According to knowyourmeme, poker face is a “4pane exploitable series illustrating mostly awkward and sometimes embarrassing social situations, who always responds with a blank expression and a caption that reads “poker face”.

This post is not about the meme.

In other news, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta had a hit song with that title. Which gives me a reason to link this blog to MySpace for the first time ever. And possibly the last. Here’s the Lady Gaga song video.

This post is not about the Lady Gaga song either.

It’s simpler than all that. This post is loosely about signals and about the absence of signals, about what the game of poker calls tells and poker faces.

We signal all the time. And we’ve been doing it ever since there’s been a “we” here to do the signalling.

Some of the signals are to do with our past activity. Fingerprints and footprints are classic examples. But they extend beyond that, we tend to leave all kinds of evidence about who we are and what we did: stray hairs, tiny bits of fabric from our clothes as they snag here and there, traces of dirt from our shoes. Lipstick and saliva and lip-prints on things we touch with our mouths: drink glasses, cigarettes, people. Whole libraries of detective fiction and police procedurals have been woven around the trails of evidence we leave behind, and whole new libraries, with similar tomes, await us. DNA profiling is becoming more common now.

Some of the signals look beyond the past and impinge upon our present and future; they are to do with our current state and used to project what happens next. The detritus in our mouths, the bacteria in our colons, the contents of our stomachs, the nature of our urine and stool, our blood, biopsies of parts of our bodies, patterns in our retinas, all these are used as signals to help determine, amongst other things, our health and wellbeing. These signals are more complex, harder to interpret, harder to get right.

Some of our signals are only decoded after we die. Postmortems, forensic autopsies and clinical autopsies tell us so much about our last meals, our last years, how we lived, how we died. As we’ve understood more about our genes, we’re learning more about our ancestors, who they were, where they lived, how they lived, how they died. Some of our signals are more fleeting, evanescent. Facial expressions (as in the tells of poker players), body language. How we behave when we tell the truth. How we behave when we lie. Attempts have been made to measure and interpret all these for some time now, and they’ll get better.

Now, with the advent of smart mobile tools, we’re now sending more signals, richer signals, signals wrapped in the metadata of context.

Who we are. Where we are. What time of day the signal refers to. Who we’re with. What we’re doing. These signals are tense-free, they span time. We’re signalling what we did, what we’re doing, what we intend to do. Past, present and future. More and more everyday things are now capable of sensing and sharing information: our phones, our computers, our cars, our cameras, our shoes, our clothes. And we’re not the only ones doing the signalling. Our friends tell the world who they’re with, what they’re doing, what they did, what they intend to do. So information about us continues to emanate even if we stop.

For decades our spending habits have been collected, analysed and acted upon by credit card companies; how often have you seen films or read books where people have been tracked down by the plastic trail? Affinity cards took things even further; e-commerce made a fine art of it; mobile “apps” took this to the nth degree. We’ve been leaving the spoor of our history, activities and intentions for aeons.

But there’s one major difference: The barriers to entry have been lowered. Dramatically.

In the old days it took an expert to figure things out. You needed specialist trackers to inspect and learn from spoor. Psychologists. Coroners. Autopsy technicians. Fingerprint experts. You needed the support of the legal system, formal warrants or court orders to inspect call records and credit cards. Nowadays, many of the trails we leave behind are trails accessible to all and sundry. Not everyone knows who can see your trails. Not everyone knows what can be done with those trails. Surprises are being sprung, errors are being made. And they will continue as we learn more about the new environment.

It’s baby and bathwater time. We must make sure we hold on to what’s important.

All these signals allow patterns to emerge. Patterns that will allow us to solve problems that no previous generation could solve. Patterns that can be seen only because of the tools this new paradigm represents. We’re already seeing nanotechnology inside the human body, telling us more about what’s happened and what’s happening; we’re already learning about the power of collective information, even in simple tools like wheresgeorge and its use for predicting viral behaviour in large populations. You should look at the work of Tom Malone, Sandy Pentland et al at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence if you’re interested in this subject.

Making sense of these signals is not always easy. We’re going to need better visualisation tools, better search and find tools, better analytics, better frameworks to operate within. Better frames of reference.

These frames of reference are often comprised of “static” and “low-volatility” data. Names. Addresses. Part numbers. SKUs. Company names. Product names. Bus route and train route and car route and plane route naming conventions. Mapping of names of things to locations. [This is where services like Foursquare are doing the world a real service, by encouraging the labelling of GPS locations in digital maps.].

The static elements are often augmented and enriched by “public” data, data paid for out of the public purse. Ordnance survey maps. Temperatures. Weather. Climate conditions. Traffic status. Bus and train timings. Census information. Usually funded by taxpayer money, usually not “personally identifiable”. Which is where the Open Data movement comes in. There is so much that can be discovered and learnt just by linking different data sources across common reference points, performing the simplest of mashups. But only if the common reference points are accessible. And only if the enriching is done. Tim Berners-Lee has spoken about the value of this for some time now. Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall et al have been doing a lot of work in helping make this happen, helped along by their colleagues Jim Hendler and Noshir Contractor at the Web Science Trust.

There’s more enriching that can be done, as the private sector learns to share its reference and static and low-volatility data (again avoiding that which is personally identifiable).

The problems we face are problems that need us to work collectively, using tools fit for purpose, encouraging sharing, allowing each of us to act like individual and sophisticated sensors, aggregating the data we collect, placing the data in the reference context, augmented by public and private open data. Climate change. Disease control. Sustainable agriculture. Better nutrition and diet. Provision of adequate drinking water. The list is endless. Problems we’ve faced for a long time, problems that have grown in urgency over the last fifty years.

 New problems. New paradigms. New tools.

And new risks.

• People are concerned about how their privacy is affected.
• People are concerned about the long-term consequences of impulsive and stupid actions, the trails of which are forever crystallised in the modern context.
• People are concerned about how quickly and cheaply the trails can be disseminated, and the psychological impact of all that.
• People are concerned about the opaqueness of it all; they used to know who gathered what information for what purpose; now, in this free-for-all world, they know less and less. This asymmetry worries them.
• People are concerned about how all this is gamed. False signals, false tells. Checking in where you’re not. Providing feedback on places you’ve never been.

People are concerned.

And for good reason.

Of course legislation can help and should help, but the issues are global and our ability to get cross-border agreement on the relevant areas is, shall we say, somewhat poor. Nonexistent. Which means we run the risk of well-meaning-but-not-fit-for-purpose legislation in regional pockets while people jockey for position, something we can ill afford.

We’re in pioneering times. And pioneers often make tremendous sacrifices on behalf of the generations to follow.

Marie Curie died of aplastic anaemia. Her condition was caused by the time she spent exposed to radiation.

Jonathan Edwards, the theologian, volunteered to be inoculated against smallpox while the vaccine was still in development, and died as a result.

William Bullock invented the rotary printing press, only to die of gangrene after his foot was crushed by the machine he invented.

There are many many more; here’s a sample list of inventors killed by their own inventions.

Some of the people alive today will pay personal prices, sometimes punitive prices, sometimes the ultimate price, for the progress we seek to make.

This is why education is of paramount importance, so that people learn about the new world, its possibilities and its risks, the benefits and the consequences.

An informed population, ubiquitously connected, empowered with smart devices, will transform global health, education and welfare.

Educated and well people will be able to spend time figuring out where their happiness lies, what it is based on.

And that’s why I write what I write.

 

Some of you may have seen this news report already. As the BBC says “India’s Calcutta to be painted blue“.

I was born there. Lived there for 23 years unbroken. And still consider myself a Calcuttan. [Enough to have named this blog after it]. So the story mattered to me.

Yet my first instinct was to avoid this topic altogether. I left Calcutta over 31 years ago. I don’t live there any more. I’ve only been there five times in the last 20 years. So I don’t have a right to say anything. And that is that.

And then I thought about it, and felt it would be strange if I didn’t cover the event, especially given my origins and association with the city. I don’t have a vote. But I can still have an opinion. [Readers in Kolkata: you live there, your opinions count far more than mine, so please treat my comments with as much disdain as you think they deserve.].

So here goes.

My first reaction was straight out of the book of McEnroe. You cannot be serious. And then I thought about it for a while, went and read the coverage across a bunch of sites, both local as well as international. Slowly I began to feel an odd sense of familiarity with the colours.

Soon I realised why I had the sense of familiarity. When I think of Calcutta, one of the first things I think of is my school. I went to a Jesuit school and college there, spent a wonderful fifteen years with them. St Xavier’s Collegiate School. St Xavier’s College. Institutions which had flags and uniforms and colours. Here’s a photograph of the flag being carried at the ceremonies to mark the 150th anniversary of the school:

Yup, blue and white.

And here’s a photo of the women’s hockey team, wearing what I remember to be the traditional Xaverian sports team colours:

Again, blue and white.

And there was something else. You would expect someone like me to think of the school first and everything else later. But what about someone like you? What images are conjured up in your brain? My guess would be that the first thing that enters your mind when you hear “Calcutta” is … Mother Teresa. [I suspect that if I’d asked the question fifty years earlier the answer would have been something else, but that’s another matter]. When Mother Teresa came to Calcutta, one of the first things she’s meant to have done is to have given up her classic nun’s habit to wear a simple, Indianised version, part habit part sari, as shown below.

Yes. Blue and white again.

An aside. The bulwark of my 15-year existence at St Xavier’s was Fr Camille Bouche, who was the “Prefect of Discipline” throughout my time there. A wonderful man, it was a privilege to have been taught, nurtured and discipled by him. I made a point of visiting him every time I went to Calcutta until he passed away. I last saw him at St Lawrence’s shortly before he died, and it was only in speaking to him that I realised just how close he’d been to Mother Teresa: I was aware of an association, but not its closeness, as briefly described here.

So now you can understand why I felt a sense of familiarity in imagining Calcutta in blue and white.

Other emotions stirred in me as well, more positive than I expected, more positive than I intended, still underpinned by my childhood experiences. I’d been brought up to dress smartly for school, to dress particularly smartly for sports matches, and to dress as smartly as possible for the “National Cadet Corps’. Crisply ironed clothes. Starched shining whites. Blancoed belts and webbing. Brassoed bits of metal everywhere. And shoes you could use as shaving mirrors. I must have been about 14 when I was preparing for what I considered to be an inconsequential cricket match, and my shoes were not particularly clean. Fr Bouche noticed them and asked me to go get them cleaned properly before I was allowed on the field of play. Some time later, I asked him why he’d done that. And all he said was “Baba, it’s an important discipline, you will think better and play better if you dress properly”. Later I heard him say something similar to a cadet in the NCC, how important it was for soldiers in terms of morale and discipline.

Those ideas have stuck with me. Deeply. So deeply that I know I will stop watching cricket the day Test matches are played by people in coloured pajamas. They can wear what they like for the limited overs games, they can wear shorts and t-shirts if they want for the 20/20, but when it comes to Test matches, there is no alternative. Whites.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve used the power of dressing up as a panacea for many things, all designed to lift up my mood and to help me focus. Depressed? Haircut and shave. Tired, exhausted? Best suit on. A day full of challenges? Dressed up to the nines. Every time with Fr Bouche standing beside me. Think better. Play better. Work better.

When I came to England, many of these ideas were reinforced during my early days in Liverpool, in Kew and in Richmond. I’ve never driven, and so I tended to travel often on buses. Every Saturday morning, as I went about my chores as a young man, I’d marvel at how the retired and the elderly would insist on shaving and on putting on a jacket and tie, even if only to go for a walk to get the paper. As I walked around the town in the afternoon (all the shops in town used to shut at 1pm those days) I’d notice just how many people were washing and cleaning window sills and windows, polishing doorknobs, trimming hedges, mowing lawns. Keeping things spick and span.

I marvelled at the discipline that they showed, at their age, and often despite the infirmities that age brought. Today I live in a different England, some of those disciplines just aren’t there any more.

When I left Calcutta I lost the right to vote on the subject. That is the prerogative of the people who live there today. And they are the only ones with that right. Again, if you’re reading this and you’re a Calcuttan, dismiss all of this with disdain if you disagree.

Of course there are a million reasons why not. The money can be used for so many other, important, perhaps even life-saving, activities and acquisitions. Painting the town blue sounds like a superficial, wasteful engagement.

But a little part of me is listening to Fr Bouche. And thinking. Hmmm.

 

 

 

 

There was a time that musicians produced collections of music called albums. A time when every song in the collection so published was worth listening to. A time when musicians even tried to create some sort of continuity, some sense of belonging, some coherence between the songs on the  albums. Sometimes they called them concept albums, to differentiate them from the others.

Albums. A fine idea. As an example, take a look at the albums I’ve listed below. All just from one year, 1971. From when I was 14. Every one a classic of its kind. If I could have afforded it, I could have bought a new album every two weeks. [In fact, I had every one of those albums in my collection in vinyl. I now have the lot in CD form, and just over half in vinyl as well.]

 

• 4 Way Street: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
• Abraxas: Santana
• Aqualung: Jethro Tull
• Blue: Joni Mitchell
• Bridge Over Troubled Water: Simon and Garfunkel
• Chicago III: Chicago
• Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Emerson, Lake and Palmer
• Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: The Moody Blues
• Every Picture Tells A Story: Rod Stewart
• Fireball: Deep Purple
• Imagine: John Lennon
• Led Zeppelin III: Led Zeppelin
• Meddle: Pink Floyd
• Mud Slide Slim and The Blue Horizon: James Taylor
• Pearl: Janis Joplin
• Songs Of Love And Hate: Leonard Cohen
• Stephen Stills: Stephen Stills
• Sticky Fingers: The Rolling Stones
• Sweet Baby James: James Taylor
• Tapestry: Carole King
• Tea For The Tillerman: Cat Stevens
• Teaser And The Firecat: Cat Stevens
• The Yes Album: Yes
• Tumbleweed Connection: Elton John
• What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye
• Who’s Next: The Who

Well, that was over 40 years ago. I could have chosen 1969 or 1972 or pretty much any year from that genre and come up with similar results. As Mary Hopkin would have said, those were the days. Since then, slowly, alarmingly, albums started morphing into something else: vehicles for surrounding a few decent tracks with tat. Of course there were exceptions. But they were exceptions.

Not surprisingly, album sales declined, and continue to decline.

I could say that overall music quality declined as well, but that wouldn’t be fair or reasonable. Every generation tends to think that the music quality of succeeding generations is poorer. So I won’t go down that road.

What I can say is that the quality of recording is getting worse, something that Neil Young feels strongly about, something that we need to think hard about, find ways to change. In the meantime, Neil is working on a device and an end-to-end process that could transform the way we listen to music.

And in the meantime. I am so glad that sites like discogs.com exist. They’re amazing.

They help you discover music; make it easy for you to find people you share musical tastes with; provide ways to buy music and sell music in pretty much any format; they even have facilities for you to add to, correct or otherwise improve their database. Now that is what I call a 21st century open and social music site. Thank you discogs.

Okay, okay, you got the “social” bit, but where did I come up with the “open” tag? Here’s why:

 

A simple, worthwhile platform. REST APIs. Using open standards. Allowing people access to the core data and processes. Allowing people to build incremental value on top of the platform. Keeping to social, open and cloud principles.

 

Admit it. I had you with that headline. Have I finally flipped? What could possibly connect Neil Young and David Agus to the Social Enterprise, and related topics?

I could just say “Marc Benioff”, since he personally introduced me to all three.  Soon after joining Salesforce.com, I heard Marc speak about the concept while travelling with him through Munich and Davos last year; he gave me the opportunity to meet Neil Young, a boyhood hero of mine, in Tokyo last December; and he ensured that I had a chat with David Agus, heard him speak and read his book last week in Las Vegas. [Incidentally, if you have any interest in personal health, you should read David’s book, The End of Illness. I’ve just finished it, it’s an excellent read].

Serendipitous introductions, like the ones Marc made above, can be valuable; sometimes they’re valuable enough for me to write a blog post about them. And sometimes they’re a lot more important than that.

Let’s take David Agus and his book, which I will commend you again to read. It’s more than just a book, it’s a manifesto. A call to action built around some core (and radical) principles. A whole new way of looking at the very concept of health, or at the very least a renaissance of older ways, underpinned and substantiated by advances in medical research, technology and understanding.

Early on in the book, Dr Agus quotes JBS Haldane as saying, in Cambridge in 1923:

“The recent history of medicine is as follows. Until about 1870 medicine was largely founded on physiology, or, as the Scotch called it ‘Institutes of Medicine’. Disease was looked at from the point of view of the patient, as injuries still are. Pasteur’s discovery of the nature of infectious disease transformed the whole outlook, and made it possible to abolish one group of disease. But it also diverted scientific medicine from its former path, and it is probable that, were bacteria unknown, though many more people would die of sepsis and typhoid, we should be better able to cope with kidney disease and cancer.”

For patient read customer. That’s easy. And for disease read product/service; it may be a bit harder to strip negative connotations away from the word, but the principle is important so please try.

We used to be patient-centric, then found that we could industrialise processes better if we went disease-centric. Which was fine for some patients and some diseases. But overall it was a backward step as we stopped learning about the patient in a holistic manner.

Park that thought, and let’s move on to Neil Young. When we met in Tokyo, Neil spoke passionately about the parlous state of modern music. He’s been a harsh critic of the poor quality of MP3s, and has felt particularly aggrieved by the continuing deterioration of the technical quality of recorded music. As a result, he’s been working on ways to transform the music listening experience end-to-end, how music is recorded, how it is stored and retrieved, how it is played back, the devices used, the connectivity, the whole nine yards. You can read some of his views on this here and here. I was particularly taken with the way Wired UK reported on this, quoting him as saying:

My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practising for the past 50 years. We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving [it].

You could say Neil is putting forward a manifesto, a platform for change, transforming the customer experience end-to-end. It may be about his chosen art form, but the principle transcends that.

Which brings me to the Social Enterprise.

It’s a manifesto for radical change.

It begins with a holistic view of the customer; the entire process emanates from a 360-degree customer profile that is at the core of the Social Enterprise vision.

It then continues with a radical transformation of the business, end-to-end, connecting customers with the companies they deal with, their staff, their distribution network, supply chain and even their products.

And it focuses on making sure that technology is used to enhance the customer experience, not to degrade it. [Remember region coding on DVDs? That’s the sort of thinking that comes from being product-centric. No customer’s experience was enhanced even infinitesimally by that “invention”.]

And there you have it. How Neil Young and David Agus help me understand and explain the Social Enterprise.

I know, I know, you’re very tempted to say “To a hammer everything looks like a nail”.

But step back and think about it.

We have moved from being customer-centric to product- and service-centric in many contexts, sometimes to such an extent that we forget altogether about the customer. Think about what’s happening in education, no longer about the student or about learning; about what’s happening in healthcare, no longer about the patient or about being healthy; about what’s happening in government, no longer about the citizen or about her satisfaction.

There’s a renaissance needed, to a time when it was about the student, the patient, the citizen. And about the customer.

A renaissance based on using the tools of technological advance to improve the customer experience rather than to degrade it.

Thank you David Agus. Thank you Neil Young. Now, as I listen to my vinyl collection on my Linn equipment, and as I continue to approach my personal health and well-being holistically, I will also continue to learn about how the Social Enterprise works.

Have you heard of Sugata Mitra? If you haven’t, then please watch this video. And if you have, please watch this video. And if you’ve already seen it, please watch this video.

He’s an amazing guy; his ideas on “minimally invasive education” and “child-driven education” are fabulous; what’s more important is that he’s put his ideas into practice and shared the results with us. I had the privilege of watching him at TED Global at Oxford in 2010 (thank you Chris, thank you Bruno), and one phrase he used has stayed forever in my memory.

Teachers who can be replaced by computers should be replaced by computers

I may be paraphrasing him, but that’s the gist of what he said. That sentence, along with John Seely Brown’s deceptively simple question (How long does a five-year-old take to become a six-year-old? One year), have influenced quite a lot of my recent thinking on education. But that’s not what this post is about. Or maybe it is. Sometimes I get the feeling the answer to everything is learn, learn, learn. Learning is living. The willingness to learn fuels life.

When I first came across the concept of outsourcing I was mystified. The received wisdom was that we should only outsource operations that had well-defined and mature processes, standardised and repeatable. And a part of me was asking “Why? Surely those are the very processes that are prime candidates for automation? Why would we want to apply the sledgehammer power of human brains to such mundane things?”. I remained mystified as I watched the BPO market mushroom. Paraphrasing Sugata Mitra, I felt that processes that can be replaced by computers should be replaced by computers. And I could not understand why this didn’t happen.

Those were the days, eh? Times when we had regular, standardised, repeatable processes. Times when we knew when, where and how locked-in customers would consume products and services in a predictable, stable manner. Times when listening to the customer was easy because there was nothing they could say and nowhere they could say it. And even if they did say something, it was easy not to listen.

Today it’s a whole different ball game. And for some time now I’ve been stressing the importance of “designing for loss of control” as companies spend more and more time trying to fit square pegs into round holes, as engagement with the customer migrates and mutates away from standardisable processes; companies nowadays seem to spend more time “handling exceptions” than executing the unexceptional.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Systems can ask for permission. Only humans can ask for forgiveness.

You can come up with rules for how people should do things, and come up with tables of authorities and permissions and what-have-you. Much of the time, all you’ve done is lay out a rulebase that can be automated. And perhaps should be automated. But maybe it’s too late for that. Today, we’re seeing a shift from process to pattern, a shift from rule to principle, a shift from hierarchical to networked, a shift from centralised to edge-based. No more repeatable processes. Values-based activity. With domain experts dotted throughout the organisation, engaging with customers who expect the people they’re dealing with to be empowered to deal.

Customers know all this.

Customers know that exception handling is now the norm. And they expect everyone to know this.

People in customer service will have to learn to improvise. Be creative. We’ve all heard tales about the helpdesk from hell of the type “My computer freezes every time I touch any key” “Well don’t touch any key then!”. That’s not going to work any more.

An aside. I was looking for recipes for jhal muri, street food from Calcutta. Extra-spicy puffed rice with dollops of mustard oil and lashings of fresh green chillies. And I found this site, which I loved. In fact the stimulus for writing this post came from reading the recipe. The author makes the point that there is no such thing as a recipe for the dish; just a set of ingredients that can be varied at will to suit tastes.

And I thought to myself, that’s how customer service will look in time to come. A set of “ingredients”, the things a company can do or make or provide, loosely coupled by the values and principles the company adheres to. A “cook” who puts those ingredients together, on order, to suit what the customer wants.

Creativity in customer service? Perish the thought.

But I’m being serious. It is possible that unless customer service gets creative, it will be the company that perishes, not the thought.

Which brings me to my final point. For this creativity to exist, we should look to the masters of improvisation, in music, drama, art. Before they could improvise, they had to have real in-depth knowledge of the domain, a feel for the space, an intuitive sense of what they do. [Maybe there’s a reason for knowledge workers to be called knowledge workers? Hmmm.] Before they could improvise, they had to understand the technical capabilities and constraints of the instruments they played, the tools they used. Intuition, coupled with technical skill, underpinned by experience.

That’s hard.

Or at least it used to be hard.

Now, with enterprise social networks, it’s become a whole lot easier. If they’re designed well, you’re able to able to propagate the principles and values consistently, develop both the tacit as well as the explicit knowledge needed, share and enhance experience, make it easier for people to build their intuition and their skillbase, grow their confidence via active feedback loops. All done in an environment where you can record and look back in order to learn and improve. [Of course this can be used to apportion blame as well, but that’s not a sustainable strategy]. That’s why I joined Salesforce just over a year ago, I was fascinated by what could be done with Chatter, how enterprises would be able to transform themselves.

Look around you. See if the culture of work you’re in is about permission or forgiveness. It’s a good yardstick for figuring out whether you’ve really grasped this new world we’re all entering.