Manage To Change

Bend Don't Break

When I was in chorus in elementary school I had this great teacher (that NO ONE appreciated).  She didn't just babysit - she taught.

Being an alto, I was pretty bad at the high notes. Aside from surely sounding horrible, she realized that I was trying hard, stretching as far as possible, but I couldn't get my low voice to go any higher. After class one day she asked me to try something. She said, "Don't stretch to reach the high notes.  Approach them from above. Reach down and grab them."

As abstract and non-specific as that advice sounds, it really helped me.  Suddenly I could see how to could get to my destination.  Visualizing it caused a funny thing happend, my body did what it needed to do and it worked!  She had changed my mindset from thinking something was just out of reach to thinking that it was possible if approached the right way.

As you may have guessed, this isn't just about singing.

2011 was my busiest year ever.  There were many times when my "to do" list felt just as out of reach as those high notes, but I got through them all and she's the person to thank for that.

When my list got too overwhelming, instead of thinking of all the things I needed to do all at once and stretching to get it all done, I thought of my "to do's" as though they were in a bucket with the most pressing things on top. As I finished one thing I would reach down and pull out the next thing.  

What happened was that my stress level went way down. It became easier to prioritize what really needed to be done and by when (as opposed to layering on manufactured levels of urgency). It also became easier to see what I needed to do myself versus what could be done by other people.

This even worked with interuptions.  When something tried to slam its way in, it would have to earn its way first into the bucket and then to the top.  It wasn't allowed to stay just because it cut in.

So looking forward to 2012, I'm going to try and keep this up.  

What's your plan for 2012?

 

Turn It Off

We're all busy.  

For me, a small and rapidly expanding business takes up most of my time. It's both exciting and exhausting. For you it might be the same or it might be a demanding position with a more traditional employment agreement. It doesn't matter.  

My epiphany this weekend was that it is NOT only the hours I work that exhaust me.  It's the hours I think I'm not working that wear me out!

The busier I get the more I seem to mentally process all the things I need to do at times when I should be disconnecting, relaxing, and giving my poor brain a rest.

Sure we could start talking about multi-tasking, over stimulation with news and information, fractured attention, and tons of things that erode our productivity and inhibit our ability to rejuvenate.

But for me...I'm going to start by taking one day completely off every week. 

What do you do to recharge your brain? Any suggestions? 

Got Game?

Learning is hard.  It takes time, effort, and engagement.  

It's the payoff that keeps us going.

Unfortunately, like exercise or dieting, in many cases learning has been institutionalized as drudgery. What's worse is that for those of us over 35 or 40 we learned how to learn in a way that took all the fun out of it.

Or... should I say we "re-learned" how to learn.  Innately we had it right.  We were born curious and experimental appreciating feedback and adjusting happily when we went down the wrong path.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, educational methodology was adopted that extinguished that joy for many students. Learning became like a failed diet or lapsed gym membership.

This morning, thanks to the Upside Learning Blog I read, Good Video Games and Good Learning, a paper written by James Paul Gee, that started me thinking about how to put the fun back in to learning.

We've all read blog posts or papers about the value of gaming as applied to learning and training environments, but that wasn't Gee's point. Instead, he simply and brilliantly articulated sixteen learning principles, how they are presented in games, and how our current educational methods fare in comparison.  

Here are a few of my favorites:

Interaction: “In a good game, words and deeds are all placed in the context of an interactive relationship between the player and the world. So, too, in school, texts and textbooks need to be put in contexts of interaction where the world and other people talk back.”

Production: "Players help “write” the worlds they live in—in school, they should help “write” the domain and the curriculum they study."

Risk-Taking: "Players are thereby encouraged to take risks, explore, and try new things. In fact, in a game, failure is a good thing."

Customization: "Games often have different difficulty levels and many good games allow players to solve problems in different ways...Customized curricula in school would not just be about self pacing, but about real intersections between the curriculum and the learner’s interests, desires, and styles."

Performance before Competence: "Good video games operate by a principle just the reverse of most schools: performance before competence. Players can perform before they are competent, supported by the design of the game..."

Whether you're a lifelong learner, an educator, or simply fascinated with how people learn, this paper is a must read!  

(Photo from CHC Emerging Tech)

When the Edge Becomes the Middle

Image by Gare and Kitty via Flickr

Ever seem to bump into a phrase repeatedly?

For the past three years I keep hearing about "the edge becoming the middle" and every time I do it's in a new context, with a similar yet different meaning.

The first time I heard this phrase was in a client meeting.  The client, a true innovator, was reflecting on how their needs, which were leading edge at the time, would ultimately become mainstream (the middle).

The same concept came up a year later in a product development conversation with a software company.  In their world successful experiments (at the edge) become core software functions.

I never thought about this phrase applying to relationships or events until lunch at O'Reilly Tools of Change this week.

Looking around the table, three of the four people that were with me are "at the edge" of my normal routine.  They're people with whom I don't usually interact on a daily or even weekly basis. 

Yet during the conference they were at the middle of my experience.  We sat together in several sessions, compared notes, tweeted back and forth, and discussed what we were hearing.

At conferences the edge becomes the middle.

Perhaps that's one reason we should still go to conferences - even though we operate in such a well connected world online.

It's also an interesting property of social networking.  Again, three of the four people at lunch were people I may never have met had we not first established a relationship online (through blogs,Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook). 

On social networks the edge becomes the middle.

The only difference seems to be, when we're thinking about relationships and events, the edge doesn't necessarily become the middle and stay there. They mostly go back to the edge again until the next time. 

reBlog from Kent Anderson under: The Scholarly Kitchen

Kent Anderson reviewed Jaron Lanier's book over on the Scholarly Kitchen:

I started Jaron Lanier’s recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” skeptical of his initial opinions. His complaints about standardization and today’s limiting philosophy of information technology didn’t impress me at first — after all, we had to embrace standards around electricity, electromagnetic spectrum deployment, and the like to have things like electric lights, radio, and television. Sure, these choices were limiting, but they ultimately liberated larger phenomena.Kent Anderson under, The Scholarly Kitchen, Feb 2010

Not only was the post insightful, the comments were great too.  Go check it out!

Michael Hansen SIIA Keynote: What I Learned from Galileo Galilei

  Image via Wikipedia

Michael Hansen, CEO Elsevier Health Sciences opened the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) Annual Information Industry Summit by reintroducing the audience to Galileo. His lessons from Galileo:

In a time of change, remember your roots. Galileo reminded Hansen of Elsevier's core strength to: "bring insights to the world and have those insights as a basis for better decisions." Elsevier published Galileo's controversial work in 1632.

In keeping with those roots, how can Elsevier, or any medical publisher, provide a valuable resource to a physician who only gets to spend approximately six minutes with a patient (generally considered a reliable statistic for primary care doctors)?  What can a publisher deliver in a fraction of that time that could benefit the physician and patient?

To address this need, Elsevier created a Clinical Decision Support business unit.  And, leading into the next Galileo lesson, this unit is not charged with simply delivering information at the point of care.  They are charged with "making information more to the point and more specific, as a recommendation."

In times of pressure and crisis, explore the counter intuitive.  Don't just follow conventional wisdom.

Those not familiar with medical publishing, may not realize that Hansen's example above, providing more specific recommendations to physicians, is very unconventional thinking. For many reasons, not the least of which is legal liability, this isn't often done.

In fact, I would argue it's the most unconventional idea he raised today. 

Below are two additional examples, that while interesting, are not uncommon practices in many organizations:

Hansen offered a sales example to highlight unconventional thinking, with a major client, the sales team took a more collaborative approach.  They analyzed the client's information assets and identified redundancies, resulting in a decrease in content costs of 10%.  His takeaway? "Forge new partnerships, relationships, and collaborations."

Of course, the revised content holdings included several Elsevier assets. 

Hansen's second example was related to people. Many companies say that people are their greatest resource, yet they don't communicate with them and are often reluctant to share bad news.

Elsevier found that in sharing concerns with their employees, they were able to identify savings offered up by people who were much better suited to identify savings opportunities than an isolated group of people in a conference room.  For example, staff were able to suggest cuts in travel that totaled almost 20% across the board.

While the second two examples might not be considered counter intuitive in many circles, that's irrelevant.  They were counter intuitive to Elsevier and, in pursuing them, Elsevier stepped out of their comfort zone.

Unconventional is in the eye of the beholder.

What are we doing to explore the counter intuitive, the unconventional, in a way that is consistent with our strengths (roots)?

Have our objectives changed? Should they have?

Have the methods by which we achieve our objectives changed? Should they have?

Hansen pointed out that the recession is bad but not as bad as the inquisition.  If Galileo could be unconventional, why can't we?

Perception, Reality, & Rory Sutherland

My husband recently pointed me to an interview with Rory Sutherland and the following video of his TED Talk.

Similar to Predictably Irrational and Nudge, Sutherland's view is that people don't make decisions on pure economic value alone.  Intangible value plays a large role, although many are loathe to admit it.

"There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor.  It involves engineering.  It involves limited raw materials.  And that what we add on top is kind of false.  It's a fake version and there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainty about it." [Quote transcribed from the video.]

Sutherland believes that 1) all value is relative, subjective, and 2) persuasion is better than compulsion.

"...how many problems of life can be solved by actually tinkering with perception rather than that tedious, hardworking, and messy business of actually trying to change reality."

While his extreme (and tongue-in-cheek) example of "placebo education" may seem dangerous and General Mill's approach to selling Shreddies (a cereal sold in Canada) may seem ridiculous, there is an element of value here - and some plain common sense.

"It's not that marketing-driven or advertising-led solutions can solve everything. That's absolutely not true. What seems strange to me, though, is that people don't at least try them first. Instead, governments try to solve their problems by compulsion. My view is that we should try and solve the problem by persuasion, and if that fails we can try compulsion or harder-level nudging."

It's worth the 16+ minutes to watch the video.  His examples are both brilliant and incredibly entertaining.

(Kent Anderson, from the Scholarly Kitchen, also wrote about this in his post Can the Creativity of Social Persuasion Cure "Corporate Asperger's Syndrome"?)

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Movin' on Out

Through the years I’ve been fortunate to meet lots of smart people in publishing, media, and technology.  It’s been an amazing experience working with both organizations “going digital” and others that have been there for some time but are continuously refining their approach to content and publishing. 

It’s an exciting place to be (scary, but exciting).

It seemed to me that the best way to ensure a spot in the middle of the changing tide was to start consulting on my own again.  So that’s what I did!

Please stay tuned as I revive this blog and keep posting on Twitter.

Sci Foo Camp 2009: Nature Video

After Michael Clarke's coverage of Sci Foo Camp on the Scholarly Kitchen, I thought there was nothing left to say.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

I was wrong.

NatureVideo just posted a Science Foo Camp 2009 video on YouTube.  From DNA, to skulls, to puzzles, it seems like Sci Foo had it all.

It was interesting to see how most of those interviewed contrasted the open and informal nature of Sci Foo with traditional science research and discovery.

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• Photos: Foo Camp 2009 (laughingsquid.com)

reBlog from Ann Michael under: The Scholarly Kitchen

Attending SSP IN!  Here's a post I wrote on the Scholarly Kitchen:

Fifteen years ago would anyone have imagined that Apple, a dying computer company, would come back to life by gaining control of the music business?Ann Michael under, The Scholarly Kitchen, Sep 2009

Read all the coverage of the Society for Scholarly Publishing IN Meeting on the Scholarly Kitchen.