrid seeds and how these were drowning them deeper into debts.

And then cutting ahead a decade later, during the early days of Ch1blogs (our internal blogging platform), the then admin cum developer behind the platform, Senthil, shared a little known fact which had been found in the records of the East India Company, still available for research in the UK. Apparently, 200 years ago, Chengalpattu district of Tamil Nadu, just outside of Chennai, had more average yield of rice per hectare than even the highest yielding districts of Japan, etc. now. I did some further research and read some notes & journals but could not find anything other than references to farming practices and management principles. And I left it at that, dispirited that there was no magic technology from the past that could revive our current yields; like how Shruti Hassan rediscovers Damo’s genetic engineering technology and recreates it to awaken Suriya’s genetic memory in the Tamil sci-fi thriller movie “7-aam Arivu” aka 7th Sense.

Being a technologist & breakthrough/disruptive innovator I was looking for a technical solution. It went with my mind-frame then, to create new social technologies that would disrupt how business was done so that it would become more sustainable & beneficial to the society rather than merely leeching off it. I however became aware that social required nothing more than some practices from existing business management principles and technology was the last bit of it, if at all required. None of the nouveau solutions we built in the ensuing half a decade made much of a dent though the potential was high. And the maxim of “People -> Process -> Technology” was then no longer a sound bite for me. It dawned on me that this was the order in which things needed to be changed for lasting effects, not the other way round.

Many a times we are so caught up in creating a new app to solve a problem that we miss the easy solution existing that requires no investment other than the effort required to change the way people looked at things or did them. Probably because we are a group that is required to build them, probably because our goals are measured thus. And thus we probably miss the point that at the end of the day, we need to solve the problem, not build a new solution.

But there is hope yet for good management principles in increasing the average yield of many crops across the globe, especially in small farms, using a method called SRI (System of Rice/Root Intensification). Though denounced by western administration and foundations as well as scientists, it has been showing growing success in various Asian farms. And it requires no expensive chemicals or GM (Genetically Modified) seeds.

"If any scientist or a company came up with a technology that almost guaranteed a 50% increase in yields at no extra cost they would get a Nobel prize. But when young Biharian farmers do that they get nothing. I only want to see the poor farmers have enough to eat."

Read this excellent article that touches upon the story, the method and the debates about it, in Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/16/india-rice-farmers-revolution

How is this relevant to us or what can we learn from this? Probably if we introspect & retrospect on what we do, how we do it, we may find some answers? Possibly if we can shift our focus from Customer Satisfaction to Customer Jobs, which apparently is "The secret to true service innovation" since “current approaches to service improvement constrain innovation by focusing on service as the unit of analysis, rather than on the fundamental needs of the customer”?

Can you think back a bit and share if you find any instances where you might not have to actually build a solution to solve a problem or get a job done?

Metaphors, Analogies, Narrative and SMAC

2013-01-08T11:53:00.004+05:30

Map of the Internet, like our brain.

I got an email over the weekend from a colleague asking if we could include Metaphors as a theme for 2013 under our organizational change management initiatives. And what do I find in my twitter time line on Monday morning? An article from MIT Sloan that talks about the research findings on the use of analogies and metaphors in innovation adoption & change management! Increasing your social surface area definitely increases serendipity. :-)

Analogies and metaphors help people understand newer concepts and ideas by relating them to something familiar. This helps in adoption of innovations, in change. In fact, how close a new technology is to the old one is an important factor determining the speed of adoption. On the face of disruptive innovations like SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud), which are very different from traditional enterprise systems, analogies and metaphors are pretty powerful.

The MIT Sloan article talks about how the Insurance Industry introduced various analogies at different stages of change (Assimilation, Analysis, Adaptation) to drive adoption of computers – as tabulation machines (data entry terminals) initially, then as brains (data storage as memory & data process as information management).

And this made me think what could be the analogies for the SMAC stack. A good friend of mine, Esteban Kolsky, once suggested that to make people understand Social, Mobile, Big Data and Cloud replace these terms with Channels, Devices, Analytics and Data Center and the understanding becomes a lot easier. Yes, that was very helpful to me initially. But the more I started analysing them and looked at adapting them to business needs this analogy failed me. It started limiting me.

And then today I got a ping on Facebook chat from someone whom I had friended long ago via twitter and then only interacted via Facebook news feeds. I was surprised to see him on my FB chat and out of the blue at that. He asked me to weigh in on a concept he is developing called the mind colonies. And he uses this metaphor to explain it:

“Imagine you are looking at Planet Earth from the Moon. Imagine nerves running all over spherical Earth. Notice human minds like dots pulsating and sending signals between them. Some nerve connections are bold , some are dotted. Some minds are emitting a lot, some nothing, some in-between. Some nerves have lots of noise/resistance/signal loss, some are flowing smoothly and rapidly like cholesterol-free arteries, some in-between.”

He then defines mind colonies thus: “Mind colonies are trust and spirit-rich, self-sustaining, blended-media networked mind exchanges for shared-ethos groups. Energetic full-time hosts catalyse minds in a mind grid to learn, work, play and complement each other. The catalysing currency is a colony equivalent of Diners Card (alternative currency).”

My initial fire-from-the-hip reaction was to exclaim that this can be helpful in the concept of co-creation. There's more detail in this page if you are interested, but for me, the image of mind colonies is now strong & indelible. That I believe is what SMAC can be. And that is what Howard Rheingold talks about in his great Kindle Single - "Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?" - which I recommend to all of you.

Serendipity must definitely be thick around me - Kumar’s suggestion to include metaphors under OCM, closely followed by the MIT article and now this request to apply my mind to the concept of ‘mind colonies’. If I were SRK, I could definitely claim that the universe is conspiring for me. ;)

Retrospection and Introspection

2013-01-01T13:40:00.001+05:30

Sandhya - a Sanskrit word for dawn, dusk or joining. A time of change. (Shot by me at Mathigiri, Hosur)

What a special year 2012 was in retrospect!

We dived to the deepest trench and jumped from the highest platform. We probably discovered not one but two Higgs Boson particles and Voyager has almost crossed the boundary of the solar system. We saw a perfect landing of the rover Curiosity on Mars and landed up with a nobody in the Indian team during the Olympic games parade.

We thwarted attempts at the usurping of the freedom of the Internet by political and industrial bodies and yet we sent the first non-government space shuttle to the International Space Station. We saw the first billionth view of a youtube video and the removal of a billion bogus views from the youtube channels of the big music labels.

We saw people protesting against corruption in the system and we saw people protesting the derogatory treatment of women by the society in India. We saw the arrests of people posting about the politicians on social media, we brought to light the falsification of facts by the police in the Delhi protests via social media.

I am sure 2013 will be even more eventful and interesting. I believe it is a year for action, but let it be guided by introspection rather than jingoism and bravura. Let us be aware of our own feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, actions and their impact on our self, our friends and family, our society, our nation, our species, our planet. Let us learn to introspect, be mindful, self-reflect. Most importantly, let us teach our children the same. Let us teach them how all our thoughts and actions impact more than just us.

Yesterday my boss Sukumar reminded me of what Randy Pausch said in his book The Last Lecture on page 113:

“It is an accepted cliche in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn. I always saw value in that, sure. But in my mind the better number one goal was this: I wanted to help students learn to judge themselves.

Did they recognise their true abilities? Did they have a sense of their own flaws? Were they realistic about how others viewed them?

In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve – as Coach Graham taught me – is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse? ”

Indeed. Wish you a very happy new year!

Social Design, Empathy & Mindfulness

2012-11-20T01:20:00.000+05:30

Frederick Taylor, dubbed "the father of scientific management", gained repute for making steel manufacturing more productive in Pennsylvania by conducting time studies of labourers which involved measuring how much time they took to perform their tasks, which were usually repetitive and required low skills. Taylor faced his first major resistance from the moulders in the Army arsenal in Massachusetts (which are now the offices of Harvard Business Review), they resented being monitored by strangers with stopwatches. These studies had dehumanising and demeaning effect on the workers, who were considered no better than cogs in the machinery and thus have no say in how things should work. This has been my major gripe with business process management too.

As a developer some years ago, when I used to work on developing & implementing BPM & CRM systems, I would work on the business processes as defined by the managers, not based on how the work actually got done. In later years when I could actually go and observe how work was getting done and flowing, how people depended on each other to get things done, I understood how far the BPMS & CRMS I built were from the actual flow of work happening on the ground. No wonder most of the CRM & BPM implementations across the globe have adoption issues.

There were many criticisms against Taylor's methods, even while the notion of efficient process redeisgn itself morphed, first as business reengineering and now as Social Business (at least some variations of the definition of that term). Managers in the knowledge industry try every now and then (or at least think of trying) to surreptitiously monitor the work of their workers. And with the advent of computers as a main tool for the knowledge workers, it certainly has the wherewithal to help the managers achieve the time studies without letting the workers know they are being monitored. With the advent of smartphones managers can definitely go even further (consider what can be achieved by Reality Mining) and measure almost everything their workers do. And now with the launch of enterprise social networks (dubbed social business) it is possible to even measure the social interactions of the workers, not just their work related activities. (Orwellian!)

Certainly, the improvements in Analytics, DW/BI and Visualization software (including the much hyped Big Data & in-memory calculations) can probably help managers design much better and efficient systems that could then be rolled out to the knowledge workers. However, I think the knowledge workers would consider themselves to be even more skilled than the moulders of the Army arsenal in Massachusetts a century ago, and resent even more when they are considered incapable of telling how work can be organized.

Given this prelude now consider the unenviable task of having to show productivity improvements while achieving employee delight. And that's precisely where I am placed currently, because that's what our CIO has been charged with and thus his whole team. The crucial lever that our CIO has given for achieving this seemingly paradoxical goals is something he calls Social Design. And I am charged with evangelising it, which I assume includes expanding on his thoughts too, as only when the concept is made accessible to everybody (in terms of awareness, reach as well as understandability) can we figure out if the people are willing to make those tiny changes that could snowball into an organization wide change.

The key to understanding Social Design, if you ask me, is to understand people as individuals as well as a social being. And also the fact that by using technology we are Cyborgs, and we have been one ever since we used a thigh bone as a hammer (as shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey right after the first monolith makes an appearance on Earth some 4 million years ago). Technology might have advanced a lot since then and also since Taylor's time, especially Digital, to make things faster thus relieving even the Cognitive burden onto technology, not merely the physical burden. But what these mechano-cognitive technological advances have missed thus far is the fact that we humans are a social animal.

Physical & Cognitive technologies have not yet been leveraged to augment, amplify or extend our qualities like Empathy, Mindfulness or Compassion. We haven't yet developed a set of skills and social practices, called "cyborg literacy" for that. Howard Rheingold says this about Cyborg Literacy: "This not only includes an ability to enhance problem solving but also to incorporate a balance of individual autonomy and collective interdependence; networks of trust; and norms of reciprocity, empathy, compassion, and conviviality that are absent from strictly engineering-oriented or purely market-based approaches."

No amount of advances in Social or Collaborative Technologies can achieve their unsaid goal (productivity improvements) if they do not foment trust, reciprocity, empathy, compassion or conviviality in its users. And while it is pertinent that tools alone cannot achieve these and that people and processes also need to be conducive, I still like to explore what can be achieved by technology, since we know that tools indeed do have the capacity to change our behaviour. Actually, even buildings are capable of reshaping our brains, so why not attempt similarly with technology? And whereby I look at Empathy and Mindfulness from a technological slant.

In my previous post on the Thali versus Melting pot metaphors I mentioned about epistolary culture & literacy lending a hand to empathy and thus reduction in violence in the world. And long back I had also made observations about how we are in the second phase of an epistolary culture, with some key variations than before on the personal interactions front. However, at a humanity level, the effects seem to be the same. Sure, there are disturbances when differing view points clash on the social web that get reflected in the physical world too in addition to the digital; however we need to be aware of how culture is going across the borders. How humanity is collaborating within itself across the borders. All thanks to the technology that has helped bring more empathy to even more people. For with non textual content (pictures, music, videos, etc.) you do not even need to be literate to get to know the other people.

This leads us to the question, how can we achieve the same (increased empathy) in a corporate environment with these social technologies? As I have emphasised earlier, it is very important to be able to 'share'; and good or bad, we are stuck with corporate cultures were sharing is deemed detrimental. Sure, it is changing, but can we design systems that can increase sharing? Since sharing is a behaviour, let us consider the Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM) of B = MAT (Behaviour = Motivation, Ability, Trigger) and we find that there is actually demotivation in the corporate environment for sharing. People fear reprisals from supervisors and don't share. Collaborating outside the group can lead to social rejection within the group. As for ability, retweeting, reblogging, social share icons all make it so easy to share content in the internet, but not so much in the Intranet. Work systems help you only to get things done, not share. Emails allow you to share, but it is limited in reach. It is not broadcast and rarely does a work related email go viral.

I would like you to try ideating on how we can get people to share more by thinking of:

ways to motivate people to share (please/pain, hope/fear, social acceptance/rejection)
ways to make it simpler to share (time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine)
different triggers to share (facilitator, spark, signal)

So while we consider 'sharing' as a means of enabling/amplifying Empathy, Mindfulness comes from what I call as the Systems of Awareness. Awareness of self, others, how others perceive self, interactions between others & self. Do read a short post where I introduce the concept of Systems of Awareness. In the ensuing months I forgot about it, only to be reminded of it again last week when I was getting an introduction to the systems our analytics team was building. And there-in I found some holes in my concept too.

In my introductory post on SoA (like SoR and SoE for Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement respectively; not to be confused with SOA, which stands for Service Oriented Architecture) I missed out on two key aspects:

the awareness a person can have about oneself from the data the systems capture these days, and also help them close the loop by seeing how the data moves by taking certain actions (actionable insights for the individual)
storytelling to go with the data, because people understand stories better than data (A good article on storytelling: http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/18/the-big-pivot-part-3/)

The problem with the first point in a large enterprise is that while technology exists to capture, analyse and present the data about an individual, the DW/BI systems license costs are prohibitively expensive to provide to every employee of a large enterprise. And that is what has been overcome by our CIO organization using open source systems and custom built applications. And boy was I happy to note the heavy usage of free/open source software. But that is beside the point here. Point is, that we are attempting to provide analytical tools to everyone in our organization, not just the managers. And these tools will not only provide data about oneself but also help people take actions based on these data points and track if their actions had any impact - not just actionable insights, but actually closing the loop!

The second point that I had missed out was that I somehow restrained myself in defining SoA to only analytical systems. But not all are able to interpret data appropriately nor is data enough to convince people. However, stories strike deeper in our psyche. Storytelling has had us hooked for ages, across age groups. But can systems write stories out of data? I do not know. Surely they can plot charts and paint a picture. Hans Rosling even does moving pictures.

Do you think that we have the wherewithal to design systems that will cater to empathy & mindfulness? Do you think they are necessary at all?

Of melting pots and thalis of social business

2012-11-06T15:33:00.000+05:30

Thali

It's been a long time since my last post and there has been a lot of water under the bridge. Sandy & Nilam were a sort of double whammy to us since it affected NJ, USA & Chennai, India simultaneously. And I got on bench for the first time in 12.5 years before I move into our CIO organization. I was unnerved a bit since it was a career first for me, but I am finding my sea legs finally. ;) My situation is a bit symbolic for the fledgling field of social CRM and social business as a whole. While there are various advances being made by many practitioners in these fields these are baby steps and essentially repeating the mistakes of older such transitions. You can read what my good friend Dr. Graham Hill has to say about that over at MyCustomer.com.

The biggest challenge currently seems to be the need for changing mindsets rather than deploying tools/processes. Even the startups & VCs seem to think so too, especially w.r.t. social. Consider the 5th point in the 'surprising' insights from Harvard's Cyberposium.

And hence from defining, refining Social CRM/Business and developing & marketing frameworks, methodologies, processes, tools and technologies I make a move to organizational change management, to be an Evangelist of Social Design. I move from a world of implementation to that of adoption. And that means I need to look at psychology, human behaviour and sociology too in addition to Organization Management Theory, etc.

(I have a feeling there will be a change in the topics that I blog henceforth. :) )

Esko Kilpi states that thanks to Cartesian philosophy we have two different academic fields of psychology and sociology. And corporates too have been bothered mostly with psychology alone while sociology is just an after thought.

The basic premise of the Cartesian philosophy revolves around Rene Descartes' maxim, "Cogito, ergo sum". I think, therefore I am.

But recent advances in neuroscience, psychology & sociology have me convinced that the brain though is of the individual (albeit its true power resides in the myriad connections its neurons make) the mind is of the social connections that the person has.

As David Brooks puts it in his book "The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement" (you can watch his TED talk too) -

"... a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds."

And while the brain & it's cognitive functions help us accomplish our work, achieve our corporate goals, it is the mind that directs our feelings and helps us cope with change. So it is imperative that change is looked at not from an individualistic perspective alone but also from the collective perspective too, especially the connections within the collective.

Esko uses the metaphor of billiard balls to explain how Cartesian/Newtonian thinking undermines the interactions between people. People are not like the billiard balls colliding with each other but not going into each other. Esko rather suggests we give heed to Kenneth Gregen who likens people coming together to baking, where the ingredients meld together to form a different whole. But I think that is not so in case of us Humans. We do not lose our self in the process of interacting/working with others.

And thus here I am reminded of what I read about the difference between India and Australia by Philip Malcolm Wollen in the Foreword to a book by Kenneth Anderson, "Jungle Tales for Children".

"My boyhood in India was an exquisite blend of contradictions. Schoolmates from several religious faiths, languages, ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic groups and cultures played together happily, enjoying each other’s festivals and food, revelling in their differences.

If my new home, Australia, can be described as a ‘melting pot’ of cultures, then my native land of India is best described as a ‘thali’. A large plate, served with a vast variety of delicious, different foods, different colours, textures, flavours, spices and temperatures — never to be mixed but savoured slowly and individually as part of a complete, satisfying and fulfilling feast."

And thus I am convinced that I need to be aware of a person as the individual as well as the connected & social animal in order to be better able to convince/persuade the person. What this actually transpires into as a framework/methodology I do not know as yet. I am more convinced about Fogg's Behavioral model the more I consider it. While it leans heavily on the psychology & behaviour of an individual, it does consider the individual as a part of the society and thus considers social acceptance/rejection as a motivational factor and social deviance as a simplicity factor.

Now cut back to corporate life which is all about meeting goals; achievements. And increasingly achievement is expected in a novel situation every time thanks to the growing fluidity in the world. Conditions are always changing. While change is a given, the rate of change has been increasing, accelerating. And thus achievements are now decreasingly personal since no one person is able to handle all the novelty. And this is where social software seems to be thriving; a place where knowledge, expertise, critical thinking and decision making come together. And since businesses have traditionally siloed each of these aspects to promote efficiencies there is a huge inertia to be overcome before openness, transparency, accountability, trust come in. But in the rat race of the corporate world achieving these is a tall order.

Territorial behaviour and aggression have an upper hand in many organization cultures. Outside of politics management is one place where it still holds a bastion in human culture. Trade, business, firm, company, management - these are the artefacts of human culture. And human culture exists in large measures to restrain the natural desires of the species. Had it not been for trade we would still be a blood thirsty warring species. Thankfully, contrary to common perception, Steven Pinker has compelling proof that we as a species are now less aggressive and warmongering than a few centuries ago and its apparently due to increase in trade (people are more valuable alive than dead), change in government (creating judiciary & police as separate entities) and cosmopolitanism (travel, literacy & epistolary culture allowed people to understand other cultures, build empathy).

This last bit is what I touched upon in a post on the new epistolary culture. And this is where the biggest impact of social tools in an organization will be. But while empathising is much needed, we should not lose focus on getting things done either, we are a business after all. And this is where there seems to be a gap currently. You have two different systems - one for getting work done, another for socialising - which do not integrate much with each other, if at all, and yet the ideal situation would be when both aspects are blended so as to make it difficult to tell one apart from the other. But these systems, processes and tools are just leveraged to support the culture of a social business. But to build a social business you must first humanize the organization; bring in a culture that will guarantee not just the survival of the fittest but also the meek, while not making the business bankrupt of course.

Organizational Silos were created to improve efficiencies, not promote territorial behaviour and aggressiveness. And tearing those walls down is not the panacea as many social media turned social business gurus will have you believe. You should at best perforate those walls allowing interactions and knowledge flows to make the organization resilient (not merely sustainable). Think of the Indian 'thali' not the 'melting pot'.

Social Construction: an aid for solution envisioning

2012-09-27T17:29:00.002+05:30

Barn raising, DeKalb County, Indiana, USA, about 1900

Of the new technologies that are defining the future of work and forward looking horizons of business the most buzzed about are the quartet of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data. Some, as I have mentioned earlier, like to call it the SMAC stack, A being Analytics - to represent Big Data. I heard a new pronunciation for it, s-mac instead of smac(k) and I like it better now. ;) But I digress.

I would ideally add 3D printing to the list too, since I think that's going to be a far greater disruptor than any of these from the quartet. You can already print live cells to make tissues, print houses, print guns (oh horrors!), teach children to make 3D chocolates ... err ... make stuff, and we all know that the economy depends on the collective creative outputs of the humans. But that is disrupting the way you look at economies more than disrupting business. And maybe why people ignore it. But I digress, again.

Of the sMAC stack Social is the one element that is the toughest to convince the CXOs about. And that's what I want to talk about in this post.

Mobile is just a new interface; and they all love to use the iPads & iPhones. Big Data, or Analytics, they know its business value and its not hard to see that there is a huge influx in data. Cloud is predominantly a CapEx vs OpEx kind of argument; everybody needs the computing infrastructure one way or the other. But Social, its a bit dicey.

Some people vehemently believe its just another channel. Some say its about the collaboration. (Or its just the same people stating it at different stages of realization). Some say its about the behaviors (some look narrowly at Gamification), though limited only to user experience of the application interface. Even if they are correct about behaviors, that's not something enterprise IT has been bothered too much about before. Sociology doesn't make much sense to IT. They are more comfortable with change management: "Here, go attend this training about using your new CRM system and ensure you fill out your sales data diligently. I will run weekly team review meetings and if you fall behind in entering that data, I will have a one on one with you."

To me the word Social itself is about the human behavior, state of mind. We are hard wired to be social, to be mindful of oneself and our interconnectedness. Our ability to be collectively creative is unique amongst the various species and that is what lured me to Social in the first place, though I am a technologist. However the Adam Smiths and Taylors of the economics and business management world have made us all lay too great an importance on efficiencies alone and thus create silos of perfection. But I digress, yet again.

The result of this confusion about what Social entails has stymied many a progress in various big enterprises. And thus I have to time and again explain to my clients about the various benefits of Social to business, the various use cases where they can fit. And over these five years of tinkering, thinking, talking and connecting ideas about Social for building customer solutions I think I can see a pattern emerging in all my discussions off late when I am helping people envision solutions. I have come to thinking of this pattern as Social Construction.

Social Construction is a borrowed term from Sociology; actually there are two different terms - social constructivism and social constructionism - and they can be quite confusing by themselves, especially for technologists (but if you are still interested, please do read this primer: http://www.control-z.com/czp/pgs/soccon.html). And I liked this term because it also, to my mind, gels with the concept of Value Co-Creation.

To give you an easier to grasp example, consider Barn Raising. In the rural North America, until about a hundred odd years ago people in a village / community would all pour in their efforts and resources to raise a barn for a farmer. This seemingly altruistic deed depended upon generalized exchange or what is popularly known as pay it forward.

Telugu movie watchers, especially Chiranjeevi fans would remember the movie ~~Tagore~~ Stalin (Thanks Sadhu Srinivas Rao for the correction) where the protagonist does good deeds by helping total strangers and asks them not to thank him, rather help three other strangers and ask them to do the same. Languishing for a long time that his idea did not take off, in the climax of the movie it is shown how the whole state has benefited from this grass roots, anonymous, movement. But I digress, this is becoming an irritating habit.

Barn raising is still practiced by the Amish, but I am not asking you to eschew technology. To the contrary, I in fact want to help you figure out how these new technologies help you build new solutions leveraging the power of social - technologies as well as behaviors.

My current concept of Social Construction builds upon a few categories of solution ideas that leverage social computing:

Social Mimicry - take existing digital assets on own digital real estate to social sites
Social Layer - add elements of social computing to existing digital assets on own sites
Social Collaboration - harness the power of community and add workflow magic to it
Social Insights - harness insights by mashing up data from social and traditional channels
Social Modeling - build applications from the ground up by adding social modeling to SDLC

Social Mimicry is basically catering to the same old business needs but by leveraging the new capabilities. Which in simplest terms might mean taking your loan calculator from your own web site and providing it as a Facebook app. Or something similar. Or it could mean building newer interfaces to your older infrastructure so that people are able to access the behind the scenes power of mainframes over social sites.

Social Layer is about enabling social elements or features on your existing assets. Think products/services from vendors like AboutEcho.com or BazaarVoice.com. Or Cognizant's intranet unifying OneCognizant application's Social Layer that we have developed to enable even Peoplesoft's boring time sheet entry become a bit more social. You can like, add comment and recommend an app via the social layer that sits like a horizontal navigation menu on top of these traditional enterprise applications. You might want to call it widgetization.

Social Collaboration, though I am not a great fan of the redundant term, is a term I am prone to use to represent the difference between mere community/social platform and a platform where people can get social and yet get the job done. To get things done though you need to consider workflows, goals and objectives, todos and tasks, notes and ideas, assignments and deadlines, SLAs and triggers. Think along those lines for a bit more and suddenly you are talking about a Business Process Management or Case Management or Project Management system.

Most community installations, internal or external facing, are akin to a water cooler or office canteen or coffee shops. People socialise there, sure, but they are also able to serendipitously come out with creative solutions because they bumped into people. But they can't get their day to day work done there. It's far too noisy and distracting to get things done. For that they need to get back to their cubicles (unless their company believes in open spaces to foster creativity and collaboration in the offline world too). And the digital equivalent of the cubicle is your workstation and the various enterprise applications. But unlike your physical work place where you can still get to interact with the person across the cubicle, or just spend a moment to socialise through the walls, you cannot do those intermittent social interaction over an enterprise system of record. Thus you use different systems to work and to socialise in your intranet. That's not how you behave in the physical world, do you? The other important question in Social Collaboration is how do you reduce noise, or rather, to borrow a term from communications engineering, improve Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)? How do you make it more relevant, more contextual, so that it helps in getting things done rather than distracting you from it? I digressed only a bit, I hope.

Social Insights refers to the mashing up of data from the social and traditional channels, analysing them and getting better answers to existing questions or being able to ask newer questions. Mash up web metrics with social data or sales data with social mentions and sentiments. Do a trend analysis. Figure out intentions too probably. You could also leverage Social Collaboration to collaboratively interpret newer sets of data/trends/analysis reports as well as initiate actions based on these insights. HR, Sales, Marketing, Product Development, just about everybody in the organization could benefit from these. And you don't necessarily need Hadoop instances to help you with the Social Insights. Social Data need not be Big Data to be useful.

Social Modeling brings in new perspectives in developing new enterprise applications and systems. When combined with the traditional use case, data flow and process modeling, social modeling can help applications and systems leverage the intrinsic motivational factors of the various actors, who are not only intentional but also social. This is still a pretty far out concept for most people and needs a whole new set of tools and practices to enter a typical SDLC. Actually, considering how Design Thinking, Value Network Mapping, Jobs To Be Done, Desire Engine, etc. seem to be more successful in catering to the individual goals as well as the interdependence of the users rather than what a few people think a system should be allowed to do (which is what is captured in a typical requirements gathering session) I think even the SDLC itself needs a relook. We need more Empathy in the application design & development process. And social collaboration platforms can themselves be used during SDLC, including for Social Modeling probably. But that's all in the future. I have not found many takers, yet.

Mindmap about Social Construction.

The above mind map captures my thought process on how I evolved the concept. This is no where complete or finished. This is merely the starting point. I hope there are further discussions in collaboratively defining and refining this concept. I welcome your inputs, feedback and insights.

CEOs, Social is not a Fad. It has economic value too, possibly $1.3 Trillion

2012-08-01T17:16:00.000+05:30

Earlier this year we heard from Gartner's survey that Social Media is not a high priority item for the CIOs in 2012 though it did seem that their high priorities were all affected by Social to a large extent. Top most priority was Collaboration / Workflow.

Late last month we heard via HBR that most organizations still fear Social Media. This was immediately followed by a post in HBR about results from a survey on why CEOs must use Social Media:

"Corporate leaders — and especially large company CEOs — are finally realizing what their employees and customers already know: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers, and even with their own employees enables their companies to be more adaptive and agile."

And now McKinsey tells us that there is in fact economic value in using social technologies in the organization and there is a number too: up to $1.3 Trillion.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute Report

No, they are not talking about the valuation of the various companies in the social technology industry, which is quite impressive in itself given the spate of acquisitions here (and smells of a bubble). Rather it is about the economic potential that lies in the productivity increase across the value chain.

"Two-thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises. The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information. Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises."

- The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

Hotlinked from Brian Vellmure

But it is not something you achieve by merely deploying a social media platform, a Facebook for the intranet. While there are variations in the values realised by industry as well as sources of value, it is clear from the survey that to achieve the full potential there are other aspects the businesses must not forget.

"To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves."

I said last year, when my focus was on predicting spread of innovation, adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing. And now we see sharing is required to unleash the economic value too.

Also, it seems creating a Culture of Sharing is not the only change required in an organization:

Unfortunately, the social technologies themselves are at such an early stage that it is not possible to share across the platforms in a manner that facilitates conversations, like email does. Of course emails were pretty incompatible too when they started out. As I said in a post last year about the privacy of the social customer, there are a lot of technological advances that are yet to be made. Interoperability, data portability, personal information stores, open standards|protocols|formats, a lot is yet to be done in the social technology industry. And I don't see any vendor sweating about these yet.

The key change required to unleash this economic value of social technologies is Sharing. Wonder where will we see the next iteration? In the culture or in the technology? Whose turn is it now? What do you think?

Increasing your “social surface area”

2012-07-24T11:21:00.000+05:30

“Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people”
— Peter Sims in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

In social media, you need to go out and read and post. They won't come to you. Its kind of like going back to the Pigeon Holes. And when you do go out, please ensure you keep your eyes and ears open. Don't restrict yourselves to your own interest areas/niches.

While it is the easy thing to do, to search about topics that interest us, and interact with the people who share those interests, probably as a response to the problem of ‘friending’ after you are 30, one should widen the scope. (Yeah, I know the proper grammar is ‘making friends’ but its the Facebook age! And you should really read that NYT article I have linked if you are above 30 years and find it difficult to make BFF, sorry, thick friends like how you could while in college/univ/school. I will wait for you to return back to my blog post.)

One reason why you should not limit your circles is because of the danger of group think, and in extreme cases, cultism. I had written about this three years ago but it still holds good. (Maybe it is a good time for you to read that old article. Sorry if you are being sent away again. But I am a patient blogger, I will wait for you to return.)

But the other advantage of widening your interactions is that increases your “social surface area”, and am sure most of you remember enough of your high school science to remember that chemical reactions happen better, faster when surface area is more. ;)

Social media lets you increase the number of people you are instantly connected with, build relationships, sustain them too. (But apparently still governed by Dunbar’s numbers – 150, 500 & 1500 corresponding to close friends/relations, acquaintances and people whose face we can recognize.) But mere numbers are not enough, the network structures matter too. And it is in this context that having connections with varied people is beneficial.

Call it luck or call it serendipity, as is in vogue now. Point is it helps you surface interesting information and resources that you might not have found otherwise, had you stayed within your niches.

Breaking out of our comfort zone is very important. But very difficult too. And being able to know what the 50 shades of grey are at the same time as grokking Great Gatsby is gross and yet allows you to hold wide ranging conversations.

When I gained notoriety in the world outside my workplace and gained visibility as a thought leader in the Social CRM and Social Business circles, I was helped by the fact that I was someone who was connected in the open source communities, with social media ‘gurus’, CRM experts, and many other groups. A few of them at loggerheads. This let me look at issues from multiple perspectives, and at the same time allowed me to be discovered by influential industry analysts.

I am connected to a few wildlife enthusiasts who go into the Melagiris Forests (Hosur Forest Division) to lay camera traps. I am getting initiated into these activities. I am connected to a few Montessorians, I attended many sessions by the Montessori trainers. I took active part in the formation of the villa owner’s association in the community I live in. I am a primary judge at the global event CRM Idol. I am connected to you all. I am of course connected to my immediate teams at work place. Do you think I have variety?

Similarly, being active in multiple social networks also helps you discover newer people.But most people tend to be in all your social networks. Thanks to the ease of adding friends from other services. This is understandable from the service provider's perspective since this sets in motion the Metcalf Law, also called the network effect; which is, the more people you are connected to via the service, the more useful the service becomes. But it only means that you are now porting your narrow network everywhere rather than finding new friends. And stopping serendipity to help you.

What does your social surface area look like? Do you believe you need to increase it or do you belong to those company executives who are afraid of Social Media?