Category: Four pillars

I had been looking forward to meeting Umair Haque at Supernova a few weeks ago. But it was not to be; sadly, Umair’s mother was ill and so, quite understandably, he couldn’t make it.

There are many reasons for my wanting to meet Umair; just take a look at what Terry Heaton wrote about him some months ago and you’ll get what I mean.

My disappointment was short-lived: unable to turn up, Umair posted this article instead: A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution. Great article, excellent food for thought. Here are some excerpts:

Creative destruction has two sides – the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff are going to sharpen. The price of growth, it seems, is a world that’s always riskier, more uncertain, and more brutal at the margin.

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Consider this. When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.

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Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble?

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Here’s the answer: marginal starvation. Lives are lost.

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If that’s 21st century capitalism – maybe it’s time for a revolution.

All this got me thinking. The turbulence that Umair speaks of, the successive bubbles, these are not theories any more, they’re here. We’re seeing acceleration and spiking in creative output, we’re also seeing the same acceleration and spiking in the cost of destruction.

When human lives become part of the “cost of destruction” something is seriously wrong. And we need to change our views and values, in some fundamental way. I remember attending the inaugural Esther Dyson Flight School some years ago, where the incomparable Freeman Dyson (her father), spoke. He talked about heady days in the late 40s when physicists were excitedly contemplating the use of nuclear power to launch rockets and to extend their reach, a time when we didn’t know enough about the consequences. Then it all changed. Which was a good thing.

We have already learnt two important lessons from innovation, particularly when democratised or opensource:

• how to keep the costs of failure low (as in Jeff Clavier’s quote here or Josh Kopelman’s here)
• how to keep the costs of repair low (as in Wikipedia)

The costs of failure and the cost of damage repair are two components of the costs of destruction. We’re going to have to extend these lessons radically, often counterintuitively,  in order to reduce the costs of destruction while sustaining, even enhancing, the creation of value.

Food for thought.

I don’t particularly like e-mail, not because it is bad per se, but because we have made it into a one-size-fits-all collaboration and communication tool. I have particular dislikes for the misuse of the cc button and the very existence of the bcc button, something I have written about before.

Even those dislikes pale into insignificance when compared to my public enemy number one, the infinite-loop mail. This is where person A sends an e-mail, say, to eight people named B to I. B drops A and C from the conversation and adds J and K. C meantime adds J as well, but drops B and brings A back.

This seems to happen regularly in large institutions, and we create all kinds of horizontal bureaucracies as a result, looping endlessly.

Kishore Balakrishnan, commenting on an earlier post of mine, mused about implementing ticketing systems for e-mail in environments where everyone could see the size of the queue, open items, turnaround times, the lot. Others have tried paying for attention at the same time as dealing with spam, using techniques like Seriosity suggests.

Some of these issues came up in conversation today, and it reminded me of some principles I tripped over many decades ago.

The first was in a world before I had corporate e-mail, I’m talking about 1981. [Others may have had access to such things, but my first memory of using serious corporate e-mail was in 1986 at Data General as part of their Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO) offering. While I had played with personal e-mail, I did not have a computer at home, so it mattered not.

So, in this world before e-mail, someone old and wise decided they’d teach me a bit about office politics and how to survive them. Things like: Don’t appear in announcements, they’re just like drawing large Xs on your back and saying “Kill me”. Try not to have an office, it confuses the daylights out of the plotters and schemers. Smoke (it was OK in those days).

When it came to interoffice memos (the pieces of paper you sent around in those bright orange envelopes with 20 address boxes and, occasionally, a string you had to tie round a circular tab thingie) the advice I was given was as follows:

1. Memos are always to be drafted by the recipient. She is the person who knows best what to put in the memo.

2. The recipient also chooses the sender of the memo. Again, she is best placed to decide.

3. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the chosen sender to sign the said memo. This is usually done by offering to trade. In exchange for the signature, you offer to get him a memo (drafted by him, of course) and signed by the person he chooses.

Sound overly cynical? It’s not meant to be. Just observations about enterprise life.

Today, when I recalled this, some other thoughts came into my mind. A separate conversation, this time about EDI and Edifact and SITPRO, discussing the evolution of automation of trade documents. Again in 1981, another wise person said to me, as if we were in a murder mystery tale, “who stands to gain? Who benefits from the standardisation and automation? Find the beneficiary and you will have someone motivated to implement the application. For it to work, EDI must be beneficiary-led.”

Who benefits? Who stands to gain? These are questions we have to ask ourselves as designers. But actually we know the answer. It should always be “the customer”. So now we have to keep asking ourselves “How does the customer benefit from what I am doing?”.

As we get better at answering that question, we will build systems that are genuinely designed from the customer perspective.

Take a look at this. Man throws money into the air, wanted to “spread a little sunshine”. Blog post, quotes, video, the lot.

Every time we mention “citizen media”, we will keep hearing horror stories about unchecked facts, downright lies, superficial reporting, poor use of language, bias and corruption.

But it’s happening. And will continue to happen. Connected scale is a wonderful thing.

I just love this story. Tommy de Carlo, a 43 year old Home Depot credit manager in North Carolina, lifelong fan of Boston, is heartbroken when Brad Delp, the lead singer, committed suicide last year. So he sings his heart out on a bunch of tracks, uploads them to his MySpace page as “tribute”, and less than a year later, becomes the lead singer of the band.

I need stories like this, to keep reminding me of the importance of access, of the importance of DRM-free content, of the importance of what Doc’s son Allen called The World Live Web. [ To keep reminding me that what we are doing, what we are fighting for, is about our emerging culture as much as anything else, that we need to understand more and more about open and free while we do this; that open and free can go hand in hand with success, both business and personal.

Boston’s business wasn’t harmed by what Tommy did, was it?

But it could have been. By DRM, by lack of access, by many things.

Just a thought.

Ever since I first heard Clay Shirky talk about the cost of damage and the cost of repair, I have been very taken with the idea. I believe he was talking about Wikipedia at the time. The more I think about it, anything that is a commons will have this tendency to retain and increase value, as long as the cost of repair is kept at least as low as the cost of damage.

I started kicking it around in other contexts and the answer seemed to come out the same. It made me understand more about urban graffiti and about vandalism. Then, more recently, I saw this article, about chewing gum. So it costs 3p to buy a piece of chewing gum and 10p to clean up after it.

And it made me think. Wouldn’t that look a little unfair to a non-chewer? The chewer gets the benefit, the manufacturer makes the profit, and the taxpayer foots the bill.

Maybe it’s time for some radical solutions. Maybe we could try something else. If a good for sale is capable of damaging “the commons” then maybe we should measure the cost of repairing that damage. If that cost exceeds the cost of damage, then we raise a tax on the good until the cost of damage is higher than the cost of repair. Half the tax is payable by the manufacturer, half by the consumer. The taxes so collected are then used to do the repairing.

Permanent marker pens.  Chewing gum. Maybe even anything that comes in packaging that people tend to throw away.

Just a thought.