Category: Four pillars

Last night, as we entered the dining room at the country club, we were greeted by this wonderful sign:

Gentlemen, please remove your hat. Something quintessentially Texan about that (and no, I’m not quibbling about the grammatical correctness of that notice). Not being far from a golf course at that time (and for that matter, not particularly far from a golf course as I write this), my mind wandered a bit, and I started to think about “local rules” in golf.

I’ve been fascinated by local rules ever since I played Minchinhampton Old a few decades ago. The course is on common ground; as a result, cattle are free to roam the course; flagsticks are therefore flagless and only a few feet high; and you get a free drop from cowpats.

I think it was journalist Charles Price who said that golf only needed three rules (and I paraphrase): don’t touch your ball between placing it on the tee and picking it up from the hole; no bending over in the rough; and if you must go into the woods, clap your hands.

Where is all this leading? Well, today’s Saturday and I’m on vacation, so I’m allowed to be lazy in my thinking. Bear with me. When it comes to buying/building decisions for technology, I tend to use the following mantra:

If the problem is generic use opensource

If the problem is specific to a market segment use commercial

If the problem is unique to your organisation use your own resources

I’ve begun to wonder whether a variation of that mantra is appropriate for rules in general. Generic rules, rules that matter whoever we are, wherever we are. Market segment rules, rules that relate to the specific society we associate with. And local rules, rules that are contextual.

Too often, I see people seek to impose rules out of context, moving from the spirit-of-law to letter-of-law, acting like car-park-warden-meets-jobsworth.

Just musing on a Saturday morning.

I’ve been lazing all week, thinking about as little as possible, spending time with my wife and children, spending time with close friends, spending time with myself.

And in that spending of time, a phrase I read somewhere came back to me:

Leadership is about taking the risk of managing meaning

There’s only a finite number of books it could have come from, so as soon as I remember the source I will update this post and let you know.

[Update: A twitter friend, Scott Germaise, checked out the quote and found the precise book: The Art of Framing. Thanks, Scott!]

Leadership in that strange space where information meets technology is fundamentally bankrupt; that is, unless we as leaders can learn to take risks in managing the meaning of three key concepts: intellectual property rights; the internet; identity.

What do I mean?

Let’s take opensource as an example. As leaders, we allowed ourselves to be drawn into the wrong debate. As Richard Stallman said, opensource was never about free as in gratis; it was about free as in freedom. Yet supporters of opensource were quickly labelled as pinko lefty treehuggers, and we allowed that meaning to persist. Very quickly, opensource supporters were anti-capitalist idealistic utopian dreamers, while the rest of the world churned out the stuff that mattered. Apparently.

Opensource is about democratised innovation, about creating value faster than via traditional models. It is about better code, about Linus’s Law, Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs Are Shallow. It is about lowering the cost of failure by its peculiar compartmentalisation. It is about creating affordable operating systems and software for the millions, the billions, that are underconnected because of closedsource operating models and business approaches. Opensource is about choice, choice shown in the very way the community moves and adapts and forks.

Yet for years we left so much of the value of opensource on the table, value that was denied everyone, from the BRIC individual to the large corporation. Those of us who call ourselves leaders have only ourselves to blame for that.

The same style of argument that was used against opensource is now being used in a different, but related, domain: intellectual property rights, covering copyright as well as patent. The discussion of the need to transform the meaning of IPR in a digital context is being shifted into one about free downloads and stealing.

The internet, or for that matter the World Wide Web, was not built as a new single-directional distribution mechanism exclusively for Hollywood. Neither was it built explictly to extend the pension rights of a few aging musicians and authors.

The internet is about a lot more than Western entertainment. But that is all it will be about, if we don’t take risks in managing the meaning of the internet.

The internet is not about criminalising everyone bar film and music production and distribution companies. Although it sometimes feels that way.

The same is true of identity. How discussions and debates about the meaning of identity in a digital context are reframed as attacks on privacy and security and safety in narrow “developed-world” terms. And somehow we allow this to happen with a minimum of fuss.

Why? Because we allow others to impose meaning on everyone.

Which is a crying shame.

I was intrigued by the possibilities that opened up in my mind as a result of reading this story: Captains’ logs yield climate clues: Records kept by Nelson and Cook are shedding light on climate change.

Diaries and journals, both amateur as well as professional, have always been a rich source of historical information.

As we move further into the digital age, the information in such diaries and journals is slowly becoming richer and richer. Meta-information is becoming easier to collect and to embed. Dates and times, places and people, environmental factors of every type.

Thirty years ago, when film was primarily analogue, all we had was frame numberings. Then we had auto date and time, followed by some crude tagging ability. Now, in the digital film world, everything is auto dated and timed and geolocated; everything is easily tagged, and in community as well, with folksonomy.

The same is happening with voice. With sound.

The same is happening with text.

And as a result, the social objects that connect us in conversation are themselves getting enriched and embedded in similar ways: commentaries and reviews, photographs and videos, sights and sounds.

Just musing. Something I’ve been working on for a few years now, yet something where I received a fresh insight by reading that story. So I thought I’d share it. And await comments.

Earlier today, Hugh Macleod tweeted “Funny how Dell is so heavily tied to the GAMING industry, yet as a company it could use a much greater sense of “PLAY”. “Playfulness” etc. He then took the conversation over to his blog, where an interesting commentary ensued, which I shall not try and summarise.

For some reason the entire debate reminded me of a passage in one of my favourite books, Serious Play by Michael Schrage.

In the preface to the book, Schrage has this to say:

Writing Serious Play has turned some of my assumptions and expectations inside out. I came to realize that I had lived my entire professional life under a serious misconception. I had thought of myself as someone who was very good at – and loved to play with – innovative ideas. Give me a clever metaphor, model, simulation, or prototype and I was a cat with a ball of yarn. There was no idea that couldn’t be transformed or unraveled simply by batting it around with the right mix of rigor, curiosity, and playfulness.

But as chapters were reviewed and revised, I was forced to confront some simple truths about what I was doing: I really wasn’t playing with ideas; I was playing with representations of ideas. The notion of talking about “ideas” and “innovations” divorced from the forms that embodied them increasingly struck me as absurd. How I played, how well I played, was overwhelmingly dependent on the nature of those representations. Playing with computer-generated images is as different from playing with spreadsheet software as playing with a football is different from playing with a hockey puck. The nouns shape the verb.

The nouns shape the verb.

When you “play” with something at work, it is the “something” that matters, not the “play”. Don’t get put off by the use of the word “play”, as most people do. For “play” read “experiment, with low cost of failure”.

Provided.

Of course there is a “provided”. Provided you have good feedback loops, that you respond to those feedback loops, and that you take corrective action to prevent recurrence.

Play is serious. Play at work can be even more serious. If you let it.

Talking about feedback loops reminds me of the first time that someone told me about the loser putt. A loser putt has one of two mutually exclusive characteristics:

(a) it is short of the hole, in which case the loserness of the putt is the same as in the “never up, never in” sentiment. You didn’t give the hole a chance.

(b) much worse than (a), it goes beyond the hole. And. You. Turn. Away. The loserness of the putt is caused here by your turning away, and thereby throwing away all the valuable information for your return putt. The valuable information provided by the behaviour of the ball once it passes the hole.

Loved this story in the Onion: Local Idiot to Post Comment On Internet. Some of the bits that had me choking on my camomile:

Mylenek, who rarely in his life has been capable of formulating an idea or opinion worth the amount of oxygen required to express it, went on to guarantee that the text of his comment would be misspelled to the point of incomprehension, that it would defy the laws of both logic and grammar, and that it would allege that several elements of the video are homosexual in nature.

“The result will be an astonishing combination of ignorance, offensiveness, and sheer idiocy,” Mylenek said.

According to the idiot, he will become incensed at the quality and sentiment of the comments already posted below the video—which will include such replies as “not great, nice try tho,” “FIRSTIES!!!” and “wtf?? lol so random.” At this point, Mylenek said, he will feel a deep, unwavering desire to offer a dissenting opinion, which he has hinted will include the words “gay” and “reatrd” [sic].

Go on, read the whole thing. You know you want to. In case you missed it, here’s the link again.

My thanks to Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, whose tweet alerted me to the story.