Relevant History

Revising

I'm spending the morning trying to finish up revisions to Futures 2.0, which has been accepted for publication in Foresight, an academic journal on futures and forecasting.

via flickr

I have lots of other work on my plate, clients and editors who I don't want to disappoint, and am taking the family to Colorado for the weekend (to see my folks before they relocate to Singapore in January). So I'm trying to focus.

[To the tune of Norah Jones, "Lonestar," from the album Come Away With Me (I give it 1 star).]

Me and Tennison

She's normally aloof to the point of anti-social, but for some reason my cat decided to spend the morning on my lap.

via flickr

I've had better writing surfaces, frankly.

[To the tune of Yes, "Your Move/I've Seen All Good People," from the album Yessongs (Disc 2) (I give it 2 stars).]

Sign worth remembering

I saw this in a Palo Alto store window a few weeks ago, on my last day at the Institute:

via flickr

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "Op. 59 No. 2 In E Minor 'Rasumovsky': I: Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 5) (I give it 4 stars).]

Paul Graham on talent versus determination

Paul Graham on "the anatomy of determination:"

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

[To the tune of Yes, "Roundabout," from the album Keys To Ascension (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

Thought of the day

For knowledge workers, is there really any such thing as "work?" Does the concept of work have any real utility if the boundaries between it and play, travel, networking, etc. are blurred? And when it's possible to spend a lot of time "working" on something, get 90% done, and never deliver?

Maybe "work" as a conceptual category no longer has much utility for organizing our days and time, and we should think in terms of what we've completed and shipped, not what we're "working on."

[To the tune of King Crimson, "The Court Of The Crimson King (including The Return Of The Fire Witch and The Dance Of The Puppets)," from the album In The Court Of The Crimson King (I give it 5 stars).]

Was the last bubble due to Prozac?

A couple days ago I posted a quote from Matt Yglesias about the danger bold predictors have of becoming cranks. Today, via the Freakonomics blog, I came across an argument about the relationship between the spread of antidepressants and stock market bubbles.

In 2000, Slate contributor Robert Wright noted that a "psychiatrist is now speculating that maybe Prozac and other antidepressants are being gobbled in such volume as to account for the stock market's seemingly unshakeable self-esteem." University of Michigan professor Randolph Nesse proposed "the possibility that this market is different because investor's brains are different."

What percent of brokers, dealers, and investors are taking antidepressant drugs? Wealthy, stressed urbanites are especially likely to use them. I would not be surprised to learn that one in four large investors has used some kind of mood-altering drug. What effects do these drugs have on investment behavior? We don't know.... From seeing many patients who take such agents, I know that some experience only improved mood, often a miraculous and even life-saving change. Others, however, report that they become far less cautious than they were before, worrying too little about real dangers. This is exactly the mind-set of many current investors.

Human nature has always given rise to booms and bubbles, followed by crashes and depressions. But if investor caution is being inhibited by psychotropic drugs, bubbles could grow larger than usual before they pop, with potentially catastrophic economic and political consequences.

So, Big Money contributor Caitlin McDevitt asks, "Did Prozac cause the most recent market free fall? Seems like a stretch, but if so, then maybe the 'great recession' should have been called a 'depression all along."

Given that I work a lot with groups in workshops, it makes me wonder: if you could convince everyone in a workshop to take Prozac (or some other mood-altering drug), what kind of results would you get? Would people be more open to crazy scenarios? Would a map of the future be all about the Singularity or talking unicorns bringing world peace? Or-- the more interesting possibility-- would the results be awful because people wouldn't care about the future? (I doubt I'll get the chance to test the theory any time soon.)

However, there are other things I am experimenting with that don't require medical supervision, but which I hope deliver some improvements in workshops. Changing the food is one.

I don't buy the idea that if you feed people marinated tofu you'll make them smart; but we know a lot about how our brains respond to foods in general, and can design food into workshops in ways that keep people active and well-fed, but don't make them sated and sluggish. For a while I've suspected that caterers unintentionally undermine good meetings and workshops by serving so many pastries, bagels, and coffee. Turns out these are foods that tend to be high on the glycemic index, or sugary things that overstimulate people and encourage the production of memory-impairing hormones like cortisol.

So I'm not only trying to get different foods into my events; I'm also serving them differently, distributing them more evenly through the day so people aren't tempted to overeat and then crash. We'll see if it makes a difference in the energy levels of the workshops, and the results.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "New Angels Of Promise," from the album Hours (I give it 1 stars).]

On academic presentations and the future of conferences

Author and creative writing teacher Rachel Toor writes in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) about the problems of either dashing off talks the night before, or just reading papers:

More often than I can believe, someone will preface a reading by saying, "I just wrote this last night." Why on earth, I wonder, would you read something that raw? Generally public readings are set up months in advance. It's not like the speakers don't know they're going to have to have something ready.... But then I remembered that arrogance is often the conjoined twin of insecurity. What those writers wanted us to know, perhaps, was that this new work was the result of pure talent: Just think, audience, how good this would be if it were coupled with labor? If the piece stinks, it's simply a matter of timing. It's not my fault. I could do better, really, I could. I just didn't have the time....

Most academics don't present hastily written papers. But they do something almost as bad. They read their papers aloud. Some professors read their lectures. It's common practice, I know, but frankly, it bugs me. It's hard enough for an audience to follow a short story, where, presumably, some attention is being paid to crafting narrative tension. Having to track audibly an argument written in long, convoluted sentences and leaden, jargon-ridden prose can feel like a forced drowning.... Reading instead of presenting is, I think, the academic equivalent of "I just dashed this off last night." It's an act borne out of (choose as many as apply): fear, insecurity, arrogance, procrastination, habit, poor training, or lack of regard for the audience. It's also just plain lazy. It's a lot of work to think something through and then write it out as a conference paper. Taking the next step—understanding what you've done and figuring out how to summarize it extemporaneously—seems to be one that many are willing to forsake.

The piece is a reminder of just how different the kinds of talks I've done for the last few years, and the sorts of intellectual events I'm usually involved in, are from conventional academic presentations. I spend huge amounts of time preparing for the workshops I facilitate: I go over every activity, every breakout session, think about the posters I need to create, the instructions I should give, what I should and shouldn't say, and what outcomes the client and I want.

All this preparation generates one of two things: artifacts and other materials that help organize an event (or that help participants stay self-organized and -aware of what they're supposed to be doing); and a clearer understanding of what I need to do for the day to succeed. What that preparation doesn't generate is a perfectly-planned day: all that planning, I know, is to prepare me to succeed despite the fact that something is going to happen that requires me to adapt and adjust.

What you absolutely cannot do in an environment like this is throw something together the night before; nor can you write it all out and assume you can just follow the script mindlessly-- the two options Toor describes.

Why are these events so different? Two reasons. First, the faciltiated workshop, much more than the academic conference, is explicitly about the production of shared meaning. The aim after a day or two is to have a common vision of the future, a common roadmap, and common understanding of what an organization's strategy should be. You don't necessarily have that as an outcome of a scholarly conference. Second, workshops are a means to an end, not an end in themselves: they're supposed to catalyze action, not be the end of action.

With the proliferation of interesting kinds of workshops, novel forms of meetings, and now the rise of the unconference, I think it's high time we thought about how we could reinvent academic (maybe mainly humanities) conferences. There's no reason we can't create a better model, that satisfies conference speakers' professional needs (e.g., the line on the c.v., the publicity, the chance to interview for jobs) and personal ones (e.g., the opportunity for subsidized travel to see your friends), as well as the needs of conference organizers and the profession/discipline as a whole-- and is a lot more interesting and engaging. So many academic events I go to end on an optimistic note, or generate lots of interest in moving on to actually doing something... but then dissipate, and at best yield an edited volume. Sitting in a stuffy (or over air-conditioned) hotel conference room, listening to someone read a talk, and feeling the collective interest and enthusiasm generated by the event evaporate days afterward-- aren't there better ways we could all spend our time?

Seriously, I'd really like to do this.

[To the tune of Walter Wanderly, "One Note Samba," from the album Out Of Sight (I give it 1 star).]

Paul Graham on meeting time

Paul Graham has a nice post on the different ways managers and "makers" divide up time:

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting.

When I read this, I thought, this explains why I found meetings so disruptive to my days. I'm a pretty social person, but I find myself increasingly aware of the need to create large blocks of time during which I can really get into a subject, and planning my days so all calls and meetings are loaded into a certain period, rather than spread throughout the day.

Graham's essay also echoes the distinction E. P. Thompson made in his classic article "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," between time-oriented work and task-oriented work, in his famous article on time consciousness in the early Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial work, Thompson argued, was task-oriented: whether you worked in the fields or town, the rhythm of your working day wasn't determined by a clock, but by Nature and the work you needed to get done. With the rise of the factory system, and the growing specialization of labor within factories, the rhythms of work were defined not by organic tasks, but by machines and the factory itself: you worked a certain number of hours a day, and then you stopped. Work was no longer task-oriented, but time-oriented.

Of course, there are types of work that have always remained task-oriented, even when we're measuring or regulating or standardizing them using time. Cooking is one. Parenting is another. Babies are as demanding as any factory-owner, but as any new parent will tell you, they run very much on their own clocks. But today, when the two are at odds, task-orientation loses out to time-orientation: managers set meeting times for subordinates, some of whom are likely to be young mothers.  As Judith Schulevitz argues,

The politics of time are hugely significant for women because the temporality of motherhood is strictly at odds with the temporality of work... Motherhood follows not just a pre-industrial schedule but a biological one as well. (The two are related.) Women have to have their babies before they become infertile, and once their children are born, they have to meet their needs then, not later. As we learn more about the psychological and physiological benefits to a baby of being soundly attached to a mother or father figure, the importance of love for brain development, not just personality formation, we get an ever clearer sense of the cost to children of depriving their parents of the means to spend time with them, especially when they’re young. Under current social arrangements, however, motherhood and fatherhood clocks clash with most career clocks, so parents who spend that time often pay a high price for doing so.

One of the things I think I'm going to have to do more ruthlessly is control my time: not just "manage" it better, but think more clearly about what kinds of time I need. I've done this pretty well for space and other resources, but time is something that I've tended to think of merely as a scarce but relatively undifferentiated resource. High time, as it were, to figure out how I can better balance tasks and time, and the different kinds of discipline required to satisfy each.

Prezi embed player

One of the more exciting things I worked on when I was at IFTF was a project with Kitchen Budapest, an innovation lab in Hungary that Anthony and I kind of stumbled across. I've been using their fantastic presentation tool Prezi for a while, and it's now getting some well-deserved attention.

They just released a player that lets you embed Prezis in Web pages. This is a presentation I made on the use of Prezi at the Institute:

from prezi.com

I've been waiting a while for this functionality, and am glad it's finally out!

[To the tune of The Malah, "Roundabout," from the concert 2004-10-09 - Gottrocks (I give it 3 stars).]

Future 2.0: Rethinking the Discipline

In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes about 10,000 hours to master something-- computer programming, classical violin, tennis, what have you. I've been working as a futurist for almost a decade; I don't know if I've done 10,000 hours of decent work, but I have some feel for how the field works, and what we're good at.

About a year ago-- okay, more like two years ago-- Angela Wilkinson, a friend who runs the scenario planning master classes at the Saïd Business School, invited me to write a think-piece about the field. I took it as an occasion to run a thought experiment: if you were to start with a clean sheet of paper-- if there was no Global Business Network, no IFTF, no organized or professionalized efforts to forecast the future-- what would the field look like? What kinds of problems would it tackle? What kinds of science would it draw on? And how would it try to make its impact felt?

As I got into it, I concluded that a new field would look very different from the one I've worked in for the last decade. This essay (it's a PDF, about 260kb) is a first draft at an effort to explain where I think we could go. Lots of what I talk about will be familiar to my colleagues, and indeed to anyone reasonably well-read; but I think there's utility in synthesis and summary, if only to see connections between literatures and chart one's next steps.

All the usual caveats apply: it's unpublished, it's unfinished, it doesn't reflect the thinking of any of the various institutions I'm associated with, all the errors are mine, there are plenty of things I could have talked about but didn't. But so does the usual invitation to comment on it. I could keep tinkering with it, but at this stage I think it's more useful for me to take a step back, work on some other things, and return to it with fresh eyes.

Angela had in mind something quick, short, and provocative. I definitely missed the first two. Angela, I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.

Update, 22 July 2009: I've posted a slightly updated version of the essay, and also reproduced the introduction below the jump.

Reflections on SciBarCamp

SciBarCamp is done. Other than a lot of excellent leftover Pakistani food, a surprising amount of beer, and a photo set on Flickr, you'd never know we hosted 60+ people for two days. Time for a bit of reflection.

Wednesday morning, as I was getting the Institute's conference space ready for SciBarCamp-- hauling tables, moving chairs, trying to figure out how to get sixty people into our large conference room, calculating how many and what kinds of signs we needed to put to up to help guests find the wifi, bathrooms, etc.-- I overhead someone say, "What I love about these things is that you don't have to do any preparation. You just show up."

Yeah, right.

Events like these may look like they're spontaneous and free, but that's only because someone has set up the environment in which it takes place. That labor shouldn't really be visible to the participants-- like all infrastructure, its purpose is to be useful, not to call attention to itself-- but it is essential to the success of even the loosest and most improvisational event. To make a brief comparison to music: the most brilliant jazz improvisers, people like Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman, aren't brilliant because they just get up onstage and do whatever comes into their heads: they're brilliant because they've played for thousands and thousands of hours, are highly disciplined, have great training... and bring all that to the concert hall. [Update: See Fred Kaplan on creativity in jazz.] Likewise, when I travel, I like to be able to wander around and explore things; but I can do that because I carry a pack that has all kinds of things that I find useful, and come in handy under a variety of circumstances. (Preparation is likewise important for biking and cooking, and other things.)

The Institute's conferences are scripted to the minute, the presentations are rehearsed endlessly, group exercises are agonized over. There's a lot of top-down structure, because we have a lot of content to share, and because it's hard for most people to think about the future in an orderly way. People, we assume, need the structure we provide in order to translate our work into terms that will be useful to them. So the bar camp model is one that I find very interesting.

But the camp isn't just the absence of organization: that wouldn't be a bar camp, it would just be chaos. There is structure here, and I want to understand what it is.

I was talking to Jamie McQuay, one of the organizers of this year's camp and a veteran of the bar camp scene, about the ingredients for a successful bar camp. He said that the two things you really need are free space (which saves the organizers money and time, and cuts down on the number of sponsors you have to look for), and interesting people. Tantek Çelik, a camp veteran, told me that all you really need are physical and virtual spaces-- a conference venue and a wiki.

But my sense is that there's more to it than that.

There's a cultural element to the camps that I think is important. People here are veterans of academic meetings, scientific society conferences, and industry trade shows, and know that world well enough to be intelligently dissatisfied by it. (I had a professor who said you couldn't rebel effectively against Catholicism unless you had been educated by Jesuits. Not Franciscans or Dominicans, mind you-- Jesuits. Truly, give me the child until he's seven, and he's ours forever.) When you have an event that's a mirror-world of the traditional conference, you need to know what the traditional conference is like, so you can do the opposite. I would draw a comparison to Wikipedia. One of the usually unacknowledged reasons Wikipedia works is because people know, or think they know, what encyclopedia articles are supposed to sound like: readers and creators alike share a basic understanding of what they should be doing.

I also suspect a good bar camp also requires some minimum number of people who are veterans of the camp scene, and can catalyze others and acculturate novices. I'm not sure what that number is. Tantek said that return attendees are like culture in yogurt, which I think is a good comparison.

I think there are also some practical things that you can do that I've listed after the jump. None are especially profound, but they'd all make the event work better, and are worth paying attention to. But what else is there? Besides physical and virtual space, interesting people, a familiarity with conventional conferences, and perhaps some elusive bare minimum of people who've been to bar camps before, are there other things that a successful camp needs?

[To the tune of John Coltrane, "Out Of This World," from the album The Classic Quartet - The Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (I give it 3 stars).]

A few of my favorite things: What I enjoy about travel, biking, workshops, and cooking

In the last few days I've been doing a lot of stuff: biking, organizing a Memorial Day dinner, preparing for a week-long trip to the East Coast, thinking about the craft and design of workshops. (These are the expert workshops that I organize all over the place.)

In many ways these are very different activities, but I really enjoy them all. I recently realized that despite their differences, they actually share a few qualities.

1) They're active, embodied knowledge.

Obviously bicycling is physical, but cooking is a nice combination of fine motor skill and lifting big heavy things (or in my case, avoiding setting myself on fire); you're always on your feet in a workshop; and travel is pretty physically strenuous, for good and bad reasons. Maybe I'm getting older, I'm less of a couch potato, or my ADD is increasing (and I know these are somewhat mutually exclusive explanations), but I find my patience with sitting for long hours and just reading is decreasing. I can do it, but I'm happier engaging my body. And nothing is better than activities where you're involving your body, but you have to think about what you're doing. (Gregg Zachary had a great piece last year on the rediscovery of the virtues of manual work. I'm part of a movement.)

cycling hunter's point, via flickr

Like Richard Sennett's craftsman (and I really recommend his book), I enjoy things that are physical or tangible, but also engage the mind. Thoughtful action is where it's at.

gestural interface missile command, via flickr

2) There are real deadlines.

My capacity for finishing things that have open-ended deadlines, or fake deadlines ("so we all agree that we'll finish our tasks by next week, right? right?"), is plummeting to near zero. Too much other stuff in my life that absolutely has to get done.

hard deadlines: flames don't wait, via flickr

So hard deadlines are good for me now. Essential even. The workshop starts at exactly this time, the plane leaves at exactly that time, the guests are arriving now. Heard deadlines also put a nice bound on craftwork, by preventing you from tinkering forever with something. A paragraph could always be better, but as Sennett writes, the demands of the trade force craftsmen to accept limits, to do the best job they can within the time they have, and to learn to be satisfied with that. As graphic designers say, "finished is good."

3) They require preparation.

The day of the cookout, I spent hours chopping vegetables, checking marinades, cleaning off platters (you can never have too many platters at a BBQ), locating plates and cups, setting up staging areas for food and drinks, laying out tools, etc. (I noticed, though, that this wasn't tedious, it was pleasant. It was a classic example of what Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.) Likewise, when you travel, you've got to think a lot about what to pack, how to structure your time, how to get among different places, etc.. A bike won't work with a flat tire, nor will a cyclist work if he's dehydrated, so you'd better be prepared for those possibilities. Every ride requires some kind of adjustment: technical climbs mess up gears; thorns flatten tires; I get hungry. Having the resources to deal with those things lets me keep riding.

With workshops, you have to think in advance about everything, and I mean everything: you have to go over the agenda minute-by-minute, think about the flow of the day, tinker with questions and exercises to eliminate ambiguity and focus people, lay out materials, move the furniture around, make sure the caterers know when to appear, etc., etc. (Indeed, there are things that we normally don't think about that I'd like to start experimenting with, like lighting and ambient sound, making some activities more embodied and physical-- sitting is exhausting-- and playing with the day's menu to keep people from getting weighed down by muffins and too much coffee.)

Good preparation doesn't require you to think just about one thing. It requires you to think about a lot of different things, big and small; to think about timing and process; about division of labor; about contingencies and strategies. That's part of what makes it pleasant.

future of science workshop, malaysia, via flickr

But here's the important thing.

Some of that preparation is meant to help you keep things on track, and do things exactly the right way. But most serious preparation isn't about scripting. Rather, its about making it possible for you to adapt to whatever actually happens. I've never had a workshop run exactly the way I imagined it would: more people show up, they turn out to be interested in other things than we'd discussed before, the room isn't laid out the way we expected-- a thousand different things can go akimbo.

I used to think that the point of planning workshops in such great detail was so I'd have more control over them. Wrong. You never have control. You have whatever you have when you get in the room. The point of doing all that planning is to deeply understand the intentionality and philosophy behind the workshop, so you can improvise your way to the same end-point, and you have the tools at hand to do so.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

[Update: I've realized that this is my complaint about humanities graduate training: it socializes you to believe that you possess skills that are useful only in a very specific future-- namely tenure track jobs in your field-- and train you to believe that you're less qualified to succeed at a different future, and that any other future is a failure.]

If you know that you're going to go off the map-- if events are going to conspire to send you in another direction, and they will-- the best that you can do is have the right gear, and a clear picture of where you want to go.

4) They have serendipity.

The upside of plans not working out the way you expect is that they can work out better. Sometimes the very coolest thing isn't on the map, and the only way to find it is to venture into the unknown.

One of the great pleasures of having a big party is that mixing up friends who don't know each other can have pleasant results for everyone. The best rides are ones that have a brilliant hill and view that you didn't know about. The best trips are the ones that expose you to something you've never seen before, or didn't even know was cool. I fell in love with Budapest not because I'd always wanted to go there, but because it's an amazing, complicated, Old World post-socialist place that I find alternately fascinating and frustrating. I love London because it rewards walking: I know it well enough to be able to navigate by Tube or on foot, but every time I go out in the evening I discover something-- a little square, a park, a row of businesses-- that charms and captivates, and that I'd never heard of.

surprise in the london underground, via flickr

Workshops have serendipity too. Tons of it. You want to build connections between ideas or fields that even experts hadn't seen before, or explore the cross-impact of trends that people normally think about separately. When that works, the results are awesome-- and the amazing thing is, the results are awesome a lot more often than you'd expect. You never know what the outcome of a workshop is going to be-- and if you do, there's really no point in having it in the first place. This doesn't mean that a workshop shouldn't have certain goals or deliverables; far from it. But it's like an evening walk in London: you know where you're going to end up, you know that there are certain landmarks you'll pass, but you don't know what else you're going to see along the way. Your job is to be open to the serendipity, so you can take advantage of it.

5) They draw out people.

I mean this in two senses. First, they can push you do things you didn't know you could. Good rides challenge you to do things you didn't think you were capable of, or leave you exhausted by happy with your performance.

Second, they open up a space for people to contribute. My wife used the cookout as an opportunity to repot a bunch of flowers in the backyard, dig out and repot some aging bamboo, and do other things on her gardening/home improvement list. Once kids started arriving, my daughter made (or taught the kids how make) balloon swords, which they then played with all evening. I hadn't thought of either of these, but people commented on how nice the backyard looked, and the kids all left exhausted and uninjured. Win.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

Workshops require both kinds of drawing out. Running a workshop isn't an exercise in controlling other people, but it's a hard task to create a venue in which everyone can think seriously, think differently, and think together.

It's also not about getting a certain result, but about creating the conditions out of which interesting new things will emerge. Of course, workshops have objectives, but as a facilitator, you have to approach them obliquely, and recognize that the actual work and thinking will be done by participants: you're just ("just" isn't quite the right word!) there to help make it happen.

workshop in laxenburg, astria via flickr

6) You can push sometimes, but mainly you have to flow.

You can challenge people, but you can't order them to be innovative. You can try to get guests to mingle or introduce them to each other, but you can't make them be chatty and friendly. You can also push yourself to some degree, but recognize that pushing doesn't get you everything: you can get to the airport on time, but you can't control the weather and need to be able to go with whatever the situation presents.

my son on a happier ride

This morning I got an unexpected lesson on pushing versus flow from my son. We were biking to school, and he has the habit of standing up while pedaling. I can't get him to stop (he's seven, after all), so I was trying to teach him how to do it in a way that maintains his balance. He got frustrated and mad, which made him distracted; and so he took a spill. Bad enough to break the mirror on his bike, add a couple nicks to the brakes or handlebars, and require some ice and band-aids when he got to school. Fortunately nothing on him was broken, and he'll be fine.

As I try to tell the kids, biking is one of those things that demands mindfulness: you have to watch the road, know what gear you're in, know where the cars are, know how tired you are. You can push yourself, but if you lose your concentration-- if you lose the flow-- you're likely to crash. In the course of pushing him, I made him lose what little flow he had.

Still, any spill that doesn't send you to urgent care is a learning opportunity, not an accident. And as a friend of mine wrote after hearing about the crash,

But falling is an essential part of growth. It teaches you where the boundaries are. If you never push hard enough to fall, you will never know if you could grow twice as much or twice as fast-- because you are playing it safe.

So across all these activities-- and maybe across everything you do-- hitting that mix of pushing and flow, planning but staying open to serendipty, and being active is key.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Hourglass, Part 2," from the album Staircase (I give it 4 stars).]

David Rakoff on creating

I've recently been reading about craft--in particular Richard Sennett's dense but serious and amazing book, The Craftsman-- and so this quote from David Rakoff's Get Too Comfortable, sent to me by my colleague Jason, jumped out at me.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instant of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.

From my dick.

Obscura Digital

Spent a very interesting evening at Obscura Digital, a company in San Francisco.

Obscura does really interesting media installation / augmented reality / giant screen stuff, mainly for Fortune 50 companies.

They had a really interesting haptic version of the old game Missile Command. I enjoyed playing it, even though I kind of sucked at it.

I'm in Heaven!

Game over

Visual impact has moved

Obscura

Cool reception space

Day 1 of the Technology Horizons conference.

Seed Magazine piece

I've got a new short article at Seedmagazine.com, on automated scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge. Sounds fascinating, I know, but it really is a better read than I make it sound.

In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us....

lder AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes — you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn — but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work.

Though I have to give credit where it's due: if it turned out well, it's because it's a great project, and several people were very generous with their time, talking me through its details, and speculating on what the project and this approach to automated scientific discovery could mean for the future of science. I should never be amazed that people are almost always willing to talk about their work and what makes it interesting, but I never fail to be. Remember that when I call you!

Doing some calls and email

Sitting on the veranda. Wifi really changes your life, you know?

The view from Fort Baker

Beautiful day here in Sausalito!

Sunday morning workplace

Finishing an essay for Vodafone on tinkering while Heather and the kids are in Golden Gate Park and the California Academy of Sciences. Thought a different place might be usefully stimulating.

Writing

I have a day with no meetings. Owing to the combination of the Institute being a pretty meeting-driven place, and my own distracting sociability, this is a rare thing. Not one to be wasted.

via flickr

The power and fragility of groups

Everyone loves groups. What's better (in America at least) than being part of a "team"? Collaboration is cool. (Is there a word that's been rehabilitated more completely than "collaboration"? Fifty years ago, someone who "collaborated" wasn't a good person, but a traitor.) Collective intelligence is the solution to the world's problems. Smart mobs are... mobbish, perhaps, but also smart, and that's what matters.

Groups are powerful... but for all their power, they're also fragile. University of Washington academics Will Felps and Terence Mitchell constructed a very interesting experiment to show just how fragile they are, by demonstrating the effect of "bad apples" on the effectiveness of small groups.

As Coding Horror summarizes their work and findings,

Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the teams, they're told that whichever team performs best will be awarded $100 per person. What they don't know, however, is that in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn't a student. He's an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types:

• The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed.
• The Jerk will say that other people's ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert: me."
• The Slacker will say "whatever", and "I really don't care."

The conventional wisdom in the research on this sort of thing is that none of this should have had much effect on the group at all. Groups are powerful. Group dynamics are powerful. And so groups dominate individuals, not the other way around. There's tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms.

But Will found the opposite.

Invariably, groups that had the bad apple would perform worse. And this despite the fact that were people in some groups that were very talented, very smart, very likeable. Felps found that the bad apple's behavior had a profound effect -- groups with bad apples performed 30 to 40 percent worse than other groups.

A paper describing the experiment, "How, when, and why bad apples spoil the barrel: Negative Members and Dysfunctional Groups," is available as a PDF.

Thanks to Mathias for the link.

This afternoon's workplace

Sequestered myself in Cafe Zoë in an attempt to make some more progress on a report I need to get to clients.

Write write write write....

Working from home

I'm at home today, as my daughter came down with strep. When I picked her up from school yesterday afternoon, she was on the couch in child care, looking pretty drained. We spent part of last night at the pediatrician's, getting her and her brother swabbed, and dosed up with amoxicillin.

She woke up today and was pretty out of it. Her brother insisted that he was at death's door, until he remembered that his class was going ice skating today. Then all of a sudden: Miracle Recovery!

He tested negative last night, seemed no worse than usual. Since I know Elizabeth will rest better if she's alone (obviously I'm here; she's alone in the same way nobility are alone when servants are still in the room), I decided to take him into school.

Elizabeth is now on the couch. She watched Nausicaä: Valley of the West Wind this morning, and is now on to The Cat Returns. She likes Hayao Miyazaki under normal times, but for some reason, when she's under the weather, escapist movies featuring young female heroines especially appeal to her. Just one of those inexplicable girl things.

Fortunately, she's old enough, and independent enough, and also not sick enough, for me to actually be able to work.

My new cafe... and bank

I'm spending the morning at Cafe Zoë, writing to a lot of people. I never expected, when I started working as a futurist, that I would have to calculate what time it was in Beijing and Budapest, and make sure to get some e-mails out while people are still in their offices or awake. But that's my life these days.

I've been coming to this cafe for a couple years now (actually, a quick check of my external memory-- aka the blog archive-- reveals its been four years and one month), and this morning I discovered a new function. I got to the counter, realized I didn't have any money, and apologized and told them I'd be back.

"It's okay," the owner said. "You can owe us. It's not the first time you're here." She pulled out a book with IOU on the front-- I guess there are plenty of people who come here a little absent-minded-- and wrote down my order.

It makes perfect sense. Unless I want to never come back here, I'm good for the $3.60. And they want to keep me as a regular customer, so it's a reasonable risk for them.

Fortunately they seem to be doing pretty well, despite the downturn: there are a core group of us who are here regularly, and they seem now to have multiple clienteles at different times of day: stroller jogger moms in the morning, people coming in for lunch, freelancers or people who aren't working and home and don't want to work in the office (hello!), and people from nearby businesses, popping in for a cup of coffee. It's a real slice of the neighborhood, and very nice to see.

From X2 to Signtific

The Institute's new future of science Web site is now live. For the last couple years we've been running the project under the name X2-- an historical reference to the X Club, a group I've long found fascinating-- but we've updated the name to Signtific, and rolled out a new, much more user-friendly Web site.

No time to stop and relax, though. We've also nearly finished development of a custom version of the online mapping tool that I started using last year (here are copies of my paper spaces and end of cyberspace maps, for example), which promises to be pretty amazing. So no rest for the wicked.

On the unreliability of expert political judgment

I've been working on a think-piece on the future of futures work. (It's an expansion of questions I started asking in my piece on design and futures.) It's organized around a simple question: If you were to invent a discipline of futures and forecasting today, organized to deal with today's problems, and drawing on current science, what would it look like? Would be it be just like the field today? Would it look for weak signals, produce roadmaps and scenarios, and seek to influence strategy and policy?

I suspect the answer is no. No, I'm confident-- using the term as Robert Burton would warn it should be used-- that the answer is no. Now I'm trying to explain where I think the field will, or ought, to go.

One of the things I'm thinking through is the role of expert knowledge and accountability in futures work. We claim to be experts about a bunch of things, most notably about how to think about the future in ways that can better inform the present. But the work of Philip Tetlock (which I've mentioned before) suggests that claims of expert knowledge, particularly when it comes to dealing with the future, are highly suspect.

Teltock's argument is nicely summarized by Louis Menand in a New Yorker review:

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “ Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

The obvious questions are, how relevant is this work to what we futurists do? And are our current attempts to explain that no, we can't predict the future but our work is still valuable, sufficient in the light of work like Tetlock's?

The great Aeron Chair Rodeo

Every year the chairs are driven south to their spring feeding grounds in Arizona....

Back to work

Got a lot of my own stuff that I'm working on, as well as never-ending Institute stuff.

Fortunately it's a cold, rainy day here, perfect for writing.

Working this morning

Finishing up a couple essays before the end of the year. This is always a good place to focus and revise.

The kids are at child care for the morning, and my in-laws are coming for dinner tonight. But the next few hours are mine.

At SFO

On my way to Tampa! I have copies of "Miami Vice" and "Wild Things" on my iphone for cultural reference. And some Carl Hiassen. If Florida isn't like it is in the movies and books, I'll be really bummed.

Packing and planning

I leave tomorrow for the Association of University Research Parks winter conference, in St Petersburg, Florida.

This is the first time I've traveled anywhere with my iPod, and already it's having an impact. Rather than putting the address of phone number of the hotel in my trusty Moleskine notebook, I put the hotel, Supershuttle, airline, and a couple local art museums in my address book, and created a new group called "Alex's Current Trip." I figure whenever I go somewhere, I can fill it with local stuff. It should be handy.

I also find myself doing two things differently when I create addresses. First, I grab the complete address, not just enough to tell a cab driver. And second, I don't bother to copy the directions. Why? Because I figure that I'll use the map program and built-in GPS to generate directions when I'm on the ground. But to do that, I need good (i.e., comprehensive) street address information. Thanks to the map program, my personal economy of information has changed. I don't need directions. I need the information that will help me generate accurate directions.

I'm staying at the Renaissance Vinoy, which is one of the few hotels to have a marina, golf course, AND tennis. Not that I'll use anything more sophisticated than a bar or hot tub. And for some reason the pictures remind me of the Hollywood Tower Hotel. However, it's within walking distance of two decent-looking museums (alas the Salavador Dali museum is not one of them), but I'm not sure I'll have time to swing by either one. But I know they're there.

One thing I wish I could do with iCal is set up an event that has several different dates associated with it. So, for example, if I'm going on a business trip, I'd like an event (or a reminder) a week before that says "Take everything to the dry cleaner / shoe repair." Five days before, "Read c.v.s of people you're meeting." Two days before, "Find suitcase and do laundry." The day before, a whole slew of things: pack clothes, print out confirmations, check weather, etc., etc.. I don't want to have to create these; I want them to be automatically generated when I create a trip.

Cafe del Doge

Last night.

A start

Definitely asymmetrical, but a promising beginning.

Raw materials

Building a map

My project for the next couple days. Start with a blank wall. Play lots of Mono, Zep and Sound Tribe Sector 9. End with a map of the future of science.

Amabile and Khaire on creativity and leadership

From Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire, "Creativity and the Role of the Leader:"

  [T]here is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditional work of management might suggest.... One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.

[via metacool]

Today's workspace

Working at home

I had a morning meeting at Peninsula that ran until about 11:15, so after it was was over, I went outside, sat on the front porch, hopped on the wireless network, and went back online.

[via flickr]

It's not at all unusual to see parents around the school-- unlike the schools I went to, when the only time you saw a parent on-campus was when someone was in serious trouble.

Right before this picture was taken, my son walked by, asked me was I was doing there, but really had no particular interest in the answer. It was curious that I was there, but not strange enough to deserve more than a second's thinking about.

menlo park, mobility, Peninsula School

Don't fence me in... a conventional office

Years ago, when I was helping the Institute look for new offices, I visited Gate 3, a "work club" across the Bay in Emeryville. It was a wonderfully cool space, and I really loved the vision: the space was part open office, part meeting space, and part members-only club, with a downstairs cafe and space for social events. Unfortunately, it was ahead of its time, and eventually it folded. (The creators of Gate 3 seem to be trying to bring the idea back in North Carolina.)

The idea of offices for drop-in work has continued to fascinate me, though it seems clear that they're hard to get off the ground. So I was pleased to see that Ophelia Chong (who is probably the only person who'd think to work Cole Porter lyrics into a piece on temporary workspaces) has a nice piece in 404 about an effort to create such spaces in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a city of re-invention and of hyphenates...Our resumes can be compared to layers upon layers of paint that is never allowed to dry, because we are constantly changing the perception of who we are.

Our definition of what employment is about re-invention as well, we are historically a nomadic work force and because of this our freelance workforce is the highest in the country, 36-38%, almost 20% higher than the rest of the country. We are nomads that travel from village to village selling our wares and services, client to client with a laptop in tow....

In the new economy the idea of full time employment has moved towards working on a series of projects as a subcontractor, in Los Angeles we are more accustomed to this form of employment than most of the country, which is why BLANKSPACES does not have to explain it's purpose, we get it.

architecture, blogging, office

Greetings from Philadelphia

I'm settled in at the Omni Hotel, in lovely downtown Philadelphia. Actually, I'm not kidding: I'm across the street from Independence Park, near Independence Hall, the Philosophical Society, and other monuments of early American history.

I'm going to spend part of the morning with friends from school, then head back downtown to the Chemical Heritage Society. See the room I'm working in, rest up, then workshop time-- third one in a week, which I think is a personal record.

Philadelphia, Travel

On the road to Waterloo

I'm in a limo, headed from the Toronto airport-- the big international one-- to Waterloo. It should be able an hour's drive.

I slept some on the flight, but very little. I worked on the fine details of my workshop for this evening, tweaking the questions a little bit and adjusting the process. Since I'll get to Waterloo around 4:15, and my workshop is at 7, I'm basically on.

Just passed a sign with distances to Waterloo and London. It took me a second to realize that 1) the distances were in kilometers, and 2) since this is Canada, I shouldn't get too excited at the idea of being 170 anythings from "London."

I think this is only my third trip to Canada. I don't remember the first trip. One of my great uncles was Korean ambassador to Canada for a few years in the 1960s, and we came up to visit him when I was two or three. The next time was just over 15 years ago, when I came up to Toronto for a history of science conference. And now i'm here again. Kind of strange that I should have been to England more times in my life than Canada, given how much closer it is.

It looks a lot like the States, except place names are resolutely English: Winston Churchill Boulevard, Kitchener, Trafalgar. (Are there any places in Canada or Australia-- ot to mention Botswana, India, or Trinidad-- named Blair or Thatcher? I wonder if that'll feel strange to me, or be an interesting hybrid state.

Canada, Travel, Travel

On the SuperShuttle

I'm on the SuperShuttle to SFO. It's the middle of the night-- I got about 90 minutes serious sleep before I had to get up and get ready for the ride-- and I'm now on my way to Canada and South Africa.

First I'm in Waterloo, Canada for three nights, attending a conference on science in the 21st century at the Perimeter Institute; then I'l be in Johannesburg from the 12th to the 14th for the International Association of Science Parks annual meeting.

I'm doing workshops at both of them, and both promise to be very interesting events. And I've never been to Africa, so it'll be interesting to see even the little bit of South Africa that I'll see from the conference.

However, no matter how cool the journey, 3:30 a.m. is a brutal time to start it.

airport, Canada, SFO, Travel, Travel

Working today

I'm trying to finish a conclusion to a big report, and often find that I think better when I stand.

via flickr

There's definitely something about writing on a big space that is psychologically different from writing on a piece of paper. And when you're standing it's easier to pace around, look at things from different angles, and throw a lot of ideas up on the wall.

IFTF, paper spaces, work, writing

Workshop

I'm back in my hotel, after the workshop at NUS. The workshop went quite well: it was an excellent group, and we got some very good ideas and scenario work out of them.

For me, these things are exhausting. Not only does each one require several days of prep but they demand a full day of being ON, which is pretty draining. In the room you have to be hyperactively engaging, listen carefully to everyone, draw people out, convince the skeptics, synthesize the conversations, etc., etc.. Plus beforehand you've got to think like an events planner (should these tables be moved? do we have enough water? will the air conditioner make too much noise?) and roadie (how do I move these tables?).

And before that, you've got to plan out every step of the day-- not so much with the expectation that you can operate the day with military precision, but to give you a clear enough sense of what you're doing to make it possible for you to successfully improvise when something unexpected happens (like when you're scheduled to restart at 1:30, but the waiters only bring out the main lunch course at 1:20).

Even for me, who was described by a college housemate as having two emotions, on and off (she later added a third, strobe), it requires a lot of energy.

But I really like doing these workshops-- not because they're easy, but precisely because they're hard work, and several different kinds of work. The technology for supporting them is changing rapidly, and there are some huge opportunities to do interesting new things. And a good workshop has some of the best of teaching, which I think I'll always regard as the noblest of activities.

I'm going to rest up for a bit, then go have dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Chjimes.

Singapore, Travel

Working in my new home office

via Flickr

I really like this new setup!

Building my new home office

Since we moved into our house in 2001, we've used part of the garage as a home office. Actually, functionally speaking much of the house is a home office at one time or another, but my desk and books are in the garage. Some of my books, at least: I've long had more books than is good for me, and not enough space for them, so at least half of them have been in a storage shed or the Institute. (An occupational hazard: my father and stepmother have a two-story octagonal library in their house, and have also filled the basement with books!)

I've long dreamed of having enough space for all my books. A couple weekends ago, we went to Ikea and bought some shelving. We bought it right before I went to Europe, so we didn't get it assembled before I left; but on Saturday we got it built. Finally, I've got space for all my books. I've got to put two rows on each of the shelves, but I've had to do that since Berkeley, so I'm used to it.

my daughter alphabetizing books, via flickr

So now I have bookcases and working space on three sides: the armoire, the new tall bookcases beside those, and the short white bookcases forming the other arm of the U. Heaven.

my son in my new intellectual control center, via flickr

I'll spend the next few days happily alphabetizing the books, then figuring out the ideal way to arrange them around me. Actually, I'm not likely to ever find an ideal system; I'll keep reorganizing them forever, as projects come and go.

Update: A Finnish friend informs me that the design for the Ikea bookcases I just bought is, shall we say, an homage to bookcases long sold by a Finnish company, Lundia. Their Web site doesn't seem to have an English section, but their designs-- particularly their chairs-- look edgier than most Ikea furniture these days. Maybe the difference is that Ikea design, for all its Swedish origins, is now a generic global modern, manufactured in and designed to appeal to buyers in China and Copenhagen alike, while Lundia's is more purely Finnish.

ikea, menlo park, office, work