I saw this video earlier today. I watched it again. And again.

I guess it may turn out that the whole thing was fabricated, that what I watched was an illusion. We live in times where such things are possible.

If you ask me, the video is real. But I’m no expert when it comes to declaring authenticity of such things.

But you know something? I don’t care whether the video was impromptu, staged or otherwise contrived technically. What matters is the message.

The iPhone/iPad generation will have such different views about everything around them as they grow up. Not just about the way they engage with information, the way they make use of information.

Old fogies like me are just getting used to using terms like visitor and resident rather than native and immigrant; I’m lucky, I have three children who keep me in touch with the millennials.

I guess I have to rely on my grandchildren to teach me all about the iPad Generation. And, looking at this video, I am so looking forward to it.

 

I didn’t know Steve Jobs. Like many others I’d seen Steve on stage a few times; we’ve been in the same small room once, but didn’t actually meet. Until this year, when I was at the iPad 2 launch on 2nd March: Marc Benioff had been invited, and he gave me the opportunity to go in his place.  At the end of the launch, Steve came off stage and talked with some of his guests. A nod, a smile, hello, and that was that for me.

I didn’t know Steve Jobs. So why am I writing this? Because I owe Steve a massive debt of gratitude, for teaching me, through the things he’s said and done, some very important lessons over the years. May his soul rest in peace. My thoughts and prayers are with his family; I was 22 when my father died, 31 years ago.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while will also know that for nearly a decade, my personal email address has been [email protected]; similarly, you would know that I’m @jobsworth on Twitter and jobsworth on blip.fm and in a few other places.

There’s a reason for that. A reason why I called myself jobsworth. It all began with a secret project we ran at the bank I worked at, seeking to switch the whole institution from Microsoft to Apple. Secret projects, especially at investment banks, came with codenames. As project sponsor  I could choose the name. And the name I chose was Project Jobsworth.

Why Jobsworth? First, to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, who had inspired not just me but many of my friends and colleagues at the bank, with what he’d done at Apple and NeXT and Pixar. And, as a play on words, to be able to smile when we faced the opposition we knew we would face, the immune system, the inertia, the bureaucracy, the “jobsworths”, as we sought to overturn the Microsoft dominance. Therein lies a tale.

I was privileged to have many talented people working for me there, and the majority were Jobs fanboys. A good number had worked on NextStep while working at a previous place, and were excited about the imminent launch of OSX. There were strong opensource roots in us as well, so the James Gosling idea of OSX being “Linux with QA and style” appealed to us. We’d had enough of the security problems with the incumbent, coming on top of poor trials with SQL Server 2000 and the SPV phone. A number of us had also gotten ourselves iPods, there was a real buzz going. So we went to the management of the bank with our plan. They were only prepared to fund a trial; we were allowed to replace up to 10% of my department’s desktops, to experiment with them and to come back with a formal and detailed feasibility report.

For a number of reasons we couldn’t go beyond the trial. But that’s not germane to this post. What is germane is what I learnt as a result, about Steve Jobs and the way he thought.

The first lesson came to me when we kicked off the project. I visited Infinite Loop a few times, and wondered if Steve would get directly involved. [It was during that time that I connected with Dan Gillmor, then with the San Jose Mercury, and briefed him on the project. I’d met Dan a little while earlier, and the idea was to run an exclusive on the bank’s “big switch” once we got going].

When I queried the possibility of meeting Steve to discuss the project, I was bemused by the response. Apparently Steve wasn’t one to get involved in markets that had CIOs in them, he preferred to deal direct with “real customers”. So, ironically, by proxy I learnt the first lesson: focus on the end-customer in everything you do. From that day onward it changed how I viewed the CIO’s role: I tried to find ways of getting out of the way, of making sure the engineers doing the real work met and worked closely with real customers. In large organisations that upsets people whose role is to be that filter; yet the more I thought about it, the more I saw how it worked at Apple, the more I knew it was the right thing to do.

The second lesson came as we continued with the project, when I met the Apple CIO and he talked us through how his department worked. At the bank we prided ourselves on punching above our weight, using a welter of ways to deliver value at a cost substantially below industry benchmark. For example, in desktop services, we used to have one person per 38 traders, while the competition hovered nearer the 70 mark. Apple were slightly better than us: one per 400. Yup, an order of magnitude better. And as the CIO told me the story I learnt more about the importance of keeping the device simple and easy to use, moving the complexity to the server. Everyone was busy “standardising” the device, going “lock-down” on it; the secret was to keep the edge simple and convenient. [This was a theme that Jobs repeated, much later, in an interview with Steven Levy in Newsweek in October 2006, excerpted here: “One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.” So lesson 2 was to focus on simplicity, not on standardisation.

The third lesson was in 2007. By this time, Apple could do no wrong, and the company was moving from strength to strength. One of the questions I was repeatedly asked was how come I could be an opensource devotee and a Jobs fanboy at the same time. I wondered about it myself, but I wasn’t giving up my Mac or my iPod and had every intention of getting the iPhone. So I pondered about it. And then I saw this interview with Steve, “Thoughts On Music“. And reading it, many things became clear to me, or at least clearer. His perspective on the music industry, the pointlessness of DRM, his [then] reasons for implementing DRM nevertheless, the whole essay proved very instructive. The bit about the industry continuing to sell unprotected music via CDs while arguing for protection in a digital world really got home to me: at the time 90% of the music sold was via CD; even though the ratio has changed, dramatically, since then, the point continues to hold. Copy protection has its pros and cons: what Steve’s essay taught me was to view the industry (and many others) with an important change of perspective, to look very carefully at the analog state of “copy protection” in an industry before designing for the digital world. I’d never liked region coding on a DVD, believing it to be the single stupidest technical design decision I’d come across. Now I understood why I felt that way.

The next lesson came a little later, when I re-read the 1985 Playboy interview with Steve. More things became clear. For example, Steve didn’t start off not dealing with CIOs, both at Apple as well as at NeXT he sought the business end of the market. So it wasn’t an animus against CIOs per se. Similarly,  I was very taken with the story of Steve, Andy Warhol,  the Mac and the boy: “Older people sit down and ask, “What is it?”, but the boy asks, “What can I do with it?” Reminiscent of Sugata Mitra and his Minimally Invasive Education.

But the real lesson, one that stuck with me when I first read the interview, one that was refreshed by my re-reading it, was to remind me about the purpose of education. The way Jobs said it : “…. Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic. It is a learned ability. It had never occurred to me that if no one taught us how to think this way, we would not think this way. And yet, that’s the way it is. Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think.”

Much later, sometime last year, I read this article by Steven Johnson, an author I admire and respect. In it Steven, a confessed devotee of open platforms, looks at the success of the App Store and comments eruditely on it. And while reading it, I realised again just how Steve Jobs thought relentlessly about the customer and simplicity and convenience in everything he did. And then I realised that all my previous lessons were just one lesson. Concentrate on the customer. Everything else follows from that.

I’m lucky. I work somewhere where this is practised. I work for someone who knew Steve personally, and the influence shows in the focus on the customer.

I’ve been a Jobs fanboy for a very long time. And I will continue to be one as long as I live. Steve Jobs, thank you for the way you changed the way I think. Thank you for being part of my education.

[Note: This is a follow-up to a post I wrote yesterday, which you can find here. Based on the comments, tweets and messages I’ve received, I felt it was worth adding this little coda. And I wanted an excuse to link to one of Joe Cocker’s fabulous versions of the Beatles song.]

 

There are many gratifying things about my job: one of the most enjoyable aspects is that I get to meet a lot of people and to listen to what they have to say, to learn from those conversations, to distil and refine that learning.

When people have come and engaged me in conversation about gamification, there’s been a lot of passion about the whys and wherefores and why nots.

And a little wistfulness.

Yes, wistfulness.

You see, the hype made it sound as if gamification was a knight in shining armour come to rescue the damsel in distress, the drudgery of work. And while they knew this was somewhat unlikely, they hankered after it. They wanted work to be fun.

This is what prompted me to speak about “not putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work.”

If work sucked, we needed to fix that. It wouldn’t happen through superficial tools and techniques. It needed something far more drastic.

I’ve always enjoyed work, even when I’ve fouled up, even when things haven’t gone the way I’d have like them to go. Because I see everything as a learning experience, and, quite often, I learn more from my mistakes than I do from my successes. Esther Dyson used to sign off her emails with “Always Make New Mistakes”, a principle I love.

So for the wistful among you, here’s one way to make work fun by borrowing techniques from gamers and the gaming industry, a “gamification” that requires radical changes to be made to the workplace.

Like getting rid of the blame culture. What if we could move to a world where Edison’s “I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that do not work” is implemented as a work principle?

Some games give you the facility to pause and resume later, some give you the facility to record and replay. [Now this tends to be more common in single- and dual-player games than in MMORPG, for obvious reasons. But the principle remains valid].

What if we could pause, resume, record, replay work? What if someone else (peer, mentor, leader) could sit with you and say “You see this? You see where you went wrong? Here’s how to do it next time round” ?

You know something? We’re not far from such a time and place. Activity streams have their supporters and their detractors, but one thing is sure: they’re here to stay. And, if we learn to use them properly at work, then we’re going to start seeing early versions of activities that can be frozen and resumed, started and stopped, saved and replayed.

If we do it right, that’s the end of the blame culture.

With a little help from my friends.

 

 

I’ve been wanting to write this post for some months now, ever since I gave a talk on gamification in the enterprise in New York sometime in June. You can see the video of the talk here.

Yet I didn’t write it. Because I didn’t particularly want to add to the hype, or for that matter participate in the heightened and emotional debate surrounding the use of the term. In fact, a few days before the talk, I was seriously considering not giving it (or at least mutating it) as a result of all the hype around the term, and the risks that such hype could cause serious, lasting damage.

And then things got worse.

I was on my way to Foo Camp, and, via Twitter, learnt that someone I had a lot of time for, Kathy Sierra, had broken her self-imposed silence, and written something via the blog of another good friend, Hugh MacLeod. She’d chosen to write on the very subject I was wrestling with, the over-use of the term “gamification”, and the serious risks it entailed. Do read what she has to say, it’s important.

So as I got to Sebastopol, I was more than just concerned.

And then serendipity intervened, in the form of Tim and Sara and the sorcery they perform to make Foo Camp such an unusual and compelling event. I got out of the car, registered, wandered towards the nearest tent. And bumped into Kathy.

I had the opportunity to spend some decent one-to-one time with her on the subject, and she was very supportive of the line I wanted to take; she’d also put the discussion up as a potential agenda item at the camp, and I went along to that session as well. And so by the time I left there, my fears were allayed, I had a sense of peace that what I wanted to talk about was worth talking about.

The talk I gave in New York received quite a bit of coverage on Twitter and in the blogosphere, so much so that my instincts reverted to staying quiet. Even though I wanted to share what I felt on the subject more broadly. And stay quiet I did.

Until now. Not because I’ve changed my mind about this. But because I’m due to fly out to Japan in a week’s time, and it appears that quite a few of the people I’m intending to see want to hear from me about gamification in the enterprise.

Now normally I try not to use Powerpoint or other slideware; I prefer to talk freely and without notes. Occasionally, I convince myself that the audience could do with some signalling, roadmaps and aides-memoire; in such cases I tend to use pictures rather than words, or single words and phrases.

There are times I deviate from this rule, and provide the audience with words to follow what I’m saying. This usually happens when the event is in a country where English is not the mother tongue, and especially where the Roman alphabet is not in use. In such cases, I try and provide the organisers with a script that can be translated into the local language.

Which, in some form or shape, is what I’m doing here. Writing that script. Sharing what I think about the enterprise and gamification. As succinctly as I can.

The enterprise and gamification: Some thoughts

Why? And why now?

Work is changing. As we’ve shifted from the agricultural and industrial economies to knowledge-based economies, what we do has changed. The tools and processes of those ages are no longer fit for purpose. Knowledge work is inherently lumpy and unpredictable and “non-linear”. The sequential, repeatable processes of past paradigms are less and less effective in today’s workplace: too often, we spend time exception-handling as the squarenesses of the pegs that come our way, stoutly and solidly resist our ability to place them in the roundnesses of the process holes we built to receive them.

Firms are changing; the purpose of a firm is to reduce transaction costs, and vertical integration is no longer the best way to achieve this. Partnering, alliances and outsourcing are ways that the boundaries of the firm are altering, and multidisciplinary teamwork, both within as well as beyond the firm, has become an imperative.

Organisations are changing; firms “organised” in order to reduce transaction costs in doing four things: setting priorities, allocating resources, dealing with conflict and monitoring progress. So for time immemorial we’ve had hierarchies of product and customer along with “overheads”. Hierarchical structures were the most efficient way of getting things done: deciding what’s to be done, allocating the tasks to people, giving them the resources needed, sending and receiving the “orders”, aggregating news of progress, dealing with the “conflict” of change, monitoring progress, intervening as required. This is not the same for knowledge workers; often, such decisions are better taken by domain experts closer to the “coalface”. Overall vision and strategy still tend to get set by leaders and leadership teams, but these are leaders, not managers, with the responsibility to do just that: lead.

The technology is changing: now, with ubiquitously connected smart devices, people are able to share information with each other more quickly and more effectively, making the decision process easier. The prevalence of activity streams in many of the social networks has had the effect of making information more “real-time” and often more “actionable”, once the appropriate levels of filter have been designed in.

Customers are changing, they’re more participative, more demanding, more active. They have greater power, both personal as well as social. They spend more time in social networks than in traditional media, using mobile smart devices; they’re more likely to be digital residents rather than digital visitors. And they communicate via the social networks rather than via email.

Business, however, has not changed. As Peter Drucker memorably said, the purpose of business is to create customers.

So that’s the why and the why now.

New problems need new solutions

As a result of these trends, there are new demands on the enterprise. Knowledge workers need smarter ways to discover what needs to be done, the context in which to do it, the tools available, past learning. They need smarter ways to discover potential team members, people with the right mix of skills to carry out the tasks. They need better dashboards to tell them about their operating environment, external and internal stimuli and feedback loops. They need more effective ways to train for all this, to learn the patterns rather than the processes, so that they can apply their personal and collective intelligence to solve the problems they face.

An environment where nonlinearity is pretty much a fundamental design pattern. Lateral, often bottom-up, task and team selection. Sandboxes to train in. Quick, effective ways to understand skill and mastery levels in oneself and in teammates. Dashboards that simplify discovery of the environment and operating conditions. Easy-to-understand, visible feedback loops.

Any of this ring a bell?

That’s why learning from video games is important, because the designer of video games began to solve many of these problems well before the people who design enterprise software.

That’s why badges are important, so that the discovery of mastery and skill is simplified. Where that mastery is earned formally, the badge is earned. Where that mastery is self-asserted, the badge can only be earned through peer endorsement. Doctors and surgeons use badges on their walls, called diplomas, to declare their earned mastery. Qualified first-aiders wear the badge of armband or jacket while at work, to ease recognition and access.

That’s why dashboards are important, so that plans and routes can be adapted to changing information. And in today’s world those changes are getting more and more rapid and confusing, so the right filters and visualisation techniques help. People search for things in order to do things, as Esther Dyson said.

That’s why points and completion bars are important, part of the way progress (or lack of it) can be visualised and assimilated, so that action can be taken.

Much of this is not new to the workplace; what is new is the bottom-up everyone-empowered state of the worker, what is new is the non-linearity and lumpiness of knowledge work. So we need tools that are fit for purpose. And the gaming industry appears to have some.

For some sections of the workforce, leaderboards can inform, motivate, even excite. But this has to be done with care, given the depth and quality of research available that suggests the negative, often destructive, impact of extrinsic rewards. Leaderboards must therefore be something we take great care in designing and deploying in the workplace. [The possibility that they may be used in environments like education and healthcare is extremely concerning because of the research.]

Even newer classes of problem will need even newer approaches

It is possible, even likely, that gaming techniques can be used to solve problems that appear insoluble using traditional techniques. Over time, we will find that enterprises use formal and scientific game theory and “gaming” techniques to deal with complex business issues. ranging from auction bidding to protein structure analysis. A recent article in the Economist dealt with some of this. And, more recently, we learnt about this collective-intelligence-meets-gaming success in solving protein structure problems.

Conclusion

The changes taking place in the nature of work and of the enterprise need to be reflected in the tools we build for the enterprise. Game designers, particularly video game designers, have been solving some of the problems the enterprise faces. It makes sense to look at the tools and techniques they use.

When I speak of the enterprise and gamification, that’s what I mean.

…. And it’s only the giving/that makes you/what you are

Jethro Tull, Wond’ring Aloud (Ian Anderson). From the album Aqualung

[Note: this is a continuation from my post a couple of days ago, linked to here. I began that post with the first line of the song, it is only fitting that I begin this one with the last. I’ve heard many theories as to what the song means, and whether I can even talk about the likely meaning before the watershed. I happen to like the song, the music, the melody, everything about it, rather than just concentrating on the debate about the meaning of the lyrics].

Before I launch into the post…. in the unlikely event you’re a Tull fan, go take a look at their official web site. Listen to their internet radio. Follow them on Twitter. And, if you’re like me, get tickets to see them on tour!

And now for something completely different. Oh yes, the post. Thinking about stacks and ecosystems and architectures and complexity. You’ve been a wonderful community, you’ve RTed the post, linked to it, commented on it, and the comments have given me some really rich material to digest and consider. I really appreciate it. It’s what blogging was invented for, the ability to share what Doc Searls called “provisional thoughts”, nascent, inchoate. To have those thoughts shared, commented on by peers and superiors, letting me learn. And letting me share that learning so that others may do the same. Thank you.

In like vein I want to take the debate further. Bring in two further streams of investigation, and broaden the discussion somewhat. Ambitious perhaps, but I have to try it.

Ever since I first heard John Hagel and John Seely Brown talk about it,  I’ve been thinking hard about the Big Shift, which they worked on in conjunction with Lang Davison. John H’s “succinct” post, which I link to, summarises the Big Shift as exhibiting the following characteristics:

• from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows
• from knowledge transfer to knowledge creation
• from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge
• from transactions to relationships
• from zero sum to positive mindsets
• from institutions driven by scalable efficiency to institutions driven by scalable peer learning
• from stable environments to dynamic environments

When I first looked at it, I was tempted to add “from scarcity to abundance” and “from back office to front office” and “from hierarchy to network”; but then I decided I could fold any and all those additions into the original list without much effort. I’m still thinking through the implications of that list, “I haven’t finished reading it yet”.

[An aside, to explain that allusion. A few weeks ago, the Economist reminded me of Harold Pinter’s delightful poetic tribute to cricketer Len Hutton “I saw Len Hutton in his prime/Another time/another time.” In last week’s issue, Kaushik Basu, the Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance, Delhi, wrote in to remind us of “Simon Gray’s response, when, a few days after sending him the poem, Pinter phoned Gray to check if he had received it. He replied he had, but “I haven’t finished reading it yet”.” Thank you Mr Basu, thank you Economist!”]

Influenced by the research behind Big Shift, I began to see the possibility that we could start proving the value of collaboration in demonstrable ROI, something that hasn’t always been easy. Which took me down the route of trying to find sensible ways of valuing relationships and capabilities, the 21st century assets that underpin the core characteristics of the shift.

And while I was deep into this, I was given the opportunity to kibitz-without-saying-anything on a long online discussion, on Gordon Cook’s amazing list (you must subscribe to the Cook Report if you’re interested in internet economics)  on some of the assertions made by Geoffrey West over at Santa Fe. I had the opportunity to spend some time mano a mano with West at TED Global this year, and obviously heard him speak about what he’s been learning re “the surprising math of cities and corporations”.

What particularly intrigued me was West’s introduction of the superlinear/sublinear construct into his ideas, empirically proven. As a long-term devotee of Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander and Stewart Brand from a buildings and cities perspective, and influenced heavily by Howard Rheingold in how I viewed all this in digital space, it was not hard to convince me that cities were living breathing spaces, complex organisms well worth studying. I was also comfortable with seeing companies in similar vein, now moving into Tainter territory again, looking at the collapse of complex societies, something I referred to in my previous post.

So what’s been going through my mind is this: when you look at large organisations, what superlinear phenomena do they exhibit? What sublinear phenomena? Can the superlinear/sublinear argument help us understand what Hagel and Seely Brown and Davison found about Return On Assets in USA Inc over half a century of published data?

As a result, soon after TED, I’ve been trying to formulate a similar argument about superlinearity and sublinearity from a systems perspective: which costs scale up faster than the rate at which a system “grows”, and which costs scale down faster? How do we measure system “growth”? Like West and his team found in the relationships between city populations and many other city measures, is there an equivalent for complex systems?

Most importantly, what is the role of collaboration in all this? How does all this tie up with the Jane Jacobs view of neighbourhoods and sidewalks and boulevards and parks? What does that mean for our understanding of stacks and ecosystems? Of course I have anchors and frames, I know what I want these answers to be, but I want to be able to prove them. Scientifically. Because the data in the research by people like Hagel, Seely Brown and West has some fascinating pointers.

The links and references that you provided me in the comments on my previous post will go a long way towards helping me figure that out. And if one or more of you figure it out first, then that’s wonderful…..as long as you share it back with all of us, in whatever way you choose.

[And now, after reading a post like this one, you know why this blog is called Confused of Calcutta. You must remember I’m a big fan of Francis Bacon, who said:

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.