Now I can finish these tasks off with style!

I haven’t tried this, so take it with a grain or two of salt. My thought is to start by filling in a rough slide name so I can see where I should be on the timeline, then think about what I want to happen during that period – do I want to demo, talk, ask the audience questions, or – more advanced – try to get them to ask the right question? It would be interesting to have this in hand in advance as a critic, do they follow their planned flow? Did they get the questions they wanted to drive?

Not sure map is the right word,but diagram didn’t seem quite right either. Flow map? Presentation flow diagram? Interested to hear what you think.

I’ve never adopted it during a normal work week, in part due to not being willing to work that hard at lining up someone for lunch every day and in part just enjoying quiet time at a meal. Most days when I go to lunch I take a book to read (usually career related as opposed to fun), sometimes I’ll work on notes or an idea for something I want to write, and some days its nice to just sit and enjoy some fresh air. The days when I do have lunch with someone are then a delight.

Somewhere between always eating along and never eating alone you can find a balance that works for you.

I watched the documentary on Nova about the IBM project to build Watson, a computer that could play Jeopardy. The technical bits are interesting, maybe even staggering in some ways, especially when you consider it’s all to do what a single human can do! It ran without being connected to the internet during the game, so they had to download and store a lot of stuff – Wikipedia, IMDB, more.

The human side was more interesting. They had to convince the show producers that this would be good TV, so they set up a mock set and brought in a comedian along with some real contestants that had been on the show, and started. It didn’t go well. Watson definitely got some right, sometimes it ran into things it didn’t “know” about like roman numerals, and sometimes the answers were just wrong. Not a little wrong. Way way wrong.

The Alex Trebek stand-in – being a comedian – cracks jokes each time Watson blows it. The project lead was wincing in the audience, visibly impacted by the snide/silly remarks from the host. You might think he had begun to think of Watson as a person,but he was thinking of how all the people on the team felt. Odd situation. Not sure if it was how it was edited or how it really played out,but going with a comedian was almost bound to lead to someone not being happy in that competitive situation.

They went off, made some changes, and finally gave it another try for real. Here’s a snippet of it:

Watson ended up doing pretty well.

Jeopardy is a hard challenge, much more so than playing chess. They had a nice example of the complexity of Jeopardy. Imagine writing the query to figure this out:

I shot the elephant wearing my pajamas.

Who was wearing the pajamas? You, or the elephant? That’s language for you!

1. Get an intern. Our local college kindly shares their campus with us, maybe they have someone working on a marketing degree that wants some practical experience.

2. Building on the college relationship, they know a lot of people in the community. How can we get them to push our message out to them in a way that everyone will find acceptable?

3. Are we trying to drive them to register for the event, or the chapter? Would it make more sense to try to get them to the LinkedIn group first?

4. Local staffing companies have killer lists, we need to find a way to use this proxy network better. How about giving them a code, give them a discount against the sponsorship fee for everyone that registers with their code (potentially reducing their cost to zero)?

5. Buy a newspaper ad.

6. Radio ad, maybe we could get a PSA?

7. Post on Craigs list. We’d have to do this repeatedly as it would roll off, and would need some work to see which section would work best.

8. Work the local .Net group to ask their members (mainly devs) to make sure their SQL people know about us. Worth doing, not sure how effective.

9. Make sure event listed in MSDN email.

10. Invest time (and money) in a solid flyer and maybe some posters,ask everyone to print/post at work.

11. Can we get bookmarks put into all the SQL books at the local bookstores?

12. Do we know the top 25 tech employers in the area? We should! Would be interesting to figure out how many of those people we’ve reached.

13. What can we pull from Census data? It would be great to know how many DBA’s were in Orlando zip codes,maybe we reach a higher percentage than we think. (Note: My guess is we reach half).

14. We know about a lot of tech companies based on registration info, how about reaching out to them directly, maybe at the CIO/director level?

15. Can we buy a list? Find a good list broker?

16. Do more with local trainers like New Horizons and DeVry.

17. Get the flyer on bulletin boards at local restaurants and coffee shops.

18. What about buying ads on LinkedIn and Amazon? Or doing a mailing to our extended LinkedIn network?

19. Make sure event listed on LinkedIn.

20. Where else would people look for events in Orlando?

21. Local government job placement/training offices.

What can you add to the list?

I’m sure those map back to someone in my network, but not sure at all how they would determine that these would fit me. BI gone wrong? Or do they know something I don’t?

I haven’t ever thought of the way I write as courageous, and probably won’t. I write to think, and the way I do that doesn’t require every idea to get fully and perfectly written. I enjoy sharing some of my thoughts and ideas, but I don’t – at least right now – worry about page views or popularity. I write to think, to grow. It’s a lot like the conversation we’d have if we sat down to talk about this topic right now.

That’s my style. You get to pick your style. Be who you are. Try to be better, try new things. Or not. In the end, you can write, or not. I hope you’ll write.

The thing about expectations that is hard – very hard – is that if you don’t set them, the other person will. They may expect that since lunch was provided last year it will be provided this year. They may expect polished presentations or cookies during the afternoon break. They may expect that you’ll move them through check-in quickly. Is that fair?

I run into cases at work all the time where something or someone didn’t meet my expectations. Whose fault is that?

I wonder how often I don’t meet the expectations of someone else?

Expectations are everywhere. For example right now I expect that if I submit my invoice on Monday I’ll see the deposit on Thursday. That’s how it has worked for many months. I also expect that if it changes I’ll be told, that I won’t have to ask. I’ve set both of those expectations does the client agree with those expectations? Or even know about them?

Part of getting this right is to think about what we would expect if the roles were reversed. That’s not perfect, but it’s a major step in the right direction. Just remember it’s not perfect, we don’t all see the world the same way.

I listen for the cues and clues in conversation that may indicate a disconnect. It’s both disconcerting and exciting when you realize it’s happened. Why exciting? Because now you can fix it! It may mean explaining why you do things a certain way, or understanding why doing it their way may make it better, or just both sides learning that it was an unfortunate miss that can perhaps be avoided the next time. Note: it really helps if both sides listen, the clues aren’t always obvious.

More and more I see this as the source of pain at work. I’m not always able to fix it. Getting someone to listen to your expectations means that you’re also telling them, indirectly at least, that they have failed. That message is hard to process and most of us fall back into defense,blaming you for the incorrect (from our view) expectation instead of thinking…yes,I see why you set that expectation.

I think we have to set expectations if no one else does. Sometimes we’ll get it right, sometimes we won’t. I find life a little less frustrating when I realize that someone else failed to meet an expectation I never told them about.

I’m going to build one in the next couple weeks. Might be a box, might be more. I’ve already got the 4×4 post to mount it to left over from another project. Not sure where to put it up yet. I’ll build it first and then figure it out!

• NELL tweets each time it learns a new fact – follow @cmunell
• You can download the belief file (15 million total, 1 million that are ‘high confidence’)

Of the two, I’ll be curious to see which you find more interesting!