Good Work Uses Innovation to Drive Change

July 29, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Welcome to the “white-water world”—a world that is rapidly changing, hyper-connected and radically contingent on forces beyond our control.

The social environment where we live and work today:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate these turbulent waters successfully (the so-called “caring” professions may be the only exception);

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone; and finally,

– this world requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

You’ve heard each of these arguments here before. Today, they get updated and expanded in a commencement address that was given last month by John Seely Brown. He was speaking to graduate students receiving degrees that they hope will enable them to drive public policy through innovation. But his comments apply with equal force to every kind of change–small changes as well as big ones–that we’re pursuing in our work today.

When you reach the end, I hope you’ll let me know how Brown’s approach to work relates to the many jobs that are still ahead of you.

Good Work Uses Innovation to Drive Change

John Seely Brown is 78 now. It seems that he’s never stopped trying to make sense out of the impacts that technology has on our world or how we can use these extraordinary tools to make the kind of difference we want to make.

Brown is currently independent co-chairman of the Center for the Edge, an incubator of ideas that’s associated with the global consulting firm Deloitte. In a previous life, he was the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (or PARC). Brown speaks, writes and teaches to provoke people to ask the right questions. He stimulates our curiosity by defining the world in simple, practical terms that are easy to understand but more difficult to confront. As a result, he also wants to share his excitement and optimism so that our own questioning yields solutions that make the most out of these challenges and opportunities.

He begins his commencement address with quotes from two books that frame the challenge as he sees it.

KNOWLEDGE IS TOO BIG TO KNOW

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. We even had canons . . . But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There’s more knowledge than ever, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything. (from “Too Big To Know” by David Weinberger)

A WEB OF CONNECTIONS CHANGES EVERYTHING

The seventh sense is the ability to look at any object and see (or imagine) the way in which it is changed by connection–whether you are commanding an army, running a Fortune 500 company, planning a great work of art, or thinking about your child’s education. (from “The Seventh Sense” by Joshua Cooper Remo)

These realities about knowledge and connection impact not only how we think (research, practice, and create) but also how we feel (love, hate, trust and fear). Brown analogizes the challenge to navigating “a white water world” that requires particular kinds of virtuosity. That virtuosity includes:

– reading the currents and disturbances around you;

– interpreting the flows for what they reveal about what lies beneath the surface; and

– leveraging the currents, disturbances and flows for amplified action.

In short, you need to gain the experience, reflexes and opportunism of a white-water rafter to make the most out of your work today.

Becoming Entrepreneurial Learners

To confront the world like a white-water rafter, Brown argues—in a kind of call to arms—that each graduate (and by implication, each one of us too) needs to be a person whose work:

Is always questing, connecting, probing.

Is deeply curious and listening to others.

Is always learning with and from others.

Is reading context as much as reading content.

Is continuously learning from interacting with the world, almost as if in conversation with the world.

And finally, is willing to reflect on performance, alone and with the help of others.

No one is on this journey alone or only accompanied by the limited number of co-workers she sees everyday.

Years before giving this commencement address, Brown used the “one room schoolhouse” in early American education as the springboard for a talk he gave about the type of learning environment we need to meet this “call to arms.” In what he dubbed the One Room Global Schoolhouse, he applied ideas about education from John Dewey and Maria Montessori to the network age. This kind of learning has new characteristics along with some traditional ones.

Learning’s aim both then and now “is making things as well as contexts,” because important information comes from both of them. It is not simply the result (the gadget, service or competence with spelling) that you end up with but also how you got there. He cites blogging as an example, where the blog post is the product but its dissemination creates the context for a conversation with readers. Similarly, in a one-room schoolhouse, a student may achieve his goal but only does so because everyone else who’s with him in the room has helped him. (I’ve been taking this to heart by adapting each week’s newsletter into a blog post so that you can share your comments each week with one another instead of just with me if you want to.)

On the other hand, learning in a localized space that’s open to global connections and boundless knowledge means that it’s better to “play with something until it just falls into place.” It’s not merely the problem you’re trying to solve or the change you’re trying to make but also creating an environment where discovery becomes possible given the volume of inputs and information. This kind of work isn’t arm’s length, but immersive. (I think of finger-painting instead of using a brush.) It allows you to put seemingly unrelated ideas, components or strategies together because it’s fun to do so and–almost incidentally–gives rise to possibilities that you simply didn’t see before. In Global Schoolhouses, “tinkering is catalytic.”

Because “time is money” in the working world, one of the challenges is for leaders, managers, coordinators, and teachers to provide “a space of safety and permission” where you can make playful mistakes until you get it right. Because knowledge is so vast and our connections to others so extensive, linear and circumscribed forms of learning simply can’t harness the tools at our disposal to make the world a better place.

Some of the learning we need must be (for lack of a better word) intergenerational too. Brown is inspired by the one room schoolhouse where the younger kids and the older kids teach one another and where the teacher acts as coach, coordinator and mentor once she’s set the table. In today’s workplace, Brown’s vision gets us imagining less hierarchical orgnizations, workers plotting the directions they’ll follow instead of following a manager’s directions, and constantly seeking input from all of the work’s stakeholders, including owners, suppliers, customers and members of the community where the work is being done. The conversation needs to be between the youngest and the oldest too. For the magic to happen in the learning space where you work, that space should be as open as possible to the knowledge and connections that are outside of it.

In his commencement address, Brown refers to Sherlock Holmes when describing the kind of reasoning that can be developed in learning collaborations like this.

[W]here Holmes breaks new ground is insisting that the facts are never really all there and so, one must engage in abductive reasoning as well. One must ask not only what do I see but what am I not seeing and why? Abduction requires imagination! Not the ‘creative arts’ kind but the kind associated with empathy. What questions would one ask if they imagined themselves in the shoes, or situation of another.

Here’s a video from Brown’s talk on the “Global One Room Schoolhouse.” It is a graphic presentation that covers many of the points above. While I found the word streams snaking across the screen more distracting than illuminating, it is well worth the 10 minutes it will take for you to listen to it.

There’s Cause for White-Water Optimism

We’re worrying about our work for lots of reasons today. Recent news reports have included these troubling stories:

– the gains in gross national product (or wealth) that were reported this week are not being shared with most American workers, which means the costs and benefits of work are increasingly skewed in favor of the few over the many;

– entire categories of work—particularly in mid-level and lower paying jobs—will be eliminated by technologies like advanced robotics and artificial intelligence over the next decade; and

– the many ways that we’re failing to consider the human impacts of technologies because of the blinding pace of innovation and the rush to monetize new products before we understand the consequences around their use—stories about cell phone and social media addictions, for example.

Brown’s attempt to produce more white-water rafters who can address these kinds of challenges is part of the solution he proposes. Another part is to balance our legitimate concerns about the changes we’re experiencing with optimism and excitement about the possibilities as he sees them.

Brown closes his commencement address with a story about the exciting possibiities of new technology tools. It’s about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become Intelligence Augmentation (or IA). “[I]f we can get this right, he says, ” this could lead to a kind of man/machine virtuosity that actually enhances our humanness rather than the more dystopian view of robots replacing most of us.”

Brown witnessed this shift to “virtuosity” during the now legendary contest that pitted the greatest Go player in the world against AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program. (Maybe the world’s most complex game, Go has been played in East Asia for more than 2500 years.)

There is a documentary about AlphaGo (trailer here) that I watched last night and that I agree with Brown is “stunning.” It follows at close range the team that developed the AIphaGo program, the first games the program played and lost, and the final match where AlphaGo beat the world champion in 4 out of 5 games. What Brown found most compelling (and shared with his graduates) were the testimonials and comments at the end.

Those who play the game regularly, like Brown apparently does, found the gameplay they witnessed to be “intuitive and surprising,” even “creative.” Passionate players who watched the human/machine interaction throughout felt it expanded the possibilities and parameters of the game, “a different sense of the internal beauty of the game.” For the world champion himself, it was striking how much it improved his Go play after the epic match. Brown was so excited by these reports that he felt the 21^stCentury actually began in 2016 when the championship matches took place. In his mind, it marked the date when humans and machines began to “learn with and from each other.”

Of course, Brown’s AlphaGo story is also about the entrepreneurial learning that produced not only an awe-inspiring product but also a context where literally millions had input in the lessons that were being learned along the way.

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The past year’s worth of newsletter stories have considered many of the observations that Brown makes above. If you’re interested, there are links to all published newsletters on the Subscribe Page. Here’s a partial list of topics that relate to today’s discussion:

– how technology influences the future of our work (9/13/17-why “small” inventions like barbed wire, modern paper and the sensors in our phones can be more influential than “big” ones like the smart phone itself; 10/1/17-how blockchain could monetize every job, big and small, where you have something of value that others want);

– how openness to “the new and unexplored” is key to survival in work and in life (8/20/17–working groups outside your discipline are better at “scaling up” learning in rapidly changing industries; 6/24/18–a genetic marker for extreme explorers has been found among the first settlers of the Western Hemisphere); and

– the value of playful tinkering (7/2/17 -if you really want to learn, focusing less may allow you to see more); 8/27/17–how curiosity without formal preparation can win you a Nobel Prize in physics; and 10/17/17–the one skill you’ll need in the future according to the World Economic Forum is the ability to play creatively).

What John Seely Brown does in his June commencement address is to link these ideas (and others) into a narrative that’s filled with his own excitement and optimism. In my experience, the commencement address season is a particularly good time to find his kind of inspiration.

Why Read?

July 20, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Both working and living are better when a good book gives you a different, and often unexpected way to look at things.

Here’s what my recent source material looks like: Zero Day, called “a paranoid thriller disguised as a murder mystery,” by David Baldacci, Contagious, “an infectious treatise on viral marketing” by Jonah Berger, and Growing Up, “a fine and true book about American life” by Russell Baker. Good storytellers like these always give you something worthwhile to take-away with you.

There was at least one snicker when I announced that I’d started reading the collected works of David Baldacci. His formula features villains in our shadow government and an unconventional assortment of heroes: perfect for the last wind-down before sleep.

Zero Day is set in a West Virginia town stunted by a domineering company that’s blasting the tops off the surrounding mountains to get at the coal. I’d worked in energy, so I knew about the little v. big guy tactics while the land & its people get sicker. What I knew less about was desperation’s byproducts in tumbledown communities few of us will ever visit outside of a book.

When word spreads of a resident dying in Baldacci’s coal town, yesterday’s neighbors become tonight’s scavengers, picking over what the dead widow or slain policewoman is no longer there to protect. Even pulp fiction can make you care enough about characters to start imagining places in America where you have to “put a notice up on the front door declaring that anyone attempting to scavenge anything from the premises would be hunted down by the U.S. Army… with extreme force if required.” It’s a small but resonating detail about personal space.

Jonah Berger is a Wharton professor who asks: “What makes people share an idea or talk about a product over & over again?” Aimed at raising the profile of just about everyone’s work, Contagious tells a couple dozen stories that reveal the magic in recent marketing tricks, and even better, help you recognize why you’d share the information in one message over another. This book discusses how some information makes you feel good when you’re sharing it, why tying your message up in emotion and narrative carries your sales pitch, and how built-in associations remind you (often unconsciously) to either share or do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Marketing your ideas often includes persuading people to take your advice. This year, my hometown took on the sugar drink industry over concerns about childhood obesity. A local ad features a mom looking at her chubby son cradling a soda and saying, “I just didn’t know,” after the voice-over that links sugar intake with overweight kids. With its nurturing content, this ad might influence moms to restrict their kids’ beverage choices. But Berger asks: why not target every soda drinker directly with an unforgettable message that’s got not only emotion (this time disgust) but also high social currency & practical value? You can judge for yourself whether this alternate approach is more effective here. By vividly illustrating the psychological and social factors behind viral marketing, Contagious shows us how it’s the message not the messenger that makes a difference.

The take-aways from a good book can be personal too.

For example, there’s a particular art to using an excerpt from your life to make your point. “Too much information” or taking it all too seriously will leave readers cold every time. The aim is to avoid these pitfalls while arriving at your destination with the sun in your face and the breeze in your hair. Great writers can navigate even harsh terrain and still stoke the light in our hearts. Russell Baker is one of them.

Baker wrote a widely read newspaper column about politics and American life for twenty odd years. Then he wrote his autobiography, Growing Up. Awarded a Pulitzer for his columns and another for this book, it was Baker’s funny & telling details that gave his stories their pulse. As a writer, I was particularly interested in how he handled the not so easy truths about being a son, husband and father. He told me right from the start, with these lines about his mother’s dementia:

At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

“Where’s Russell?” she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

“I’m Russell,” I said.

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

“Russell’s only this big,” she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife with chickens in the backyard and a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.

While I’m sure that my take-aways from reading these 3 books hardly “make the argument” for reading in general, more emphasis on the pure enjoyment and practical information to be gained from sitting down and reading a book can only help.

A 2007 study from the National Endowment for the Arts found that nearly half of Americans between 18 and 24 read only what’s required in school, and never for pleasure. With the increasing dominance of visual & social media in our lives, the percentage today is likely even higher. (A teacher’s recent op-ed, called “The Young & the Bookless,” provides his own particular lament.) But it’s not just young adults. I suspect that fewer of us at any age are reaping the regular rewards that can come from reading a good book.

There are lots of implications in this, but none more unfortunate than what the non-readers are missing. It’s all the take-aways (big & small) that make work easier or better, and life more interesting.

To make the joy of reading books contagious, I think that readers need to start talking more about their take-aways.

Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

July 12, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

How do you decide what you should do with your life? How do you figure out what “a good life” would look like for you?

How do you sort through the possibilities and choose the kind of work you will do? After years of working, how can you transition from a deadening job to work that will energize you?

What happens if you never learned how to think and feel your way through questions like these?

Why aren’t we getting more help here?

One thing is certain: our schools should be doing a better job preparing our kids to lead good and satisfying lives at work and in their communities.

Unfortunately, our students aren’t prepared, because our schools aren’t helping them to identify what they value the most, or showing them how their values can transform the work they will do into a vocation. Increasingly, our kids are left to figure out “how best to live” with no real guidance from educators at all.

Every student is seeking information that will give their lives direction and meaning. But instead of providing this information in a user-friendly way, students get a lesson here (a glimpse of the heroic in English class) and a lesson there (on the football field, in the lab, or from a counselor), but are generally left to put these assorted pieces together on their own. As a result, most students never manage to assemble a roadmap they can follow when they go out into the world.

What follows should not be surprising.

Our kids spend time doing this and that, and dream impossible futures, but they are increasingly unable to discover a path in life that will bring them genuine satisfaction. (For years, Stanford education professor William Damon has discussed why so many young people “fail to launch” in books like The Path to Purpose (Free Press, 2008))

While it won’t change everything, there should be a class in every school that will help students identify what they value the most, and how to apply those values to the decisions they are confronting everyday.

– Students could be given tools like the Rokeach Value Survey to identify their most important terminal and instrumental values.

– They could learn about the value choices made by peer groups and admired individuals, and consider how making different values their lodestar (like “equality,” “fairness,” “freedom” or “security“) can influence their choices about life and work.

– They could learn how their values will change over time as their value awareness improves, and how those changes relate to new goals they will start identifying for themselves.

– They could learn how their behavior and decision-making is guided by their values, not in the abstract but by considering decisions that are being made around them everyday: about allocation of school resources (new equipment for the football team vs. a new chemistry teacher), school conflicts (like bullying) or a political issue polarizing their community.

There might be an institutional drive to combine these value-choice exercises with resume writing or work-interview101—an extension of what guidance counselors are doing in our schools already. That’s ok, because this curriculum has everything to do with the work you will do after school. But it is not just about finding A Job, it is about ultimately finding or creating The Right Job for who you are and what you value the most, so you will gain fulfillment from your effort and maintain a life-long sense of purpose.

To help ensure this result, “resume writing” and “mastering the interview” modules could be combined with an extended exercise where each student prepares his or her own plan for the future. It would be a practical exercise on where their individual values might lead them in the real world. (I’ll elaborate in the next post.)

Why aren’t we giving our kids this kind of learning experience today?

Most students leave school without a compass for navigating the working world. Having only vague ideas about the kind of work that will bring them satisfaction or how to go about getting it, a tremendous effort goes into finding any job—any kind of paycheck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When students truly want to do something, know why they’re suited to do it, and understand the value to themselves and others that will be gained by doing it, their goals aren’t random and ill-defined, but specific.

Our schools need to be helping students to identify what they value the most, how to identify real-world work that vindicates those values, and how to bring their strongest competencies into their working lives.

What kind of coursework could be more relevant to them or to the challenges they face in the world?

When our schools start integrating their disparate lessons into a curriculum that helps students find their vocations in life, they will be providing our young people with a valuable roadmap that points the way to working lives with both meaning and purpose. And as teachers, Americans, inhabitants of a troubled planet, we would get something too: a chance to mold a hopeful and energized generation to go forth and make the world a better place.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which will be taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)