For more than 40 years, we’ve escalated our obsession with productivity. From efficiency experts at Disney in the 1960s peering over the shoulders of animators to being accessible 24/7 by checking email and answering the phone in the bathroom today, we have worshipped at the altar of output, efficiency and accessibility. Our productivity- obsessed society manages time and not attention.

At many companies, software developers are rewarded for knocking out the list of features and cranking toward the release date with no emphasis on the quality of the feature being checked. Does it work? Check. Tests ran? Check. Is anyone asking if it’s contributing to the excellence of the product or service? Is there another way, a path to quality results and profitability that is not productivity-obsessed?

One might venture a guess that Apple has found that path. Readers of “Delivering Happiness” realize that this alternate path is the secret sauce at Zappos.

Our productivity-obsessed society is in the more, faster club. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s not. Which is why I started a discussion about post-productivity computing and an era characterized by post-productivity values.

Post-productivity does not mean unproductive. It does mean, let’s take the best and leave the rest, as our burned-out selves, our burned-out workforce and our burned-out economy take steps to move into a thriving and prosperous 21st century. This era of engagement is post-productivity because the motivations and metrics mine, in the best ways, our human assets (positive emotions, positive relationships, meaning, engagement) as well as profitability. I use the term post-productivity primarily as a reminder that a productivity-obsessed approach to an era of engagement takes us right back into the murky swamp.

This is about a new mindset. Tony Hsieh figured it out and last year, 25,000 people applied for the 250 job openings at Zappos. Applicants are enthusiastic to be part of an era of engagement, post-productivity company — selling shoes online, being part of the Zappos team.

Like many of you, I’ve worked in companies that pit employees against each other by rating on a curve. Productivity, which could be contagious, instead, becomes a zero sum game. The brilliant and insightful Stanford professor Carol Dweck, author of “Mindset,” would view this as a management process with a fixed mindset orientation. Hsieh manages Zappos for what Dweck calls a growth mindset, a mindset that welcomes challenges, embraces exuberant learning, and experiences failure as part of positive forward motion.

Once you start reading “Delivering Happines” you’ll feel an irresistible pull to email Zappos for a copy of their “Culture Book”. This crowd-sourced, edited collection of stories bathes the reader in stories of a corporate culture characterized by trust, productivity, joy, and profitability. “Delivering Happiness” is an inspired and inspiring must read for our journey into an era of engagement.

Related:

• A new era of post-productivity computing?

I’m not opposed to using technologies to support us in reclaiming our attention. But I prefer passive, ambient, non-invasive technologies over parental ones. Consider the Toyota Prius. The Prius doesn’t stop in the middle of a highway and say, “Listen to me, Mr. Irresponsible Driver, you’re using too much gas and this car isn’t going to move another inch until you commit to fix that.” Instead, a display engages us in a playful way and our body implicitly learns to shift to use less gas.

Glenn was kind enough to call me for a comment as he prepared his post. We talked about email apnea, continuous partial attention, and how, while software that locks out distractions is a great first step, our ultimate opportunity is to evolve our relationship with personal technologies.

Personal technologies today are prosthetics for our minds.

In our current relationship with technology, we bring our bodies, but our minds rule. “Don’t stop now, you’re on a roll. Yes, pick up that phone call, you can still answer these six emails. Follow Twitter while working on PowerPoint, why not?” Our minds push, demand, coax, and cajole. “No break yet, we’re not done. No dinner until this draft is done.” Our tyrannical minds conspire with enabling technologies and our bodies do their best to hang on for the wild ride.

With technologies like Freedom, we re-assign the role of tyrant to the technology. The technology dictates to the mind. The mind dictates to the body. Meanwhile, the body that senses and feels, that turns out to offer more wisdom than the finest mind could even imagine, is ignored.

At the heart of compromised attention is compromised breathing. Breathing and attention are commutative. Athletes, dancers, and musicians are among those who don’t have email apnea. Optimal breathing contributes to regulating our autonomic nervous system and it’s in this regulated state that our cognition and memory, social and emotional intelligence, and even innovative thinking can be fueled.

Our opportunity is to create personal technologies that are prosthetics for our beings. Conscious Computing. It’s post-productivity, post-communication era computing. Personal technologies that enhance our lives.

Thirty years ago, personal computing technologies created a revolution in personal productivity, supporting a value on self-expression, output and efficiency. The personal communications technology era that followed the era of personal productivity amplified accessibility and responsiveness. Personal technologies have served us well as prosthetics for the mind, in service of thinking and doing.

Scientists, like Antonion Damasio, Daniel Siegel, and Daniel Goleman, are showing us that aspects of our intelligence come from sensing and feeling and that our bodies offer a kind of wisdom.

Here at #Foo10, Sara Winge has just pointed out that, for the first time she can remember, people are sitting in sessions, taking notes on notepads, laptops closed. Laptops are out of sight. It feels different. That’s another option. We can use technology to help enable Conscious Computing, or we can find it on our own, through attending to how we feel.

How do we usher in an era of Conscious Computing? What tools, technologies, and techniques will it take for personal technologies to become prosthetics of our full human potential?

To me, Dean’s most prominent quality is his ability to dream. His dreams are big, full of heart, compassion and a commitment to a more prosperous life for everyone–through the wonders of science, technology, and engineering.

FIRST stands for: For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology. By 1992, Kamen was becoming increasingly concerned about our ability to effectively compete in business given our declining ability to educate students in science and technology. Kamen and his friend, Dr. Woodie Flowers, had a wild idea: create a competition–now a “coopertition”–where teams of high school students, working closely with mentors, design and build a robot, in a six week period, then compete both regionally and nationally. Flowers had been doing this with Scientific American Frontiers for twenty years and Kamen built on this experience when he founded FIRST.

FIRST is about the robot. Every year, in early January, the game season is launched. Each team gets a kit of parts, a rule book and, working with mentors, has six weeks to design and build a robot optimized for great game play. Experienced teams often start the process at the beginning of the school year, learning design, shop, and project management skills that will support them to hit the ground running as soon as the kickoff wraps.

Actually, it’s not about the robot at all. The robot Is the point of focus. The actual game is about play, hands-on learning, teamwork, mentorship, and discovering new things about yourself. In the decade plus I’ve been involved in FIRST, the most common and powerful threads are the stories of students who discovered a passion for science, technology, or engineering through FIRST and the students who thought they were total failures, and then found themselves to be capable team members and capable individual contributors on a FIRST team.

Flowers sums it up like this, “FIRST is about re-inventing self-image which includes being in the mainstream of what’s going on. It allows kids to re-invent themselves and realize they’re now in the game, fully capable of doing many things they previously thought only others might do.” The experience turns out to be as powerful for mentors as it is for students.

Ken Streeter of BAE Systems, a developer of software for complex avionics and one of the largest corporate contributors and “strategic partners” of FIRST, talked about the benefits of his company’s engagement in FIRST:

“There are many instances where BAE Systems gained greatly from participation in a tangible way. FIRST experiences led to innovative approaches and specific solutions. In particular, the speed of development in FIRST provides good archetypes for faster prototyping and decision-making. The cycle of perception, analysis and control in FIRST systems are similar to that of any complex system today.”

Streeter cited numerous examples of conversations such as, “You know, we tried something like this in FIRST and it worked well. The creation of small, fast moving and effective teams is the canonical FIRST model. The benefits of FIRST sponsorship are manifest and numerous.”

FIRST is not just for nerds, though the nerds play a central role. Teams need project management, communications, logistics, and a variety of competencies that complement the engineering and build efforts.

Coopertition (similar to the word “cooptition,” used in the business context) is central to FIRST, and is used to describe competing in a way that both parties win. This is coupled with a value that is fundamental to FIRST, and can be summed up in a phrase coined by Dr. Woodie Flowers: gracious professionalism.

It’s hard to create a game and rule set in which coopertition pays without distorting things to the point where it’s hard to understand, and there’s a healthy discussion in the FIRST community about this. What’s clear to everyone in the game is this: blowing out an opponent is a losing strategy.

Here’s a piece of a discussion from the Chief Delphi forum, alive with chatter since the Breakaway game was revealed on January 9.

In 2010, 1809 teams and over 200,000 students are participating with FIRST teams around the world. Kamen assigned homework to all of us this year: It’s time to make FIRST a spectator sport! He wants to infect the masses with a spirit of play, invention and innovation. A Hollywood Director and the Director of Technical Support from Cirque du Soleil were added to the Game Design Committee in an effort to make the game as fun to watch as it is to play.

This year’s game with its bumps, bars, and balls is sure to feature robot flipping and crazy arm contraptions. I can’t wait to see how the students decorate the underside of their robots this year. Lots of opportunity for exciting flips!

Please check the schedule and mark your calendar to join us at a FIRST Regional Competition this March 2010. The most exciting time to join: Elimination Rounds on the Saturday of competition, noon until 4 pm.

See you there!

Brockman’s 2010 question, How has the internet changed the way you think? evoked thoughtful answers from a range of people, including Brian Eno, Rudy Rucker, Clay Shirky, Martin Rees and many others. The full collection of posts can be found here.

I took the opportunity to explore the tension between my physical and virtual lives. A topic Jim Stogdill wrote about a few days ago.

NAVIGATING PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL LIVES

Before the Internet, I made more trips to the library and more phone calls. I read more books and my point of view was narrower and less informed. I walked more, biked more, hiked more, and played more. I made love more often.

The seductive online sages, scholars, and muses that joyfully take my curious mind where ever it needs to go, where ever it can imagine going, whenever it wants, are beguiling. All my beloved screens offer infinite, charming, playful, powerful, informative, social windows into global human experience.

The Internet, the online virtual universe, is my jungle gym and I swing from bar to bar: learning about: how writing can be either isolating or social; DIY Drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) at a Maker Faire; where to find a quantified self meetup; or how to make Sach moan sngo num pachok. I can use image search to look up hope or success or play. I can find a video on virtually anything; I learned how to safely open a young Thai coconut from this Internet of wonder.

As I stare out my window, at the unusually beautiful Seattle weather, I realize, I haven’t been out to walk yet today — sweet Internet juices still dripping down my chin. I’ll mind the clock now, so I can emerge back into the physical world.

The physical world is where I not only see, I also feel — a friend’s loving gaze in conversation; the movement of my arms and legs and the breeze on my face as I walk outside; and the company of friends for a game night and potluck dinner. The Internet supports my thinking and the physical world supports that, as well as, rich sensing and feeling experiences.

It’s no accident we’re a culture increasingly obsessed with the Food Network and Farmer’s Markets — they engage our senses and bring us together with others.

How has the Internet changed my thinking? The more I’ve loved and known it, the clearer the contrast, the more intense the tension between a physical life and a virtual life. The Internet stole my body, now a lifeless form hunched in front of a glowing screen. My senses dulled as my greedy mind became one with the global brain we call the Internet.

I am confident that I can find out about nearly anything online and also confident that in my time offline, I can be more fully alive. The only tool I’ve found for this balancing act is intention.

The sense of contrast between my online and offline lives has turned me back toward prizing the pleasures of the physical world. I now move with more resolve between each of these worlds, choosing one, then the other — surrendering neither.

How has the internet changed the way you think?

How does this work exactly?

1. Teachers, scientists, organizations, and individual volunteers are invited to go to: National Lab Day
2. From there, follow the track that best identifies how you would like to contribute. Or, you can simply browse existing projects.

As you browse, you might come across the teacher in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, wanting to build a working model of a river watershed. Or, the Levittown, New York, teacher wanting help with a project on Superconductivity. You’ll find a teacher in Chicago, Illinois, working with students to design, build and test bridges, and seeking engineers and Department of Transportation contacts.

On the National Lab Day website, educators enter hands-on learning projects, listing the resources needed, both human and otherwise, that can bring these projects to life. Matchmaking services are available on the site to support these hands-on learning projects. The Radar and Make communities are a match made in heaven.

As National Lab Day scales, a national hands-on learning curriculum will begin to take shape.

Research shows that hands-on learning is powerful and effective. In the well-meaning efforts to create standards in education, context, creativity, and our natural inclinations to explore and play, have been replaced with mountains of homework and a curriculum that is unlikely to effectively prepare youth for the 21st century.

In schools, failure is stigmatized, emotionally disabling, and has become a label and a measure rather than part of a feedback system supporting iteration and exploration. The most productive scientists and inventors will tell you that they fail constantly, all day long. Each failure informs them, guides them toward a new direction, a new hunch, a new possibility. With hands-on learning, failure is iteration, in the spirit of how the most accomplished scientists and inventors work.

In the somewhat misguided efforts to “teacher proof” the educational system, we have lost what good teachers bring to the system: passion, curiosity, love of learning, and an ability to create a learning ecosystem in a classroom, a school and a community. Think about what touched you most in school. At a dinner discussing education with a number of Silicon Valley CEO’s, to a person, the most significant memories were those of passionate teachers as role models.

We don’t find our passions. They find us. Not through hours of homework and standardized tests; rather, through engagement, exploration and in context learning. According to Stuart Brown, MD, author of Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, highly successful people have a rich play life. Brown further suggests that play is a “biological necessity, contributing to the learning of emotional control, social competency, personal resiliency and continuing curiosity….(many) other life benefits accrue largely through rich developmentally appropriate play experiences.

An adult who has “lost” what was a playful youth and doesn’t play will demonstrate social, emotional and cognitive narrowing, be less able to handle stress, and often experience a smoldering depression.”

Brown talks about the value of recalling your play history. You can take time to do that here.

National Lab Day has the potential to revitalize a national learning community by offering an infrastructure to facilitate the spirit of play and exploration in our classrooms, schools and communities.

While there have been efforts in the past to encourage hands-on learning, the sheer scale of the consortium gathering around National Lab Day gives it the potential to have a profound transformational impact on education and learning. Respected scientific communities and organizations, including: ACS, IEEE, AAAS and 100+ other scientific societies will be promoting this effort to their members.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation have kicked in the capital to get the project going.

In addition to the White House, other key federal agencies have joined in, including: NASA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

The National Science Teachers Association and the National Education Association are supporting this effort as are a growing number of companies, including Microsoft and Texas Instruments. O’Reilly and MAKE have contributed project guides to National Lab Day.

Please join in! Click on the links, join the movement, and lend your energy, skills, or resources to renew education and learning for the 21st century.
]]> http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/working-together-to-create-a-n.html/feed 6 http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/the-fun-theory.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/the-fun-theory.html#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Linda Stone http://blogs.oreilly.com/radar/2009/10/the-fun-theory.html In one of my favorite reads this last year, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, author Stuart Brown talks about play as “an un-realized power that can transform our social and economic lives.”

As I read, I realized:
- We have replaced play with homework–big mistake
- Play is how our passions find us
- Play is where happiness finds us, and
- Play is where failure isn’t failure and isn’t emotionally charged. Play is all about iteration and we iterate on the emerging questions that arise from within us and that we are driven to understand.

Some of the most accomplished people I’ve met–Dean Kamen, Roderick MacKinnon, Charles Zuker, and Nathan Myhrvold–talk about their work as play. When I ask them how they played as children, they often describe activities that explore the same questions and ideas they are exploring today in their work. At a gathering of molecular scientists, more than a few whispered that, as children, they’d electrocuted bugs–they had to know what would happen. Interaction, reaction. One of them told me that his MBA sister had a chemistry set that looked as if it had never been used, while his was trashed shortly after he opened it. He tried everything.

Recently, VW launched a campaign, The Fun Theory. The videos on the site show people:
- Choosing stairs over an escalator in a subway station when the stairs are turned into piano keys
- Recycling glass when the glass recycle bin is like a slot machine, and
- Clearing litter when a trash can offers sound effects as trash is pitched in.

The Fun Theory Award competition is accepting entries until November 15. Short window, competition opened October 1. Radar readers are brainy and creative. A winning combination!

The key issues appear to be whether the business model created by the settlement will lock up content that essentially belongs to the public domain (per Brewster) and whether the publishers’ and authors’ creation of a Google monopoly for books will harm access to knowledge in the future (per Darnton). Below, I’m relying on their words to explain this further.

Last week Brewster posted “It’s All About the Orphans” (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/02/23/its-all-about-the-orphans/) on the blog of the Open Content Alliance, focusing on the plight of “orphan works” – that vast number of books that are still under copyright but whose authors can no longer be found:

“After digesting the proposed Google Book Settlement, it becomes clear that the dizzyingly complex agreement is, in essence, an elaborate scheme for the exploitation of orphan works… The upshot, if the Settlement is approved, would be legal protection for Google, and only for Google, to scan and provide digital access to the orphan works. Presto! … So, should the Settlement be approved, Google will be handed exclusive access to the orphans, and the public loses out… I, personally, am amazed at this creative use of class action law. The three parties have managed to skirt copyright law, bypass legislative efforts, and feather their own nests – all through the clever use of law intended to remedy harms. This Settlement, if approved by the judge, will accomplish things appropriate to a legislative body not to private corporate boardrooms. Let’s live under the rule of law, as arduous as that might be, and free the orphans, legitimately, not for one corporation but for all of us.”

And in “Google & the Future of Books” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281), an article that Darnton published in The New York Review of Books last month, the focus is slightly different but the upshot is the same:

“After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese – one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world’s largest library… Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world’s largest book business – not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon… The class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition… We are allowing a question of public policy – the control of access to information – to be determined by private lawsuit… As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly – a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information… The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company… This is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.”

A lot seems to be at stake and the court may approve the settlement in June! I don’t care if the settlement means that Google will get even richer (disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder). The question is: to what extent will WE become poorer?

Brooks discusses an intellectual revolution that brings together neuroscience, sociology, psychology, behavioral economics, genetics, and a variety of other fields in an effort to shine a light on non-cognitive skills — that which cannot be counted by IQ scores, but is important to success.

He addresses the importance of the action that takes place in the human mind below the level of the awareness, in the unconscious; how emotion is the central core for giving value to thinking – it’s the central organizing process of the brain; and the permeability of the human mind.

Brooks speculates: How do you talk about the unconscious or love at a Congressional Hearing? We tend to focus on what we can easily measure. Yet, what really matters is extremely emotional, unconscious, and relationship-based and, for that, we need a new vocabulary.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on Brooks’ talk. If you have the time, there are a number of talks worth viewing on the fora.tv site from the Aspen Festival of Ideas.

Distraction is getting a bad name.

This past month, I’ve been heads down on a few projects and noticing something I’d not been very conscious of before now. When I get “stuck” or when I reach a natural break point on a piece of work, the menu of potential distractions includes everything from email and telephone calls to getting food, socializing and more.

I did an informal audit. Sometimes I would check email. Other times, I would pace, get a glass of iced-tea, or walk outside for a few minutes. When I did the latter — any activity that was quiet, reflective and receptive, I would feel refreshed. I was open to receiving an insight and to being in the moment. When I returned to the project that had momentarily stumped me, I would enjoy new energy. I started calling this receptive distraction. Receptive distraction is any sort of distraction that creates mental space.

When I went to email, however, I would “spin out.” That is, I would completely lose track of what I had been working on and get immersed in all sorts of other issues. I started calling this deceptive distraction. I thought I could take a short break and crank out a few emails, but it took longer to do the emails than I thought, and longer to get back into my project afterward.

I asked friends about their experiences with receptive distraction.

Don, a retired judge, related that he had always had a shower available in his chambers. On one occasion, during a twenty-minute recess at a custody case, Don took a five-minute shower. “I let the water roll over me and let my mind go. Things that were subtle, that I’d heard but that had not sunk in — body language and other impressions — drifted through my mind, and surfaced. When I got out of the shower, I had a decision.”

Receptive distraction. “It’s like a palate cleanser,” commented Walt, a journalist.

Are your distractions receptive or deceptive?

Taking that train of thought a step further: technology can fix the problem. I believe we can make smarter email and smarter phones – and we should. It just won’t fix the problem.

We can think of technology like cupcakes. The cupcake is at the scene of the crime, but it’s not the criminal. We can make smarter cupcakes — sugar free, higher in fiber, but that doesn’t seem to be making any difference. The cupcake isn’t saying, “Eat five of me.” We make the choice. “I’ll have one and take a walk. I won’t have one.” Or, “I’ll have five.”

Why will it be different with technology? Technology is at the scene of the crime. The criminal is that voice inside of each of us that says, “Do it all. Have it all. Don’t stop to consider what you’re doing or why. Run fast and do as much as you can.”

Sharon, a former professor turned consultant, says it always seems easier to respond to emails than to work on the project files sitting right in front of her. Is she making this choice because picking up a project file requires focused attention and emailing requires less of a commitment? Or is there a buzz of completion and immediate gratification each time the send button is pressed in contrast to the delayed gratification from a meatier project?

The technology is at the scene of the crime – a weapon of mass communication turning productivity opportunities into an excuse for procrastination. How do the choices we make in each moment, about what we choose to do and what we choose to ignore, tell the story of what matters to us?

When a day begins and ends with a list of action items, it can lack a sense of purpose. Without a sense of purpose, we have no framework to guide our choices.
As we plan our day, while reviewing what we hope to do, we can ask ourselves: Why is each of these things on the list? What can I do to bring into focus what really matters to me? What can I exclude that would allow me closer alignment with my sense of purpose and my intentions?

Technology, just like cupcakes, is there — for our pleasure. The crime only happens when we forget our sense of purpose and fail to make choices as to what we include or exclude.