Humans + AI

“If people valued that their lens and the strength of their lens is their competitive advantage, they would probably take better care of themselves. The mindset that I want to invite through this conversation is that if we only treated ourselves as well as we treat our gadgets, we probably would have a better time thriving on overload.” – Jennifer Sertl About Jennifer Sertl Jennifer Sertl is president and founder of the leadership development company Agility3R, director of marketing at Circle Optics, and adjunct professor of Innovation at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the co-author of the book Strategy, Leadership and the Soul. Website: Agility3R Podcast: Think. Build. Launch LinkedIn: Jennifer Sertl Twitter: Jennifer Sertl  Book: Strategy, Leadership, and the Soul What you will learn Why is your personal processing and filtering also your competitive advantage? (03:10) Why thriving on overload is ultimately trusting yourself (04:32) How filtering using the 18 points is an excellent starting point (06:42)  How your identity affects the way you filter information (09:15) How to tag people you trust to reference and find interesting information (12:58) How to take reciprocity to a higher level (17:46) How to connect the dots to build a constellation of interesting ideas (20:50) What actually is reflection and why is it so important? (23:58) Why you and your ideas are inherently interesting (26:48) Resources The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman Transcript Ross Dawson: Jennifer, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Jennifer Sertl: Thank you so much Ross for having me. I always think of the Knights of the Roundtable. When I think of the lineage of scenario planning where you and I learned someone that was part of the team that actually coined the phrase “scenario planning”, I feel like you’re a brother in that domain. Ross: Yes, scenarios are one of the most powerful ways to make sense of the world. The classic idea is once you’ve established a set of scenarios, that provides a filter for perceiving what fits with the scenarios, what is more likely to lead to one of the scenarios unfolding, making sense of the world. I certainly feel that scenario planning is one of the most valuable tools to filter and make sense of a world of information. Jennifer: Absolutely. Ross: Jennifer, I’ve known you for a long time. I always think of you as one of the most visible and obvious contributors to the global brain in terms of being able to filter and make sense of the world and share what it is that you find, which people will find useful to contribute to their mental models and thinking. Where does that start for you? What’s that process? Perhaps starting from the attitude behind your seeking and finding and sharing. Jennifer: Absolutely. One of the things that I feel especially in the world of gadgets is that people almost feel that they have nothing to contribute but their ability to interpret. What I really want to invite people to do is to realize that your competitive advantage is the accuracy in which you scan your environment, the way that you process what you scan, and make decisions. Ultimately, if people valued that their lens and the strength of their lens is their competitive advantage, they would probably take better care of themselves. The mindset that I want to invite through this conversation is that if we only treated ourselves as well as we treat our gadgets, we probably would have a better time thriving on overload. Ross: How we can treat ourselves well in a world of overload? Jennifer: I was lucky enough to be given a reviewer’s copy of Thriving on Overload. What was so great is that so many of the attributes that you talked about are things that are part of the practice. One is inviting everyone here to define their own sense of how to participate in the world. I was lucky enough. I know we had this conversation earlier that I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Thomas Friedman, who wrote The World is Flat, and this was back in 2005. One of the profound things about having that conversation with him is that he introduced me to John Hagel and the idea of the Power of Pull but I also realized that I was helping companies compete and that what I really should have been doing is helping companies condition, and that there’s a difference between preparing people to win or saying can you be in great condition. I went through a pretty significant change in my consulting practice as well as in myself. I named three words. The three words were resilience, responsiveness, and reflection. My ability to make sense of the world is how well I can be resilient, be responsive, and be reflective. You had mentioned the word filter before when we talked about scenario planning, and what naming and claiming kind of my lens of the world is, is that it allowed me to sharpen what it is that I need to practice, and what fits and what doesn’t fit. I don’t try and come into an organization or come into people and say that you should use my three words, resilience, responsiveness, and reflection, I actually ask what is your filter, and if they don’t have their filter, then there are some neat exercises I can do to help them create that filter. With it, it creates an internal True North, and once you have an internal True North, you trust yourself. One of the things about thriving on overload is the ability to have a sense of trusting yourself. Ross: Can you give me an example of that process in a nutshell of how you might take a leadership team through finding those filters? That way of viewing the world? Jennifer: Yes, I can give you the exercise that I use, but it comes with a caveat that it is very dangerous to do in teams. Because unfortunately, we are hardwired to be loved and lovable. That ends up doing in a power struggle, and I have never been in an environment, including my family, that is not some sort of power struggle. The exercise that I use is I love the number 18, you’ve probably heard this before, it’s that every 18 months, there’s a lunar eclipse somewhere; whoever decided that a golf course should have 18 holes; then if you actually get into a situation like COVID, where you’re drinking a lot of whiskeys, you realize that there are 18 shots in a whiskey bottle. The number 18 means a great deal to me. What I talk to people about is the idea of the Elite 18. Again, the caveat is this is a very private exercise, you can set it up in teams, but no one should actually disclose what they come up with is their Elite 18 of people that they admire or hope they can meet in their lifetime. Essentially, we are born for mirroring. That’s one of the reasons why, not to bring religion into it, but one of the reasons why the Madonna, a figure is so important is that there’s the idea of someone looking into a child, and a child really doesn’t know a child exists until it has the gaze. Behaviorally, we are hardwired for modeling. When you take the time to think of who are the models that you admire, this is where it gets tricky in teams, people want to know who’s on your list or who’s not on your list. I say that it’s very tricky business to be thinking about who would be on your Elite 18 lists. But once I’ve seen people’s perceived Elite 18 list, meaning that I probably never get the truth of who they really want on their list, I can usually help people determine what are the most significant three words because each person represents a latitude and a longitude, and it makes it accessible to be able to get at what is their core identity, and then how can they cultivate, protect, and strengthen that particular identity? Ross: Bringing this to the information or the overload, I use the word purpose as the first frame and what it sounds like you’re talking about is identity, is that what are you identifying and understanding so that you can filter the world? Jennifer: Yes, if your competitive advantage is your ability to have a sense of accuracy relative to X, it’s really important that you name what X is. Even as far as technology goes, at the end of the day, it’s all about a sense of belonging and identity. It’s so hard for me to separate a filter from a sense of belonging and being. Although these terms are intellectual, they’re very private to how a person believes that they can create value, and the whole creation of value is being lovable at a core human level. Ross: This outcome of the words that define yourself, how is this applied? Yes, of course, it’s applied throughout everything you do in the sense of being able to determine what is relevant to you. Does this then become something that you refer to or just implicit in terms of understanding what’s relevant to you? Jennifer: You had mentioned at the beginning, I have a very global brand. I built it simply by being true to resilience, responsiveness, and reflection. When I began to put things through the portal that was either my LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever it is I do, I put it through that filter. What it creates is like a lighthouse, there’s a sense of affinity, and people have an affinity toward my lens. I know that no matter who’s listening if they took the time to codify their lens and they used it as a filter by which how they participate externally in the world, it would help them create more of a pull strategy. Internally, I know when I do my own journal practice, that we do have to create a time in which we reflect on how we perceive that we’re being. When I used that same tool? Where was I resilient? Where was I responsive? How can I be more reflective? When I ask those questions, there is never a time when I haven’t had something to say, both plus and delta: Plus being something affirmative in which I noticed that I did it well, and the Delta being the triangle for change is that I still have work to do. My lens does not have an inner critic because I know if I’m afraid of judgment, I won’t be as accurate as a read in the macro environment, so my job is accuracy and truth. Truth can be critical, truth has to be accurate. Ross: I struggled a bit when I was writing chapter one of Thriving on Overload on purpose, and part of it says the purpose is not what the book is about. It’s about information, like purpose is relative to information but began with that idea of identity, this idea of you need to know who you are, and the information is filtered by the perception of your identity but also shapes your identity. As you see new things, you could learn more about who you are. That journey of identity is one that you can look at from many frames. But in just simply that information frame, it’s fundamental in terms of saying you need to know who you are, to know what’s relevant to you, and as you discover that information, that helps shape your identity. We’d like to move on to you as a curator, it’s one word, there’s more to it than that. But you uncover wonderful things to be able to share on your channel. What’s that? Let’s get quite tactical here. What do you look at? How do you find these interesting things? How do you determine what’s relevant to your community? How do you share that? What are your daily practices to do that? Jennifer: Thank you so much for asking. I know sometimes talking about Twitter now is somewhat volatile but I was an early adopter. In 2009, what I began to do is I tried, believe it or not, very hard not to be a woman and try not to be an American in that when I participated, I participated at the idea level. As I began to be a beacon, I noticed people started following me back. What I ended up doing is I started collecting people that I found interesting and then putting them into categories, both from where they were, from what country as well as what their thought model was. I have a group of system thinkers, I have a group of people that are design thinkers, and I have a group on sustainability. Now I’m in the world of 360 imaging, I now capture thought leaders that are talking about that photography. This is my secret sauce. I just got really good at being able to see the identity of the person I was following, and then put them into categories that were important to me. It became easy to then collect what are these people that I find interesting thinking about daily. What also is a word that is underutilized now is reciprocity. It isn’t I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine, and that is very transactional. We were using the word Metasphere before it got a little bit contaminated. But in the new sphere, in the collective intelligence of the groups that we participate in, if we found things that were interesting to them, if you can identify a person’s core theme and core purpose, if you found interesting things, you could tag them, and through, believe it or not, well over 15 years of tagging and collecting and nurturing people and ideas, it ends up being this incredible feedback loop where, I hate to say it, but I wake up and I have the most important information literally at my fingertips because I’ve created those filters and people tag me as well. I’m so lucky that I’m involved and people know that they’ll be attributed so it isn’t about hoarding information, it’s really about being someone that, say, people trust Jennifer’s Sertl with information because it goes further with her, she becomes an important agent of that information. When that happens, you don’t have to look, you have to look at who you trust. That’s why the next layer is that I can’t possibly process all the information but I know who I trust. One of the reasons we’re talking is that early on, Ross, you were someone I trusted, it was accidental that we learned that we had some people in common. It was your commitment to visualize information, and it was beautiful. You made it shareable. You made it easy to extend your brand and make sure that you were being attributed because it was all so frictionless to make sure like sometimes the sharing is frictionless, but the attribution piece is missing. For people that really care about attribution, it’s hard, because then you have to make sure that you attribute and do all that. What you did so wonderfully and continue to do so wonderfully well even in Thriving on Overload is the images that you create are so prescient, they’re just condensed information, beautiful to share, easy to share. Ross: I mentioned in the book the idea of diffused reciprocity, but yours is more specific. The essence of what you’re describing is when you see something which is interesting, you know who it is interesting to, because as you say, these are not just identities that share information, they’re not just tweet streams, they are people. Because you understand what these people are interested in, when you see things, you share with those people, Oh, I think someone would be interested in that, so and so. You are actively giving, this is precisely contributing to the global brain in the sense of saying, it’s not just here’s something I’ll throw out there but I’ll throw it in this direction, this direction, and this direction because I know it’s there. That reciprocity comes when people say, Oh, I know that Jennifer would be interested in that. She shared with me, I will share with her. You become then in that center of that sharing, and particularly knowing who is going to be interested in something described in the book. Fred Wilson, venture capitalist says the most important information I get is from people, and it’s just people who know what I’m interested in, they send me what I need to know and everything I need to know people send to me because they know what’s interesting to me, and these are the most interesting people out there. It is an interesting intersection which you’re describing here of the Thriving on Overload, how it is that we thrive in a world of information and the living networks, where it is those who are contributing not just by filtering for themselves but by filtering for the community, filtering for those people they know, by knowing their identities, by knowing what it is they’re interested in. Jennifer: It’s so amazing talking to you, Ross, because as I look at the background, you have a wonderful galaxy behind you. The decade for me, 2009 to 2019, was really about connecting those dots, participating, and creating clusters. This is a brand new idea, for everyone listening, this is a statement I’ve never said before, in this context with Ross right now, I think that the decade that we’re in now, 2022 through 2032, will be the constellation, making constellations, beyond curating, I think it’s making sense of things, sense-making, and beyond connecting those dots is actually creating iconic ways that people can actually both see the shape of the thing as well as make sense of it. It’s about making sense right now. Ross: Yes. The idea of the synthesis, of connecting the dots, then the constellations is how these dots are connected, oh, in this particular pattern, it’s a lovely description of that. For you, what’s that process going to look like? Obviously, what you’ve been doing for a long time anyway is being able to pull together those dots and making sense of them but just to speculate on this is a time of the constellations, of connecting the dots, what is it that we are doing, can do, and will do to be able to build these constellations? What do you think? Jennifer: I know that there was a time where there was this pressure to publish or perish, and you had to keep creating content and all, and I was someone that, you know I wrote a book in 2010, Strategy, Leadership and the Soul. I felt like I don’t like to write unless I feel compelled. As you’re asking this question, I’m thinking, I look forward to knowing what my role is with the constellations because the only thing I can feel right now is that I want to invite people to have more courage. For me, the answer to your question is to create time and space for processing and to not force anything but be open to it. Then what I need to have the patience for that next thing to emerge is the word courage. We’re in a place where we might feel frenetic to have an activity or feel that we’ll be left behind if we don’t do a certain thing, and I feel in the sense-making, the truth of it all is that what we need is quiet, and what we need is trust. I believe that the collective unconscious is speaking through us, the next layer wants to be known and it probably has a new language. I’ve never been disappointed by allowing quiet to inform the next iteration of whatever it is that I’m doing personally, or whatever it is that needs to be said. Ross: This comes back to what you said, the third R is reflection. Several things we’ve already talked about, including what you’ve just been saying is about reflection. I’d like to dig into that word, reflection. What does that mean to you? What does that mean when you’re explaining that to somebody? What is that practice? What are the inputs to reflection? What are the outputs to reflection? Jennifer: What’s so important is that we’re learning more and more. In the United States, even doctors are now prescribing the idea of going out to nature. When you’re working, and hopefully many people are working in hybrid spaces, it’s really important that you have downtime, and that you actually design downtime. If people work full time, I remember them really liking having to drive to work from having a meeting with me and having that time between driving to go, and now people are doing Zoom meetings, they may be less likely to create space between things. The first is to always make sure that there’s space in between things. The other is to make sure that you’re in an environment where you can be in nature, even if you’re in an urban environment where you can’t go in nature, that you create a way to listen to water rustling. There are wonderful noisemakers that have all kinds of natural sounds, and I would invite you to take sound baths. If you don’t have access to nature, take an environment and force function it. It literally feels like a forced function. It’s counterintuitive. Be sure that you’re reading poetry in addition to fiction, in addition to whatever you need for your technical trades. I believe that poetry forces the pauses in between and that just being exposed to that type of nonlinear architecture does something to the brain. All the rules that you have in your book around managing technology, you have to actually say to yourself, I’m valuable, and my senses are valuable, and I will take care of myself the same way. The most literal example is that I used to work with a manufacturing company that had a glass-cutting machine called a CNC machine. They knew when it had to be unplugged, and when it needed to be cooled down. You have to be unplugged, you have to cool down. The practices for me are journaling, writing, and always making sure that I create space. I too am someone that does have a lot of alone time. Everyone probably experienced me as an extrovert with a capital E but the truth is, I have an enormous amount of alone time. It’s because I value processing. I’m not doing anything at that time except just knowing something’s happening. It’s almost Eastern religion, or is it there’s never nothing going on? I just trust that so much. Ross: It’s, in essence, giving yourself the space, particularly for that reflection, for what comes up, for processing. Is that right? Jennifer: Yes, totally. Solid, liquid, gas. The solid is in physical spaces making sure that you’re actually creating space between. The liquid might be like the journaling, where you’re actually creating a space on a page, that you’re like, Okay, I don’t know what’s going to happen, maybe nothing’s happening, this is boring, I want to go, but there’s space on a page. Then the gas is really just being in silence, silence would be the gas. If we wanted to make it a physical component, that would be the three ways in which I’d say we need that. Ross: Fantastic. I want to round out by, you sharing what you believe other people could find useful from what you do. You have a very distinct, unique frame, perspective, and practices that are yours. What of what you do do you think others might find useful in their practices in daily life and the world of emotional information? Jennifer: I love that. There are so many ways to answer it. If I don’t feel like something, if I’m not a contagion, and you don’t feel like I want to find out more about her, my hope is that even on this call, I’ve given a couple of suggestions that people should take advantage of. Honestly, the truth is to be interesting, don’t underestimate the way that you carve out your reality, somebody wants to learn from that. I feel like I’m not answering the questions, particularly. What I care about right now is data ethics. The themes that I’m paying deeper attention to really have to do with data ethics and just learning more and more about our biases, and how important it is to know about biases because biases are being baked in. I was always lucky as a coach to have a great coaching practice, but I’ve been able to translate that into being able to be a Director of Marketing for a couple of startups, and really creating coherence inside of a company as well. I invite people to find me, and they will see pretty clearly who I’m representing, and hopefully, they find it interesting. I know that you’re creating a new practice group with your Thrive On Overload. I would love an opportunity to help in any way I can with that practice. Because I do think the thing about you and I is that we’ve been to the future and are coming back, we have a lot of strength in how we lead this, and I do think people need strong models to help support them in creating new practices that are quite frankly, counterintuitive, and certainly counter-cultural. I invite anyway I can further the conversation around Thriving on Overload. I feel very lucky to be talking to you about this, and it’s within our best interest to care that deeply about Thriving on Overload. I think you’ve created a beautiful roadmap for people. Ross: Where can people find you, Jennifer? Jennifer: Yes. the neatest thing is just in my name Jennifer Sertl, and I can be found on LinkedIn as well as on Twitter. I’ve started to do more in women’s equity, and trying to get some funding for female founders. I have a podcast, think, build, launch to help support that practice. I love our communities and curating together so I’m sure it will lead to even better things. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insight, Jennifer. Jennifer: So great to see you. The post Jennifer Sertl on scenarios for sense-making, the power of reflection, sharing feedback loops, and building constellations (Ep44) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I like to say stories is data with soul. Particularly when it comes to understanding potentially where your organization could be in the future that’s emerging, how do we help human beings, which are essentially storytelling animals, make sense of all that information?  Stories are a really good way to do that. “ – Ari Popper About Ari Popper Ari is the Founder and CEO of SciFutures, a foresight and innovation firm that works with leading organizations such as Visa, Ford, and NATO to create inspiring and insightful visions of the future to drive innovation and positive change. He is a frequent keynote speaker and his work has been featured in publications such as Fast Company, Wired, and BBC. Website: SciFutures LinkedIn: Ari Popper Twitter: Ari Popper   What you will learn How does data storytelling create meaning (02:12) How tools prevent us from shutting down under overload (04:23) How do you identify important trends from today’s massive amount of noise? (07:11) What is the value of finding trends early enough to get first mover advantage (13:20) What are structural frameworks and buckets? (16:13) How to turn synthesis into beautiful stories (19:45) How to write a brief for prospective or existing clients (22:49) What are some available resources discussing the future of technology? (25:24)  What are some recommendations to thrive on overload (27:07) Episode resources AI 2042 by Kai-Fu Lee Twelve Tomorrows Series XPRIZE HAL 9000 – 2001: Space Odyssey The Terminator Transcript Ross Dawson: Ari, awesome to have you on the show. Ari Popper: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Ross: You run a very interesting organization called SciFutures. Tell us about that. What does it do? Ari: Firstly, I want to say it’s great to be here. I’ve been looking forward to chatting with you. Thanks for having me. SCIFutures is a foresight and innovation agency. We’re 10 years old. I founded the company on the belief, intuition, and gut feeling that science fiction could be a really powerful tool for organizational transformation. My background was in management, consulting, and consumer insights, market research so I knew the power of stories, in terms of making data come to life. I thought if it applies to market research, we can apply it to the world of foresight and futures. I was also a big science fiction fan. I understood how sci-fi can capture the imagination and bought you into these future worlds in a visceral way. What I tried to do is bottle that and sell it. That’s basically what SciFutures does at a very high level. Ross: So it’s getting you and your teams to write or convey stories about the future which are relevant to organizations so that they can be a little better informed or get a bit more perspective on the decisions today? Ari: Exactly. Definitely, better informed because as you put out in your book Thriving on Overload, when you have so much information, how do you make sense of it? One of the great things that storytelling can do is it can help us create meaning and data. I like to say stories is data with soul. Particularly when it comes to understanding potentially where your organization could be in the future that’s emerging, how do we help human beings, which are essentially storytelling animals, make sense of all that information? And stories are a really good way to do that. Sci-fi, in particular, has done really well as a genre, as an entertainment genre. Our company, what we did is we took it and created it as a business tool. At a very high level, that’s what we do. Ross: Pulling back to the present. Organizations and individuals are overloaded with information. One of the things you’re doing is using tools to be able to make sense of that. What are your reflections on this sense of overload that we experience as individuals? Even organizations, by extension, are also overloaded. Ari: When you’re overloaded, as we all know, at least certainly for me, we shut down. We can’t function. That’s because there’s too many stimuli to take in so we start to shut out stimuli, or the stimuli that we have, we just cannot process it fast enough or in time. Actually, not only do you become in a neutral state, you become completely ineffective. At least as an individual when I’m overloaded, I just got to literally put myself in a room, close the door, put on my music, and regenerate that way. Part of that is the way that we as human beings process information. Few of us are good at processing information in an intellectual cognitive way. That’s the tool of business, isn’t it? It’s slides and slides of data, and its management consultants talking to you and its engineers telling you about feeds and speeds, but it’s just too much. But what we are really good at is processing information in narrative, in stories. Stories help us make sense of the world. It’s a very successful medium. It’s one of the oldest technologies we have, the storytelling. Whatever most of us do and we’ve had a hard day at work, we come home and we put on the TV so we can watch stories. They are just the ways for us to process. Our approach to bring the future to life is to take the signals, trends, and information, create a structural framework for that, and then create stories to bring it to life so that you really enhance the key information that might have been lost. There are lots of different ways to tell stories and create a connection with information and content. But the basic premise of it is if you follow the system one, system two processing, system two is the cognitive, analytical side, and system one is just got an intuition, and more emotional, visceral; what we’re trying to do is take all that cognitive information and then create a system two way of putting it. Another analogy I like to use is the iron fist and the velvet glove. The iron fist is basically that great research that you’ve done in the trends and all that information you’ve hoovered up and organized, and then that other club, the way it’s delivered, is through the stories or storytelling. Ross: You’ve talked about the trends, then a structural framework, and then the story. Let’s unpack that, and coming from the trends, the information, the present, what do you do in terms of being able to identify what are the signals and all of the massive amount of noise that we have today? Ari: Yes, it’s a really good question. The strong philosophy and this is a bit controversial I know in the foresight space, but I’m of the strong belief that the best way to predict the future is to build it yourself. I know that there are other foresight practitioners who like to try and plan as best as they can and create scenarios, they can do mental gymnastics to create the right what-if scenarios and levers but I think, in reality, that can just be a system overload too. What we want to do is to create well-informed stories about potential futures that excite and inspire the organization. What’s the future we want to build? Let’s create visions, narratives, well-informed, we’re not making this up, and we’re not creating entertainment, but let’s create visions of the future that are inspiring and exciting. I wouldn’t say utopian, because we have a lot of challenges so we also need to be realistic in terms of what can be achieved and what can’t be. But let’s create what I call North Stars, well-informed North Stars. Those then become catalysts for the organization to galvanize and get behind. Now, whether those futures come to life exactly how they are imagined or not is almost immaterial. What’s more important is the fact that the organization is changing the way of doing things today. You asked today what our work is about. It’s about accelerating change today, towards more, I would say, disruptive, although that word has become a bit of a naughty word these days, but more transformational futures for the organization. That’s really where we specialize, it’s building those well-informed visions. Now, what are the building blocks of those visions? That’s the question you asked me. It can be trends, it can be the big macro forces of change. Every organization has a different language around emerging technologies, weak signals, and strong signals. We often interview experts, subject matter experts, we interview experts within the company, and all of that is the raw data that we then use to inform the vision. Another analogy I like to use is it’s like an artist’s palette of all the different paints and colors that you have and then those are all the signals and all that raw data, and then you can paint the picture using that as your toolbox. Even the process of doing that is incredibly valuable itself because what it forces the organization to do is to prioritize what’s in and what’s out. Oftentimes, they don’t know, but they happen to have those strategic conversations. Ross: In Thriving on Overload frame, your purpose is the frame, which makes you understand what information is relevant and which is exactly in an organizational context. Either you have a vision or you need one. Ari: Yes, or do you all agree that that’s the vision Ross: That is part of the process. That starts to then filter what information is relevant and what isn’t. But there’s still this question of this process. As you say you’ve got strong signals and weak signals, but before you discern whether it’s weak or strong, you still got to see that there is a signal. Is there any practice? How do you individually look for information? Do you scan particular sources? Do you have feeds? How do you see what might be input into this? Ari: We subscribe to companies that specialize in scanning, scouting, and signal identification. We also do our own, because oftentimes, there are common databases that companies have access to, but oftentimes, it’s unique people that you meet through your network. Our expertise is in identifying experts working on really interesting areas and bringing them in. It’s a combination of both. But we do a lot of our scanning, we create databases of companies around particular areas, we’ll use our client’s information too, but we typically buy into outside companies that do that all day, every day, and they’re good at it. That’s part of it. Certainly, you want to make sure that you have the right foundational content. Maybe you want to prioritize what you think is more important than other pieces of content but it’s quicksand, you can get completely buried and swallowed up in that work. Ultimately, just be reasonable about what the signals are and what our foundational material is. But then let’s say, Okay, if this is the case, now, what potential futures could we create? What do we want to be when we grow up? What will motivate us? What will make us money? What will inspire our company or inspire our customers and stakeholders? Now let’s create narratives of that future. Now you’ve got something tangible, a strawman or some North Star that you could then work towards. What’s unique about SciFutures is we do that, but we also help our clients prototype and build towards that future as well. Over the last 10 years, we know that the act of prototyping and starting to invent solutions around your North Star, that’s a creative act in itself, and the more you learn, the more you earn what you can and can’t do. Yes, ultimately, you might have had that as a North Star vision but now that you’re doing that hard work, you’re realizing that it’s probably going to look more like this. Then within the same time, the world is changing as well. The context is changing around you as you’re doing that. Ross: Part of the point is that when you’re looking at these visions or possibilities for the future, you’re hopefully writing a trend, or understanding where are the directions, what it is that you can ride, or harness, or unleash, or work with because that’s part of the signal. It’s not the present state but where things are heading and that’s where you can’t necessarily completely turn the course of history but you can maybe tweak it, or write that in various ways, but you still need those inputs as to where we are heading. Ari: And you need to be ready, ready to pivot, or ready to be able to jump on it. You don’t want to learn about something that’s transformational happening too late, because then it’s too late. If you can get in early enough and you have the language around it, organizationally, you have the competencies around it, then you’ll be able to jump on it may be quicker than your competitors and have a solution. It’s also developing competencies internally to be able to handle sometimes ambiguous, emerging, amorphous, but potentially very transformational ideas. Obviously, cryptocurrency is a great example of that, but there are lots of them. Of course, the danger with that is the hype cycle, you get a little too excited or exuberant, it’s too early and it doesn’t eventuate how you are, it’s kind of a balancing act. But what I’m most interested in and what our clients struggle with the most, and these are Fortune 500s, is like, we just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to have the same outcome or we did very well making money and became successful doing it this way, we really need to be open otherwise we can see the writing on the wall. What this work really does is it helps them rehearse the future and helps them practice, develop language, understand it, and experiment so that they can be a little bit more malleable and flexible. It’s easier said than done, of course, but that’s really what I’m excited about, is changing and getting out of that fixed way of operating into a more flexible, open way of doing things. Ross: I’m from scenario planning. Rehearsing the future was one of the phrases I learned very early in my training, that’s a wonderful crystallization of what it’s about. Ari: Yes. Exactly. Ross: You mentioned earlier the structural frameworks. This is making very much the framework for which I put together for Thriving on Overload, so frameworks, yes, love it. What are those structural frameworks? How do you put them together? What is the process? What do those look like? Ari: We don’t have a great process for it but we do have very smart strategists that we work with, that are very good at distilling. Their dream job is to take all that information, figure out the themes, figure out the commonalities, and then create meaningful buckets that the client can digest. For each client, those frameworks are different. It also depends on the brief of what we’re trying to achieve. I apologize, this is probably a terrible oversimplification of it but essentially what it is is it’s a way to tame complexity in a way. Those frameworks are where taming complexity in a way that you can double-click on different areas, you can still get the complexity underneath it but it’s to meaningfully organize a lot of information, that’s what frameworks are, and there’s a real art to it doing it well, isn’t there? There can be genius creativity in creating these beautiful, elegant frameworks. You know it when it’s done. It’s like, Ah, it’s perfect. But oftentimes, it takes a lot of time to get that right framing. We tend to let that happen organically. It’s almost like we’ll know when we see it, but it also depends on the client, what language they are comfortable with, what they use. Ross: You mentioned buckets? Ari: Yes. Ross: What’s a bucket? And what’s in a bucket? And how are buckets connected together? Ari: Yes, it could be big bets, it could be opportunity areas, it could be the macro forces. It’s the one we’re just working on, why is it slipped my mind? Maybe I’m not allowed to say that’s probably why it’s my unconscious telling me not to, not to talk about it. Essentially, there are big grouping areas that are contextual, may be mutually exclusive from the others, although it’s harder and harder to…because everything is intertwined but essentially, there are key ideas that can sit fairly independently on their own. That’s a good explanation of a particular area as distinct from other areas. We’ve seen them all, we’ve seen houses, Venn diagrams, pillars, there are just lots of different frameworks. Ross: I have to ask are any of these public? I’m sure they’re all for corporate server-internal use, but nothing there which…? Ari: Unfortunately not because it’s strategic to the client. It’s really where they’re going to focus their transformation efforts so it’s very difficult for a client to agree to share any of that work. It’s even more sensitive than sometimes they’re like, downstream work, like the stories and narratives. Ross: You want me to try to get a pro bono client or so we can share something? Because that’s a part of the crystallization. The crystallization, of course, is in the stories, these applications, this is the future world and all, I can see, yes, this is possible, this is what we’re going to do to be successful in that world. But the frameworks are part of what a lot of companies don’t necessarily recognize as a critical step between the vast amount of information and making sense in a way that’s useful to them. Ari: I totally agree, it’s that iron fist, because otherwise, you’re just sort of of finger in the air. Ross: What you are doing, of course, is synthesizing. You are pulling together unlimited information and synthesizing that into something coherent, ultimately a story. You already shared some aspects, is there anything else you can say about yourself individually, the people in your team, the process, or how it is that you are enacting that beautiful act of synthesis? Ari: It is a beautiful act, and it is a creative act. What I’ve learned through my career, and particularly my 10 years at SciFutures is that people have different skills and different passions. What I found is, for some people, their dream job is to literally spend all day doing research and looking for signals, and for other people, that’s a complete nightmare. For some people, I suspect it’s you, Ross, it’s to synthesize information and create structures and knitting beautiful, elegant frameworks. They love doing that. So, for me, what I found is finding the right people to do the right jobs. Then everyone’s happy, they’re in their flow, passionate about doing their research, they’re in their flow, passionate about creating the structures and the frameworks and the foundations. Then the storytellers, the creatives, they can take that, and this is your brief, the structures and frameworks is what you need to use as your source material for your imagination. What I found works best is finding the right people to do the right jobs and then you’ll get really good work. Where it becomes difficult is when somebody who hates research has to do the research, or somebody is not a structural thinker, they’re just completely wild creators, it’s just a nightmare. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to identify good people. Occasionally, you get people who are very good and are passionate about one, two, or three. They are almost unicorns in the world of our world. I actually think it’s a bit like a personality type that it’s rare for people that have multiple, it can happen, but it’s rare. Ross: Neal Stephenson or William Gibson? Ari: Exactly. Ross: Nice examples if you could put them all together. Ari: Exactly. They’re unique. I’ve seen a couple of them in my career, and then they just go off and have these amazing jobs, because they’re super rare, and people hire them and they have these fantastic careers. Our business model is we have a very small team but we have a lovely network. I like to say it’s like my jewel box of precious jewels, and it’s like, we’ve got the client, and it’s like, okay, sounds like we need this person, that person, and then we assemble the team, and then we do really good work. Yes, it’s fun. Ross: You’ve already described a little bit, but just to flesh out a little bit, that idea of a brief to the writer. You’ve got a sci-fi writer. As you say, if you just let them loose, they might go a bit wild. What is the nature of the brief that you give them? What do you give them so that they can write a story that’s relevant to the client? Ari: This is another thing we’ve learned over the last 10 years is that you can’t expect extremely creative science fiction writers to write what I would call, a strategic narrative as science fiction, they just don’t know how to do it, because they don’t know the language of corporations, they don’t know the language of consumers, marketing, innovation, foresight, so you need to find the right type of creative that understands the world of business and commerce because those are most of our clients, not all of them, most of them, and also very creative, and those people are fantastic. The brief will typically include these people who love information. We’ve created a nice brief, there’s usually a deck that supports it, and that’s the structure, the frameworks that we’ve developed. We share the frameworks. This is the opportunity area, this is the framework, these are the areas that clients are interested in, then they’ll use that, and then we’ll say, okay. Usually, we start with seed ideas, so rather than go out and create big works of art. To be clear, our stories aren’t always although sometimes they are just like short stories, they can be podcasts, magazines, articles, videos, or short videos, there are so many different ways to tell stories. We like solicit seed ideas. This is the foundational material, this is what the client is trying to achieve, and that’s really what the brief is, let’s hear some of your seed ideas. Now, with creatives, as you’d probably know, some are more introverted and want to do that on their own so they’ll go away, and they’ll do it on and then come back, and then some like to brainstorm and dance with each other, so we have a combination of both of that. Then ultimately, we’ll take those seed ideas, present them to the client, and go, look, these are all the different ways we can tell your stories, these are the different types of stories we can tell within the lens of the strategic work that we’ve done. Then basically, we pick the ones they’re most excited with. It’s a collaborative process because the client has politics to deal with their own internals… Ross: This is so inappropriate! Ari: Yes, exactly. But ultimately, you’ll get to this happy, middle ground where it’s well-informed, it’s creative, but it’s also going to fit the culture of the client. Ross: One book, it’s very generic, it’s not company specific, but is really nice is AI 2042 by Kai-Fu Lee, some beautiful, well-structured, pertinent scenarios for future AI. I’m just wondering if there are any other public reference points or other writers or things where you found that there are pragmatic, tangible applications of the future. Ari: A publication I really liked was Twelve Tomorrows which MIT used to put out, I don’t think they do that anymore, unfortunately, though, they were fantastic. But I quite like the short story anthology format myself. Because in a short story, there’s enough space to really tell a good story, but also flesh out ideas. I’m a huge fan of that. Some anthologies are quite good, some aren’t that good. The XPRIZE did some interesting work for a client, if you’ve seen those, I think it was for All Nippon Airways (ANA), they created a fictional website, where each seat on the airplane was a different story. That was cool. There are some interesting ones, but they’re rare, I haven’t seen that many of them. Every now and then Microsoft will do an anthology, which can be quite good. We’ve done a couple of public ones. We did one for NATO on the future of warfare, which we’re repeating right now, we’re doing it again, which is cool. It’s interesting to see how much has changed from when we did the first set of stories to where we are today and to reread those stories is fascinating. But yes, there aren’t that many, unfortunately. Ross: To round out, from your role and what you do, what are any wisdom, insights, or recommendations you would share with our audience on how it is they can thrive and prosper in a world of lots and lots of information? Ari: For me, it’s like, remember that humans are storytelling creatures. Don’t expect them to be able to process huge amounts of information. Although certain people can and they’re amazing and they typically are engineers but most people have short attention spans and the way to help them process information is through a story, well-informed, well-written stories, and when you say story, create a character that someone can relate to, give them a challenge, see them overcome their challenge or not, build a world that you can empathize with, and then implicit within that, there’s all the content or the messaging, I would strongly suggest that, that’s a very effective way to communicate in times of information overload. You’d be surprised how powerful it can be when you get it right. It just can become part of the public imagination and science fiction has done that, you’ve got the HAL, you’ve got the Terminators, they’ve totally created a vision and almost a belief that this is what technology can do when it goes wrong or eventually will do. No one agreed that, the person who was creating those stories didn’t intend to do that but somehow, someway, collectively, we’ve realized that that’s our future. They’re powerful both in the good sense and in the negative sense. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. That’s been a fascinating conversation. Ari: Pleasure. Thanks for having me. The post Ari Popper on storytelling for meaning, structural frameworks, taming complexity, and creative synthesis (Ep43) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I think this is a really valuable conversation for this moment where we’re talking about Web3 and the blockchain and all of this because there’s a fascination about using the metaverse to sell more things and to fashion more things. But what we need is a metaverse and a Web3 and a blockchain that allows us to collaborate to solve the world’s problems in ways that we haven’t before. We’re at a real tipping point, I think, for the net right now. “ – Frank Spencer About Frank Spencer Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Kedge, a global foresight, innovation, and strategic design firm, and co-founder and Lead Instructor of The Futures School, He has worked on strategic foresight projects for companies such as Kraft, Mars, Marriott, and The Walt Disney Company and has spoken about foresight around the globe for the last 20 years. Websites: Kedge The Futures School LinkedIn: Frank W. Spencer IV Twitter: Frank Spencer   What you will learn Why we are futures thinking from the perspective of what we do on a daily basis (03:14) What is the difference between complexity and complication? (04:48) What is a swarm and holoptic foresight? (07:00) What is a digital angel? (12:36) What are some best practices for filtering and scanning information?  (15:54) What are sense making techniques for interesting information? (19:07) How to balance our sensitivity to information with sense making (21:53)  Why we should look for where information collides with each other (26:46) Episode resources TikTok Digital Angels – talk by Alex Lamb How the Internet Will Save the World – talk by David Eagleman General Mills Walt Disney Company Zan Chandler Mural Transcript Ross Dawson: Frank, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Frank Spencer: Ross, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s an honor and I’m looking forward to our conversation together. Ross: You have thought a lot about information overload. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Frank: Yes, I love the focus of the podcast. This is a big topic for people. We’re living in a world that’s more complicated than ever before. I’m sure that some of your guests have probably talked about the difference between complexity and complication today, but I think when we think about information overload, we think about things being so complex. For me, it’s really interesting, because I saw a great TikTok by you yesterday, I’m just scrolling through, and of course, we’re friends on TikTok, and I love that you’re using that medium as well. You were talking about how to manage your day, and just make sure you don’t go over ten two minutes in the morning. I loved that. That was great. I think people are desperately seeking those kinds of ways to manage their time and the information that comes in, and the overload. Futures thinking is interesting. I know that you know this, but maybe there’s some of your audience that isn’t aware that when we think about the future we think about it from the perspective of what we do on a daily basis. We can think almost like three concentric circles. The inner circle is what I do, and what I’m really concerned about, my job, and the things that I have to do every day, it’s sort of that microenvironment. Then you’ve got this middle bubble, that’s like, this is my environment, this is the industry I work in, this is the people I talk to, and this is where the information is bombarding me. But then how we live in this digital environment as well with this outer circle that’s all of the stuff that seems unrelated to us but it’s just information that’s bombarding us all the time, the disruption, and things that people are worried about that weren’t necessarily things that 20 years ago, they wouldn’t have been caring about at all, but it’s a much more connected or interconnected world today. There are things that we often don’t think relate to us now, people realize they do. But as you know, Ross, good futures thinking and foresight really work from the outside in and not the inside out, because it helps us to redefine how we’re thinking about our environment. I think that’s why for me, really focusing on sense-making is a critical element of that information overload. What I love to say about that, and if we get a chance to go into it on the podcast a little bit is this idea that we formed 12 or 13 years ago, natural foresight, and a conference we just had on transformation is really helping people to embrace the complexity. I know that you know this, but for the audience, there’s a big difference really between complexity and complication. Complexity is the natural order of the universe. I was just showing quotes at the anticipation conference last week of all these social scientists and biologists, and they all were saying something very similar that greater complexity gives us greater ability to find unknowns, to do things, to tap into unseen possibilities and answers and solutions. We definitely don’t want to weed out all of that noise because if we did, we would miss all of this great stuff that could happen, this very transdisciplinary approach. I think oftentimes what we think is complex. It’s really complicated. That’s us trying to overmanage the situation. We put another button in and we fax another sheet and we put another lever in to try to control it, it gets complicated, it’s very complicated, and that’s what gives us the overload, I think more so than the complexity does. What I would suggest for managing that overload is to think about the environment differently. When we develop this sense-making for complexity, and we embrace it as a friend, not as an enemy, we tend to look at things very differently. Now, I do think there are some very practical things that we can do to make the rubber hit the road here. Those deal with broadening our network, having a greater swarm around this, so that we’re able to tap into this information that’s needed, but we don’t have to house it all by ourselves all at one time, have multiple ways of seeing the world, multiple voices in our network. That’s a very different way than the good information or the good advice of managing your time, and I think those are all legit, of course, but also this idea of seeing complexity in a very different way and instead of shutting it, developing our sense-making ability to say, how’s this complexity broadening the way I see things so that I don’t feel overwhelmed by that information, and internalizing that information with networks and connections and swarms that are allowing me to think in a way that I’ve never thought before. It actually enlivens and empowers us rather than overwhelms us. Ross: Let’s dig into that. One of those themes is around the swarms. Let’s dig into what’s it like to have that swarm of other people or ideas. How does that work? How somebody can put that in place in their life and work? Frank: That’s a great question. It’s so important. We hear about holism being more important in organizations today and the multiple ways or models that we might get that in place. For over the past decade, we’ve been talking about something that we call holoptic foresight, and it’s a really fancy term. But to break it down, what it refers to is the eye that sits on the head of a dragonfly or a damselfly, those insects are unique, some other insects have this kind of holoptic eyes, but a holoptic eye is an eye that is 360 degrees at all times. Dragonfly has an eye that covers the entire head, he can see forward and backward, up and down, right and left. But the really interesting thing is not that we can’t look behind us, we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads as a dragonfly does, but the dragonfly doesn’t look at those parts separately, they rather look at it as a whole. Could you imagine if we had that? It would probably drive us crazy, but maybe not because we would’ve been designed for that. To have an eye that has 360-degree vision allows them to see the environment very differently than we see with our eyes. Even though our physical eyes aren’t probably ever going to evolve to that state, and we weren’t made for that, is there a way that we can model that holoptic eye of the dragonfly? When you zoom in on the eye, it’s really interesting because you see all of these little clusters and cells, and they are the individual parts of the eye that make up a whole. Likewise, is there a way for us to develop swarmed or holoptic networks that allow us to say, look, your diversity, my diversity, her diversity, his diversity is very important to coming together and bringing a common whole or cooperation? Ross: What does that look like for an individual? Let’s say an individual says, this sounds great, I want to be able to get this many facets to see the world through, what do they do? How do they put that in place? Frank: In organizations, we’ve got to think much more about hybrid value chains. There are many ways that we can think about this. But now we see these “Four P” models that are taking place of public, private, partnerships, and I forget what the fourth P stands for, but you see these “Four P” models all the time. It’s really beyond just public-private partnerships to saying, how can we get out of these siloed molds because our educational organizations are siloed, our organizations are siloed, and we, for so long, have leaned on and honored and esteemed the siloing because it allows us to think just about my one area, and I can really dig down deep. That’s valuable but research has even shown that the more we silo, the more we exacerbate our problems. Because we’re missing all of this information that could connect in between, that creates new solutions we’ve never thought of before, instead of trying to solve our problems from within the context of the problem. Our organizations have to be more fluid, they need to be more open. We need to create organizational models that allow us to connect outside of what that organization traditionally thinks is its DNA, or what they’re doing. That means new work models too, that means new talent acquisition models, that might not be, you work for this company, but I work for seven different companies, and not just so the individual can have the freedom to work for seven companies, but the companies benefit for you working in them. I know there’s IP protection and all of this, I get that we get in those things but we have to start thinking about how we unsilo these things. In terms of governments, very similar, but from me as an individual, we’ve got this great thing called the internet, maybe you don’t think it’s so great because it’s done a lot of damage, we see what’s going on with Twitter right now, we’ve seen how it’s directed behind the scenes, even elections and governments and wars and those kinds of things but the original idea, and I think David Eagleman had a great talk in 2011 at The Long Now Foundation, you can find that talk online, probably on Youtube, he talked back in 2011 about a civilization that has never had a tool like this before, that allows us to swarm in ways that elevate civilization to a new place. Back in 2011, he wasn’t thinking about what might happen with Elon Musk and Twitter in 2022, what might have happened with the elections in Australia or the United States and other places in 2018 and 2020 but certainly, he was saying, we have these tools, we have digital tools, we have organizational tools, but we really need to shift the way we think about siloing to connecting more. We could go off on a whole tangent about how we need to build what I might refer to as digital angels instead of digital devils or digital demons and how that kind of model of the internet could connect us in ways to swarm so that I don’t have to have all of it in my head, I can rely on the swarm to build that holoptic eye for me. That’s a way of managing information. That’s not just about siloing that information, but rather, letting the information breathe among a diverse cohort of people that will open up new areas for jobs, talent, new ideas, new products, and new innovations. Ross: What is a Digital Angel? Frank: You watch the media, and they’ll tell you all the bad news so you got that out of the way. The good news is behind the scenes, there are tons of people working on tons of great things around the world, and we just don’t hear about that very often. This idea of a digital angel actually came from a sci-fi author friend of mine, and I think he was writing a book on at the time, I don’t know if he ever finished it. But I was speaking at a conference in New York a couple of years ago and he said we know what a digital devil is, and we see them all the time, and bots online, and misinformation but what we need to do is develop these nodes, individual nodes, and also regional collective nodes, swarms that are watching out for ethics on the net. That doesn’t mean necessarily censoring, but finding how we can get information to the forefront is true, and protecting this environment so that it can be helpful for people to collaborate in, to build in, to model in. Ross: That’s a great idea. Who is the author of that? Frank: It’s going to come to me in just a minute. If not, I’ll let you know after the show is over. I’ll look it up and you can put it in the notes or something. Ross: That’ll be great. Are you aware of any actual examples of this in practice? Frank: It’s interesting, we wrote a scenario for a company a couple of years ago, a large international food company. One of the scenarios that we wrote, of course, you know in scenario writing, a lot of research goes behind it, it’s much like science fiction authors do, they’re not just making wild stories, they do a lot of research about technologies and where things are going, and in this particular one, we looked up several different examples of people that were actually building ethics on the internet. I can’t remember the particular names right now. But that’s another thing that I could send to you after the show’s over, maybe we could reference some of those. But there are great examples of people that are working on, again, what we might refer to as these digital angel organizations to really flip the net. I think this is a really valuable conversation for this moment where we’re talking about Web3 and the blockchain and all of this because there’s a fascination about using the metaverse to sell more things and to fashion more things. But what we need is a metaverse and a Web3 and a blockchain that allows us to collaborate to solve the world’s problems in ways that we haven’t before. We’re at a real tipping point, I think, for the net right now. Hopefully, we’ll see more and more people get involved in Web3 development that are really truly saying, when I say decentralized, in that I mean so that we can work together in this sort of holoptic or swarming way to bring our diversity together to create a new whole that we’ve never seen before. Ross: Fantastic. I want to dig into your practices. You help many organizations think about the future which involves being aware of what’s happening in the present. I’d love to hear you, potentially you and your colleagues together, what is your practice? You’re immersed in overload more than almost anyone, and the fact that you have to be across everything, and you clearly thrive on that, so what’s your practice? Even take me through the day, or what are the things that you do to be able to achieve that? Frank: That’s exactly right. I’m glad you asked that question. Of course, the organization that we formed probably about 12 years ago, Kedge is our mothership. That’s the main company. We are a foresight and innovation strategic design firm. We’ve worked with companies like General Mills, and the Walt Disney Company, and intelligence agencies, I was going to say which one, but oftentimes, I’ve said it to them, and they’re like, you have to say, intelligence agency, don’t tell us what agency it was, or we have to come after you, and organizations like that, that you’ve worked for as well. Fortune 500, 100, SMEs and governments, and all kinds of people. That does mean that daily, we’re looking across a swathe of different kinds of information and then connecting it. Because a lot of regular daily scanning that we might do, which happens off and on. I don’t normally because it’s my job, set a time aside during the day when I scan, that’s just me, I’m more of a type B person, I guess, everybody else in the organization is very type A, and they always are like, oh, here comes Frank, he is going to disrupt the whole thing. I’m more of the kind of person that just as I’m going along and doing my daily routine, the scanning comes that way. Of course, if we’re working with a client, we’re going to not say that to them, we’re going to say, hey, look, here’s how you set aside a time during the day where you can scan around information, here’s the kind of information that you want to scan. But scanning is an important part of our day. Ross: One of the really important points I make in the book Thriving on Overload is don’t just look at printed information or information on screens, get up and look around and get out there, that’s one of the best possible ways to get a sense of what’s going on in the world. Frank: So true, it’s my favorite way. We’ve actually even dug into that so deeply that we’ve had multiple clients that we take out on field trips, in California, here in Florida where we reside, and across the world, we’ve taken them to certain places, in downtown areas, festivals, and teach them really how to look for what are people wearing? What are they doing? What are they consuming? What kinds of businesses are attracted here? What does that mean when you think about new patents and ideas and innovations and products? It’s really great to be able to walk down a city block and to be able to see how it’s impacting them, what’s on the fringe, what’s arising. Ross: When you’re seeing or are you scanning? When you see something interesting, what do you do with it? Frank: Yes, if we see something interesting, we do several things with it. For one thing, we put it in our scanning repository, and there are lots of ways that you could capture it. Scanning information, we make sure we tag it, which means that if we’re working with a particular client, we might put tags on it for us to go back to and say this was about the future of shampoo, or this is about the future of dog food or this might be about the future of rhinos because we worked a couple of years ago with the top 40 rhino experts in the world, they’re using foresight to think about rhino conservation. We might tag it with those kinds of things or whatever the focal issue is about or generally, if we’re just scanning and it’s not for a client, I see interesting pieces of information that I know are going to come back up again, and it’s just important for no matter what client we get, then we might tag or put those in the repository with ideas around whatever they are that they’re speaking to us. Because I will say that one of the most important parts for me, scanning is not what the thing I see or the thing I read says on the surface, is what’s in between. As a matter of fact, when we teach scanning we teach people to really scan three different ways. We talk about scanning around what’s on the surface, the trends and those things, and, of course, if you’re in competitive intelligence or consumer insights, you’re like, I already do that, but do you scan around the values as well? That’s the next layer down because we know that value creation comes out of trends and values create or emerge or bubble up to new trends, so what are those values? Oftentimes, when we’re reading or looking, we’re really looking for these things that are in between, what values are emerging, and what does it mean? And then we’re also looking at the impacts on humanity. It’s really three different ways of scanning. Then we collect those, we put them in repositories, that go into pattern building, which means multiple values, trends, and impacts that create emerging landscapes of change. These things are interrelated in some way. That really takes us back again to that sense-making piece. We’re not just collecting trends and saying, here are the top 10 trends because that’s not enough, that’s just scratching the surface. We need to understand how these trends are interacting because, in the real world, none of this information that is bombarding us are in pieces. They’re all colliding, converging, and intersecting. Because of that, it’s more important to see how they’re patterning than how they are impacting alone. 3D printing and the metaverse, yes, those are individual things, but how are they colliding with one another? And what does that really mean for healthcare and construction and government, etc.? Ross: I want to come back to the sense-making in a moment, but first, I suppose you’re pointing to these ways in which we are sensitizing ourselves; rather than just looking around, we’re looking around and we’re looking for values, we’re looking around and we’re looking for trends, we are becoming more sensitive to the world. I think that’s a fundamental part, of course, just to be able to understand what’s going on, to be able to see it in a frame that helps us to make sense, but that starts to mean that there’s not just overload but there’s just more and more. As we sensitize ourselves even more, there is more and more to see, there’s more and more to notice. How do we deal with that? There are plenty of people that go through the world with tunnel vision and that makes it a bit easier for then in some ways but once we sensitize ourselves, we’re seeing so much. How is it that we balance that? Frank: One of the things I was suggesting, I know people often hate this phrase, but they can’t swallow the ocean, I think that’s the phrase. We can’t do that. That’s why I think it’s important to understand the information we’re seeing in the context that we’re in. Now, of course, as you just suggested, it can change our context somewhat. I love this phrase that I heard a long time ago: we must hold tightly to our vision but be ready to let go of strategy at a moment’s notice. Applying that to this situation, I think it really means that the information we’re taking in doesn’t change the context or doesn’t change the vision necessarily but it does change our strategy around it, which could very well broaden the vision and alter the vision and help us to see the vision in a way we weren’t thinking of before but it’s still that vision. It doesn’t mean that the information when we take it in that way is going to overwhelm what it is that we’re trying to accomplish. It means that we’re making sense of it in our context. We’re not just making sense of the world, oh, I understand my identity in this context, I was really struggling with this for a moment but now I can understand how this makes sense for the world, but we have to center this thing around what it is that we’re doing and we’re trying to accomplish our vision. Ross: The vision then is the vision of your objectives, objectives of the organization, so you say that you have clarity on that, that then starts to make that. One of the points I’m making forever on overload is that it’s a shift from overwhelm to abundance, in the sense of you’ve got overwhelmed because you got too much but if you have a sense of purpose, then everything, basically you’ve got as much information as you possibly want. Now that clarity around that vision or purpose or direction, whatever it is, then starts to essentially mean that everything is a resource and everything shapes something in the middle rather than just not having any you know or It’ll all just be in a mishmash. Frank: Yes, that’s beautifully put. We just had a retreat, our first in-person get-together since COVID took place. The reason we were super comfortable with it is that we all went to a retreat center in Northern California, above San Francisco, and it was the rolling hills and it was beautiful. We had all kinds of people come there and met with Zan Chandler, who is a professor at OCAD, one of the association’s professional features board members was there with us, and we had just a great cross-section of different people there. One of the world’s most awarded and renowned slam poets was there with us. It was really a cool collection of people. They all brought a very diverse way of seeing things. Of course, every one of them came with their passion or purpose as you put it there, their passion, I love that. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. During that time we were there, we talked about the fact that we are nature, and to not silo, and we’re nature, we’re anticipatory, and if that’s the case, we can co-create together, we can collaborate, and we can cooperate without losing our diversity. It was amazing to see people leave the retreat and say, I feel more passionate now about the thing that I was passionate about when I came in than I did before I got here because now I realized that all of your passions can help me understand my passion better, and connecting with the cosmos in a greater way, and understanding that I’m not disconnected. Humans are a part of nature and nature as anticipatory has helped me to think about this in ways I never thought about it before. I love how you just put that. It’s not about just hearing the information and being overwhelmed, but it’s about receiving it and understanding the context of what makes us passionate and gives abundance to our passion. I love that you use the word abundance there, it just enlarges or empowers the scope of that passion. Ross: That’s fantastic. I really resonate with that. Often I have those interactions where I think, well, you’ve made me even more excited about what I was excited about before because of the complementarity. Coming back to sensemaking, that’s a phrase we understand but it’s very conceptual in a way. I’d like you to try to make it as grounded as possible, what advice can you give to people that are saying, I’ve got lots of information, I’ve got lots of bits and pieces of things, I’m trying to do this, what can I do to be able to make sense of that? Frank: One of the things that happens even in our practice because we have to make the rubber meet the road too, and of course, our clients are like, that’s great, Frank, sensemaking, can you make this very practical, as Ross just said? One of the things that we like to do is we like to keep a running mind map going. We actually have whiteboards all over the office. Right now you’re seeing me in the studio because over the last three years we built…I can look at 10 different cameras here, and actually Ross is over there so I’m just looking at the camera, but I see his face to the side because there are all kinds of screens. This is actually real behind me. That’s not a fake background, but it’s fake in the manner that there’s like a whole other studio behind it and such. I say that to say that I’m in here, out there down the hall and then the offices, just whiteboards like crazy. However, you do it, there needs to be a way for us to be able to take this information that we see. If we’re working on new models, or new organizational resources or operations, or we’re working on an entrepreneurial idea or innovations, how can we actually map these ideas and make sense of them? One way we do that is, we first talk about the collision of ideas or information that we’re getting. That’s what really makes what we might call pattern recognition. I want you to keep a whiteboard, or on a piece of paper somewhere, somewhere that colleagues can see this. Maybe you’re an individual in your house, or you meet on Zoom with people, or you have a group, a mentoring group, or maybe you’re in an organization, so now you’ve got a room where you can put this up, I want you to actually do that, and make sense of the collision of these pieces of information. Obviously, you’re thinking about it around what I might call a focal issue, but I love Ross’s use of the word passion here, so your passion issue, what is it you’re trying to accomplish? What are you passionate about? What are we doing here? First of all, look at the collision of these things, A, B, C, and D, they really speak to this pattern arising, this is the thing that’s happening that could really impact what we’re doing, so we’re mind mapping through that entire process. Every time that we go another layer down with that mind mapping, we’re really drawing out the sense-making, but we’re never losing sight that it has to relate back to our passion again. You could put this in circles or squares or however it best suits you but to find some way to actually mind map this information so that you can stand back and see what it’s speaking to, what is shifting, and what is changing speaks to the issue that you’re trying to relate it to, and what that might mean in terms of change, or adaptation, or resilience or transformation, I like to often say even a higher order purpose is like, this is what we’re trying to accomplish but gosh, now that I know this information, this can add to what we’re doing in ways that we never thought of before. But you’re not going to be able to do that if it’s just floating around your head, you’re going to need to be able to do this collectively with others, to put it down on paper, to mind map this thing on a whiteboard, to get it out somewhere where you can really see it. If I could take you on a journey out into the office out there, you would see all of these mind maps that wouldn’t make a lot of sense unless you were working with the clients. They look convoluted but to us, they’re beautiful paintings of how this connects to the issue and how we can actually make sense of this. Ross: I think that’s around the relationship between the ideas. You’ve got all these ideas, these insights, this data, whatever it may be, but it’s the relationships between them out of which sense happens. I use paper and digital tools, but I think there’s real power to putting it on as big as possible canvas to draw that out. Frank: I do too. I’m still a tactile person like that. I’m a child of the 70s and a teen in the 80s. Of course, I use digital tools now. We’ve had a long-standing decade-long relationship with Mural. We’re grandfathered in back when one of their first clients was the Walt Disney Company where we built a foresight team that spans 45 countries. They’ve been using Mural ever since. I love to use those tools, Miro, whatever it is that you use are all great. But there’s just something about being able to have that board in front of you, and you’re conversing, and you’re working together, you’re collaborating and cooperating. There’s something that’s not just the information that goes on the board but sort of the mirror that happens back between the board and the group, or you yourself, where it’s changing that environment, I love that you just use the word relationship, it’s so powerful, and being able to see those circles and those connections on the board that says, this is what this would mean for us, and this is how we make sense of this environment, and this is how we’ll need to adapt or be resilient, or transform, to take our opportunity to transform because all living things transform, and that goes for people and organizations and governments, etc., if they’re alive, if they’re living, they eventually have to transform, so that tactile element is so important for me. Ross: Yes, that’s fantastic. It’s been incredible just touching the surface of your practices, but I’d love to provide people a touch point to find out more about your work or even examples of that. Where can people go? Frank: The place you want to go nowadays online is thefuturesschool.com. Going into next year, I’ll give a little tease or hint that we’re not completely rebranding, but we’re going to pull a BCG, PWC, EY stunt here, because people have known us as TFS for the longest time, and actually, even though the mothership is Kedge, everybody knows it says The Future School now, so we’re rebranding completely towards that. The Future School is a great resource. This has been what we call the Year of Free for us. We just tabulated yesterday, since we’re getting to the end of the year. This year, people around the world have been nominating other people to go to one of our programs, our three-day training program that was born out of our work with large corporations, Fortune 100s, from years ago, we used to do this three-day program to kick things off for them. Then it went public about eight years ago, and it just went gangbusters. We’ve done it all around the world. Now we do it online. It’s our Foundations program. We also have a six-month activations program. Next year, we’ll have a lot more programs, because The Future School is a learning ecosystem. During this year, free people have nominated people to go to that. We’ve given away $200,000 in seats this year and had I think 95 people around the world get nominated this year. It was really cool. That’s a place where you can get free resources, go to the resource center, we gave away all our resources this year, and you can still get free resources until December 31. Just go to the checkout, and everything says $0. You can check out and get all kinds of templates and tools and great stuff, so thefutureschool.com, that’s where you want to go. Ross: That’s fantastic. I think that generosity of sharing is really important because these are such important capabilities. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Frank. It’s been a real pleasure. Frank: What an honor to speak to you today, Ross. We here, The Future School, my business partner who used to be the Head of Futures at the Walt Disney Company, we respect you greatly from afar, and it’s a great honor to be on your podcast. The post Frank Spencer IV on sense-making for complexity, holoptic foresight, digital angels, and colliding trends (Ep42) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I think the research will tell us now that the ancient people probably used art and symbols before language. It is something that we all know instinctually because of the world around us. It’s visual. If you situate ideas in something physical, it stays with you.” – Eileen Clegg About Eileen Clegg Eileen has been a long-time pioneer in visual journalism. She is the founder of Visual Insight, and is now also the CEO of vTapestry, which automates the creation of visual summaries of online meetings. She is the author of seven books including Claiming Your Creative Self and Creating a Learning Culture. Websites: vTapestry Visual Insight LinkedIn: Eileen Clegg Facebook: Eileen Clegg Twitter: Eileen Clegg Books: Claiming Your Creative Self: True Stories from the Everyday Lives of Women Master Symbols: A Visual Insight Field Guide Amazon author page   What you will learn What is visual note taking? (02:13) Is visual notetaking for everyone? Is it more inclusive than words or indiviualistic? (06:53) Are special skills needed to be a visual storyteller or note-taker? (09:15) How to start in visual notetaking with common archetypal symbols (13:00) What are some commonly recognized and powerful archetypal symbols? (14:47) Why generative AI is a signal that society has wider acceptance of visual note taking (18:35) What TapestryAI can do for meetings and distilling ideas (25:17) What are some practices that people could try to help them be more effective and balanced? (30:13) Episode resources Institute for the Future Carl Jung DALL-E 2 Midjourney Stable Diffusion The Guest House by Jalaluddin Rumi Amygdala Transcript Ross Dawson: Eileen, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Eileen Clegg: So good to see you, and thank you so much for having me. Ross: We first crossed paths around 20 years ago. You were the very first time I experienced somebody taking visual notes. On a big whiteboard at the back of the room you were drawing what it is that was being said and everyone was able to go back and have a look and see in just one picture the ideas of the keynote, and since then it’s now become not quite commonplace, but certainly, you see it around quite a bit. But you’re at the vanguard of that. I’d love to hear the story of how you came to be doing that. Eileen: Thank you for asking. I do remember those times and you as the thought leader about emerging technologies and their meaning for people. I was practicing an emerging technology that is now evolving into a new technology that’s beyond just paper and pastels. But back then, in the very beginning, there was a handful of us doing this on the planet. Now there are tens of thousands; our professional association has many, so it is much more common now. Interesting that it started at Institute for the Future (IFTF). While they were forecasting the world that we see today, what you were talking about then and the thought leaders, it’s all here, your life on a card, they were saying before the iPhone, it was so exciting and we were also excited about technology. But here I was with butcher paper on the wall, four feet tall, with pastels all over my fingers. One of my clients said sometimes it’s like kindergarten around here, there’s pastel dust everywhere. On the one hand, we have all this excitement about this technology. On the other hand, it’s bringing people together in the room and helping them literally see complex ideas that are hard to grasp with this very old-fashioned way of working and not fancy art. They are very simple shapes that bring ideas together that we all understand. Why does it work so well? We’ll talk about that because I did do a lot of scholarships around that. But in the very beginning, I would realize, if you ask somebody, what would you do with your hands if you’re excited? And they would make a ricky racky (sic), a nervous moving back and forth. After you ask them, how would you show wholeness or health, they will make a circle with their hands. That is that we all speak this archetypal, ancient language of shape. It’s in our bodies, it’s maybe instinctual. You and I were talking about writing back and forth about our mutual interest in Carl Jung and archetypes. Those are as much instinctual as they are a visual or a thought. Situating complex ideas in ancient language is a pretty exciting way to think about communication. Thank you so much for not only inviting me on your podcast to share this but also for your great questions that had me really thinking about this ancient and emerging way of communicating and how that works together. In the very beginning, back to your question, IFTF, back then we were using visuals to help us understand complexity, share it, and it helped us forecast to see a bunch of disparate ideas, and what were the patterns, and in those patterns, could we begin to see what was next? That was then. Since then those technologies have happened, and we’re all connected, hyper-connected. Our social lives are really confusing. I can give some examples of that, but you probably have millions who are like, what’s the rule now about that? And we’re drained and we’re tired of cyberspace, the video conferencing, all that, it’s draining our energy, which is why I like your whole notion of overload. I think now, we have a different job than we had when you and I first met with the visuals, and it was novel then. The job now is to help people be, feel more human, creative, and energized, and art is a tool for that. Ross: That’s a fantastic framing for it. Before we dig into some of that, I’m a big believer of visual frameworks and communication, I’ve practiced that in my way over the years, but is this something that is for everyone, for some people? We have very different styles cognitively. For example, some people are very happy in 3D, and some people are not. How inclusive is the visual storytelling? Is it even more inclusive than words? Or does this resonate more for some people than others? Eileen: We talk about this a lot and the statistics are pretty fuzzy. We’d like to say 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, so 1/3 of people are highly visual. It does play out anecdotally but the research is hard to come by. 1/3 of people are highly visual to the point where they may really need to put something in a visual frame themselves or see it in their heads visually, but the visual is essential to their cognitive processing. Then there’s another third who might find it interesting, amusing, helpful, okay, that range, and then there’s a third that just don’t use visuals, they’re okay with it but it’s not really key to their way of thinking. Maybe there were some different percentages there but there is that range of people. However, to your other question about does it affect everybody? I think the research will tell us now that the ancient people probably used art and symbols before language. It is something that we all know instinctually because of the world around us. It’s visual. If you situate ideas in something physical, it stays with you. When you go back to a place, you can remember everything that happened there before. Often we anchor our experiences in visual landscapes. I think that is pretty common, I would say probably more than two-thirds of people benefit from that dual cognition of having an idea situated in a song, or a picture, some other sense besides the rational word. Ross: This is now as you say relatively common practice, there are plenty of people doing that. As a pioneer in the field, how is somebody trained? How do they develop the capabilities? What are the fundamental skills? Somebody perhaps has a little visual aptitude or in a way of the underlying talent, how do you train? What do you teach somebody? What do they need to learn to be a visual storyteller or note-taker? Eileen: One of the biggest joys in the last 20 years have been a few trainings that I did, because they were very different than the typical trainings in visual language. Everybody can learn without exception. First of all, the whole idea that you need a lot of little details, like you have to draw the flower, then that literal translation, it’s not a literal translation, it is figurative, it is a big picture that can contain a concept. As I was saying earlier about how our bodies naturally make these shapes, that’s what I teach people. That’s how I learned. I had no training in doing this. I was a journalist, a print journalist. In my family, I was not the artist my sister was, I was the writer. At IFTF, in the halcyon days, I started doing this just for my own benefit, and it was more fun at meetings. I would just do whatever my body told me to do naturally, I didn’t think: is this an arrow? Is it a circle? In the beginning, it’s body language, it’s sign language, that leaves a mark. If you can use your body to communicate, which we all do with our hands when we’re allowed to, you can learn how to do this, you learn the flow of that. That’s what I train people to do, not to pay attention to the perfect little drawing. Certainly, the best visual journalists are not the best classical artists necessarily, in fact, usually not because you can’t spend too much time on the detail. It is how the ideas flow and what connects to what. The way that I train people is to have them help somebody else express something difficult. So they get focused on somebody else’s communication needs, and to empathetically listen, and to try to feel what the person is saying, and then how does that look? It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, it matters that they are reflecting something important that somebody else had to say. The training is a lot like that. It’s much more about deep communication, empathy, and just visually connecting ideas. Ross: It strikes me that one of the great services could be simply sitting down with anybody and saying, tell me what’re you trying to express, let me present it back to you visually, and helping them to understand their ideas better, let alone other people. Eileen: Absolutely. That’s why I call myself a visual journalist, because in journalism too, that was the highest compliment. For you as well, I’ve listened to your podcast, and you get this compliment as well, like, I didn’t know what I was thinking before I talked to you, but now I understand my own thinking better because of your guidance. So yes, you can definitely do that with the visuals. I do it for my friends and often for young people. It’s a gift to help people with their thinking. I offer you that gift as well. It’s very fun to do. Ross: Earlier you mentioned this idea of archetypes. This is something where you said that we use our body in particular ways to express ideas. I believe you’ve studied Jung and have looked at that at fairly deep levels. If necessary, let’s go a little deeper to look at the idea of archetypes in this idea of being able to crystallize and communicate your ideas. Eileen: That’s the evolution, the evolution of this form of communication. What we discussed about connecting ideas and using body language to express ourselves visually, that’s the floor, that’s the beginning, and everybody can do that. As we move up into more sophisticated, thoughtful ways of using visuals to contain information, that’s where the archetypes come in. I do have an interesting story about this too. When I was doing visuals in the beginning, I was strictly using what I mentioned, just the instinctive, intuitive way of using my hands to draw. But what I was drawing were archetypal symbols. I would use spirals in a certain way. I’d use triskelions. These are symbols I really didn’t understand. I would know what animal to create, and when to put a snake in there. Then I had a colleague, do you remember Bonnie DeMarco? She was Buckminster Fuller’s archivist in the shape of thought. A good colleague, a lot in 3D visualization, very early in that. She saw my work one day and she said: “I want to tell you something, you are using ancient symbols, did you know that?” And I said, no, I didn’t. That’s when I realized that we probably carry the knowledge of ancient symbols actually in our DNA because I really did not know. Then I began studying why certain images were so very powerful. I wrote a little book, I’ll send it to you. This came to me as I went back for a two-year master’s program in union studies to understand metaphor archetypes and these master symbols. They’re the kind of symbols Jung said, they’re pregnant with meaning. It’s not just the spiral as spiral, it’s something that opens up a kind of ineffable spaciousness, where we read more into it, it actually generates ideas, it doesn’t just capture them. These symbols are very powerful containers for something beyond words. That’s what I studied. The archetypes are patterns and instincts, when you read a fairy tale, the prince, the king, the grail, those are archetypes. There’s something we all understand deeply, a mountain, a barrier, an iceberg, things that are metaphors that we know because maybe our ancestors ran into icebergs, we know there’s something below there and there’s something showing, these are images that convey a lot to us and show up throughout history and throughout time. Ross: What you’re saying almost evokes that it is about stories. If something’s static, that’s one point. But the mountain is a challenge, which implies that you’ve got to go and climb it, or go around it, whatever, or the prince is on a quest, this is then about not just what is a piece of meaning, but also in viewing that and pulling that into a story, I presume? Eileen: Yes. That’s become interesting as we developed, I told you, it’s just going to launch very soon, we developed a technology that can produce a visual of a meeting immediately. Push a button, you have a visual, you have the words, the quotes, I know it sounds impossible, but we’ve done it, if you saw our team, you’d understand how and why we could do this, this particular group. But what we’ve realized is that in order to convey a lot in a very simple picture, we need to use the big symbols in a different way, in this way that conveys a lot of information very, very quickly. Just for a moment, I lost my train of thought, because I’ll tell you why. I’ve been so heads-down with making these ideas work by working with technologists who actually can make a concept into an algorithm that in talking to you, I’m going back to the philosophy and ideas that led to all of this, but for the last two years, it’s been how to make it work. I just got into that. Let’s go back to your thought that we’re bringing this to people now in an automated way. Ross: You commented about the generative AI with DALL·E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and so on, you said you see a bit of synchronicity in the evolution of those in terms of the state of society. Eileen: Yes. Again, because of all your great questions, I came to see that connection, it had seemed like a lucky coincidence because we already had generative AI and we already were working with automated visuals. We also could put meaningful phrases in there. I just thought, Oh, very cool, this year, everybody’s into exactly what we’re doing. But because of your questions, as I contemplated that, I thought, why are people so excited about the generative AI? As a friend of mine said, they’re intriguing, but not satisfying, for the most part. They don’t have that artistic excitement that you get when you see a Van Gogh, although some of them are cool. In the beginning, I was like, Whoa, these are my definition of art. However, the idea that someone can just put in some words, like you said, if somebody is interviewing somebody and makes a picture of their ideas, they can just put in some words, and get a picture of what that might look like. It helps them think differently. It’s fun. That’s another thing. I’m so exhausted in these meetings, and there’s nothing fun about it; and the art, it does so much for us, it’s emotional, we feel our feelings a lot of times we look at it. We turn off the words for a minute, the spinning stops in our brain to look at this, oh, what’s that? I’ve started thinking about all the ways that art is an antidote to what we’re experiencing today. It’s fun. It’s colorful. It’s not always a direct translation of what has happened but it allows for some innovation and some interpretation. Right now, all the generative AI is up over here and on its own land, but my business partner and thinking partner said, beyond beauty is a utility. We’re taking that beauty and making it useful. Like you’re in a meeting and you’re disconnected but you know at the end, there’s going to be a picture and you’ll look in, are your words in there? How do your words fit with other people’s? And then you can look at the picture and say, why did that quote come out? That’s very weird. But then you can click on it and see where it is in the transcript. Now your transcript is no longer just something, oh, I have to go read that and see what happened, it’s given a different context from the visual. Now you have a whimsical and creative way to look at that meeting. I know what I was going to mention earlier when I got a little off track. It was that we tend to try to translate things directly, ideas. I’m in that ineffable area that’s really hard to describe but it will be very different for people to have something that is putting words that they use all the time into a different framework. As you said, how do you think about things in your questions? Do you have a framework? This can give people a shared framework. Interestingly, one of the benefits is people start talking in the metaphors they’ve generated. If a bridge happens to come up as a metaphor, then people will talk about, oh, we crossed that bridge, or what’s that shark in the water? Oh, I know what that shark is. Now they talk about the shark and everybody knows what that is. One thing that we’re doing, and this is something that I wrote about right after the union studies is that words go together in ways that we don’t usually think about, there’s a mental level of communication around action words. You and I are having this conversation, and I’m saying excitement, or I’m saying communication a lot, those words, then we see the kind of conversation we’re having. If we say competition, or winning, or who’s ahead a lot, we know the kind of conversation we’re having. It’s not just about content. It’s about this sense of it, the meaning, the flavor of our interaction, the kind of symbols that pop up. This happened to me too when I worked live and it was lots of fun when it happens because you’ll suddenly have a personal example. At one meeting, everybody was talking about a value chain, so I’m trying to draw a chain because I just learned how to make a perfect chain, like, oh, good, I have a chain, and I’m going to put all these ideas about the value chain in there, that’s really exciting. But then what they ended up talking about were all the things going wrong in the company. I just put that in the corner, because I’m like, I do not want that to mess up the chain, we’re talking about the value chain. Pretty soon in the corner, there’s this big circle, it is black, in a circle with words in it. Then it’s connected to the chain. Then at the end, this is a client that likes to have the whole gallery from the day, and we would walk through the gallery at the end of the day. It was literally a gallery in New York. They got to that, everybody says: It’s a ball and chain. We have a ball and chain. This is what’s dragging us down. The metaphor just popped out and it gave everybody an awareness of what their problem was, it was not what they were talking about, it was what they weren’t talking about. That’s what you get is the information in between the spaces can come out in a visual. It’s intriguing. Ross: That’s a lovely example. So of course, we have lots of ideas and we’re trying to distill that, to make sense of that, so we can know more, understand the world, and make better decisions. And as you say, when you can imagine this long meeting, for example, or a long presentation, and just distilling that into the ideas, that’s when the real value is distilled, it’s a distillation process, but more than that is around evocation. I think that’s a lovely example that you give, the ball and chain, or even the bridge, as you mentioned, where people may not have used the word bridge, but when they see it, that gives them a framework to understand that better. I’d love you to just give me a little snapshot of your new product. That’s out next year, I understand? Eileen: Yes, early. We’re able to work with it now and we are working, using it with people, it’s not in the marketplace yet. It’ll be in the Zoom marketplace. We have a backend that takes the transcript. We go from audio to the transcript and from that, it generates a picture with layers, and it pulls out the main ideas. The way that happens is this, I’ve told you a little bit about how symbols themselves end up helping us organize information, so the symbols have really helped us build this product. Jung would be very happy to know that. We’ve actually put those symbols to work. In the end, you push a button and there you have a picture of your meeting, you can choose different backgrounds that would generate a little bit different, you can edit, and you can go back and say these are my five phrases that were chosen as significant phrases. But as a user, you can say I’d really rather have that phrase, it means more to me. Then you can shift that around, you could do a little bit of changing with symbols, of course, not too much, because we want to keep the big flavor of what the metaphor is. That’s the meaning. But there are lots of ways you can play with that, too. We have some fun UX stuff. Ross: Is it created live, or is it just generated at the end? Eileen: Right now, it’s generated at the end. We absolutely are going to have it so you can see it being created live. There are so many directions for this, Ross. It’s so exciting. What we have right now is quite useful, just like me being in the room, only not quite there, but with the live visual journalism, not bad, pretty close, so we’ve got that. But you think about the future when you can see it in a square in your meeting being drawn, where you’d have so many ways to use it and play with the tool. With generative AI, we’re able now to create quite an interesting set of visuals. But more and more, there’ll be more self-assembling, more nuance, more reading the emotions in the room more directly. We have ways to read that context so with the subtext, as I was saying, but emotions, there’s so much that’s out there, that’s just endless fun, it’s endless excitement, what’s possible, and it’s very good right now, at the end of the meeting, like what I did if you weren’t watching me do it as we went along. Ross: What’s the name of the product? And when will it be available? Eileen: It’s called Tapestry. What we do is generate a tapestry and we like that because it gives a sense of weaving things together, and it feels good. It should be available at the end of 2023. In the meantime, we are working with some enterprises already, some companies, and colleagues already to generate from their transcripts. We have a lot of customer interaction as we get close to launching. We’d love to experiment with you. We can play with it a little bit. We’re seeing how people use it and making our final tweaks. But I would say, I’ll let you know, you’ll be among the first to know, but I think it should be January or February 2023 that it will be in the Zoom marketplace. Ross: I’m very excited to see that. In the book Thriving on Overload, we talk about the importance of visual communication and this visual framing of our ideas, so this is a way in which you could certainly assist many of us to do that and be more effective at that. To round out, perhaps transcending or not our conversation so far, for anybody, whether they have any visual inclinations or otherwise, what would be some of your practices, you personally, or other recommendations or suggestions for anybody who is striving to do better in a world of overload? What are some suggestions? What are some practices that people could try to help them to be more effective and more balanced? Eileen: Of course, I’m continually working on that. As I wrote to you, everybody on our team has that awareness, we talk about how we do it, and we do it together. In our meetings, we have meditations, we have our medicine of the week, joy, and emotions, we read even sometimes passages like the one recently, the poet Rumi wrote about the guesthouse, and inviting in even the negative emotions and the difficulties. I think one of our problems, in general, is that we shut down who we are as human beings, the fears, the anxieties, we’re supposed to just have emotional containment and set that aside, but we’re people, we feel those, we bring those into meetings. One of the ways that I think about it is, there’s a new brain research, that what is most important to cognition is not necessarily all the gray matter, it’s the white matter, the myelin sheets in between the connective tissue, so connecting the ancient brain and the thinking brain, the amygdala, the connections, so anything that can help integrate who we are as human beings with the people we work with, with ourselves. Thinking ahead of time I’m going into this meeting, and what’s on my mind, and really taking the time out, and that’s where the art comes in. People can do that, they can make notes themselves, visualization, of course, if you’re a visual person at all, that can help integrate, even doodling is a way to have an expression for something you’re feeling that you might not have words for, so any way of honoring our humanity. Our feelings do not always have words to go with them, especially in our culture. Any way of creating space for those aspects of ourselves that aren’t expressed will end up giving us energy back. We’re giving away a lot of energy and thinking about what brings our energy back to us, what integrates us. It’s an inner-outer balance, the internal and external, and keeping the internal. I think art is, and this is something Jung said, it is a translator, between the psyche and the outside world. That is one very powerful tool but the overarching challenge we all have is to keep our internal selves connected and resonant with what’s happening around us. It’s a challenge. Ross: Yes, that’s actually useful to me, and not least in reminding me and hopefully our listeners as well that taking on information is not purely a cognitive thing, it is an emotional thing. It is about who we are. It’s how we feel in the world. We have to acknowledge those emotions. Journaling is a wonderful thing to do for all sorts of reasons but being able to try to visually capture not just what we are thinking but also what we are feeling is probably really central to our ability to thrive in a world of overload. Thank you so much for your insights and your work, Eileen, from the very beginning. I’m so excited about what you’re creating now. It’s a great pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you. Eileen: Thank you Ross. The post Eileen Clegg on visual journalism, archetypal languages of shapes, learning visual language, ancient symbols, and shared frameworks (Ep41) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“There’s the experience, what it is we take in the information, and then there’s the output, which can come in many forms just in talking, thinking or writing, and so on. The writing is crystallizing the ideas, which can be a process and come out difficult, but it is this process. What you write then informs what you read or what you input or the things which can shape that to be able to then write something which is even more incisive or better.” – Greg Satell About Greg Satell Greg Satell is a transformation and change expert, international keynote speaker, and bestselling author, most recently of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. He is also a lecturer at The Wharton School; his work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Barron’s, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company. Websites: Digital Tonto Greg Satell LinkedIn: Greg Satell YouTube: Greg Satell Twitter: Greg Satell Book: Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change What you will learn What is the importance of an information routine to get to the good stuff (02:27) Why thinking your own thoughts and ideas is important (04:25) How to leverage your personal information networks to learn more (06:38) How curiosity allows you to uncover what’s worth reading? (10:00) What is the process to build a framework? (16:07) What are co-optable resources and why TedX is the best example of it (18:57) Why we should ask what-if questions (22:57) Why doubting everything you think is the way to thrive on overload (26:32) Episode resources Fareed Zakaria Michael Port  Goldman Sachs Elizabeth Holmes Anna Sorokin aka Ana Delvey Henry Kissinger FTX Transcript Ross Dawson: Greg, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Greg Satell: Thank you so much for having me, Ross. Ross: You keep across the edge of change, undoubtedly, in all sorts of interesting ways. How on earth do you do that? Greg: I just pursue interests that change over time. What I really think is most important is that you put in the work every day. You make sure that you’re taking some time out to read every day. For me, it’s really important to write every day, whether I write something worth writing or not. You put in the effort every day. Often I find myself copy-pasting or writing something that’s not very good, but you really need the reps, you really need to put in the time to get to the good stuff. Somebody once described it to me, you need to let the muse know you’re serious. There’s so much to just putting in the work every day. Ross: That’s great. What do you write? Greg: It’s funny. One of my favorite quotes is from Fareed Zakaria, a famous journalist and author in the United States. He says when he sits down to write that the thoughts he thought he had were just this garbled and mumbled chain of a bunch of stuff, he said it much more eloquently than I could, but a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make much sense. Obviously, everybody can’t write. I have other friends who like to do podcasts or do it in other ways. The idea of that discipline of arranging your thoughts to see if they make sense. He’s right. When I sit down to write that great idea I had, I realize that a lot of times, it doesn’t make sense, but that process of working through it – I’ve been doing this for a long time now. I have old thoughts. Sometimes I’ll have a thought, and I’ll say I thought something similar five years ago, or 10 years ago, and I’ll go back to it, and I’ll say that’s interesting, but something else I was thinking, I can build on that now. That’s really how you start building your own idea about things. It’s really important that you are thinking your own thoughts because if you don’t think your own thoughts, somebody else will think them for you. The best indication of what we do and what we think is what people around us do and what people around us think. We have decades of research that show this is absolutely true. It’s not just the people we know, either, it’s three degrees out, so our friends, and our friends and friends and their friends, many of whom we never met, are all influencing how we think. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to persuade people. Ross Dawson could come to me and tell me how to think about the future and I think, jeez, that’s a really great idea, he really persuaded me about that. But then what happens the next day? I go right back to those same social networks that form the way I thought in the first place. Chances are, that Ross Dawson’s idea is just going to fall by the wayside because everything else in my environment is pushing me in a different direction. That’s how we get into trouble. Generally speaking, we take the most available information, not the best sources, but what’s easiest for us to access. It’s called the availability heuristic. Somebody can tell us about traffic accident statistics, and it won’t change our behavior but the second we see an accident on the side of the road, we’ll immediately slow down. If we happen to make a particular observation or just our local information in a certain way, that will form our opinions, and then we’re likely to go out and try and look for data that confirms those opinions and tend to reject data that contradicts our existing paradigms. Ross: There’s the experience, what it is we take in the information, and then there’s the output, which can come in many forms just in talking, thinking or writing, and so on. The writing is crystallizing the ideas, which can be a process and come out difficult, but it is this process. What you write then informs what you read or what you input or the things which can shape that to be able to then write something which is even more incisive or better. Digging into your point about social networks and this idea, of course, we take information through our screens, or reading or books, whatever, but a lot of it is the people that we connect, we have conversations with, we’re exposed to, are there ways that you leverage your social networks? Sometimes I call them personal information networks, this idea that networks are the people from which we can draw on for our information or insights. Are there any ways in which you try to leverage your social networks to think better and learn more? Greg: Yes, that was the point I was getting to. You have to be very careful about that because they’re shaping your thoughts in ways that you’re generally not aware of. That’s one of the powerful things about writing is that you’re doing it yourself. If it doesn’t make sense, you’re much more likely to catch yourself. So I think that whole idea of falsifiability and testing yourself and being very careful about things that you want to believe. Because if you want to believe, you’re not going to look that hard for other information. Ideas you don’t like, you’ll check. Again, we know this from decades of studies when people are in situations where they don’t expect to be checked, they don’t expect people to call them on stuff. They’re much less careful about the information they share. I think everything is it has to be about being careful. You’re right, when you’re inundated with information, it’s important to remember, you’re only getting a sample, a small sample of it, because of your social networks, your location, your time, your geographic location, all these different things. You’re getting access to different information in Australia than I’m getting in Philadelphia, you probably don’t even know who the Philadelphia Eagles are, they’re the greatest football team in the national football and we have an Australian on the team, by the way. It’s important to remember that what we’re seeing is only a small part of the information that is out there so not only do we need to filter the information so that we can understand it but then we have to ask the hard questions, what are we not seeing? How can we be wrong? What’s another perspective? Very much to your point, it’s really important through both social media and also through your social networks to surround yourself with people who challenge you and don’t think exactly the same way you do. Ross: Going back to the start, you were saying you do lots of reading based on your evolving curiosity. How do you find what it is you read? What formats do you read in? Do you tend to read books or articles? How do your evolving curiosities allow you to uncover what’s worth reading? Greg: It’s funny, I can’t stand documentaries. I’m not a documentary person. I also can’t stand anything with subtitles. Because I’ve spent so long, I spent 15 years in non-English speaking environments so whenever anybody says, oh, do you want to watch a foreign film, I say, watch them, I’m living in one. Anything I watched became just a pure form of entertainment. I’ve always been very, very partial to books. To grasp a subject, to get a hold of it, you need to read three or four books about it, you can’t just read one book and say, now I understand that. It’s that type of thing when you get interested in something, whether it’s an idea or anything, if it’s worth reading one book, it’s worth reading five books. You have to get to that point where you’ve read three to five books, and you’ve read a bunch of different perspectives on it, then you can start to put it in perspective. Ross: Do you read a chunk a day? Do you say, here’s a particular time of day that I’m going to read a book? Greg: I try and read 20 pages a day, hopefully, more than that, but 20 pages a day, or an hour a day, is a good number. I don’t always achieve that. Sometimes I’ll get more, of course. In the beginning of the book, you’re always reading slower. Then, of course, you have to make that decision once you get to about 50 pages, whether it’s still not interesting, whether you’re going to continue to slog through it, or maybe jump to something else that’s a little bit easier to hold your attention. Because your time is important. I always feel guilty when I don’t finish a book. Ross: It’s a really important precept, if it’s too hard going, just move on to whatever it is that’s enjoyable, which is going to be worthwhile. There are a few. There is very occasionally, a book, which is worth slogging through. It’s not just time, it’s enjoyment. If it’s hard work, then there’s plenty of reading out there, which is not hard work, and which is beautiful and wonderful. We don’t speak enough about just dropping a book if it doesn’t keep enough interest. Greg: Yes, it is always. It’s funny, you get to that point, and you’re thinking, what’s the value of actually finishing this? And also what’s the value of jumping to another book I can read twice as fast? Ross: Yes, I think it’s dynamic. Your evolving curiosities, do you track it as in say, okay, this is what I’m interested in now, this is what I’m digging into, or is it just whatever takes your attention? Greg: I track it through my blog. That’s the way I track it. That’s nice because my blog could just have its 13th birthday in August. I lose track of how many years it’s been, but it’s great to have a 13-year-long record of your thoughts. Ross: Yes. I’ve been doing it longer, but you’re more consistent than me. I need to get back to being more consistent. It’s one of the things where, for example, you write a book, okay, I can focus on that but when you’ve done that, it’s important to have the discipline to say alright, this is a thing I want to capture, and then write it. I admire your consistency in getting your ideas, really good and incisive ideas out there. Greg: I have slowed down. For the first few months, it was three times a week. I kept up to two times a week for at least 10 years. Recently, I switched to one time a week, a few years ago, and that’s enough I think, for now. Ross: You have a nickname or moniker Digital Tonto. I’d love to hear about that because that’s relevant to what we’re talking about. Greg: When I started my blog back In 2009, it was 2009 in Kyiv in Ukraine and the whole world was coming to an end. I was just online and I was reading this article about why you should do a business blog, and I thought Gee; my wife was nine months pregnant at the time, I went in and I said, hey, honey, I think I should do a business blog, and she was, okay, whatever, she was nine months pregnant. I went back and said, I need a name for the blog, because back then when you had a blog, you didn’t just name it gregsatell.com, now I have gregsatell.com, but back then, everybody needed a name. It was 2009. I knew it needed to be digital something. Then there was this old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto so I thought it was a cool name, Digital Tonto. If I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t have named it a Digital Tonto but I think it’s worked out pretty well. Ross: It has certainly; certainly very well known. For me, it evokes this idea of learning in the digital space. I’m not necessarily the Master or the Lone Ranger, but being at a place where I know I can look out there, and to learn and to find things and discover. Greg: I’m glad to hear you say that. Ross: Part of the idea is building your frameworks and your thinking. You’re very widely read, you share all sorts of interesting references and sources in what you do, they’re not just from business books, and so on. But this idea of building your framework of understanding how an organization works, how the world works, how the economy works, and so this is an ongoing process, you capture a lot of these frameworks or these ideas in your blog posts, what’s the process for you to have all of the information come in to be able to build that framework of understanding? Do you use any ways of writing notes or drawing things? Is it all in your mind? How do you develop those ideas and frameworks? Greg: I really just write, for the most part. I’m not a visual person, I’m not a drawing person, maybe I’m not clever enough because there are a lot of people who are really good at that. They’ll draw things out and their whiteboard things, and I’m not really that great at that. I plod along, and I keep knocking at it until I get something that starts to make some sense. I usually don’t realize it until later. When you’ve put it down on paper and you come back to it six months later, a year later, two years later, if it still makes sense, you’ve probably done pretty well. Ross: Yes. There is a structure in writing. I’ve been through the process of taking a written article and then distilling it into a visual because there is logic, there is structure. One way of representing is visually and another is through writing, but it’s just as valid. Now, that’s common, the most accepted form in how most people are used to taking an idea. Writing in a structured format does tell the story, it is a framework. Greg: Michael Port, who does speaker training, has an interesting one that he puts his students through, he calls it content cataloging. The idea is you have an idea, then you have a story and a conceptual model. The idea could be something about this, about the future, what you do, or for instance, in terms of what I do, when we’re talking about scaling change, we often talk in terms of co-optable resources. The simplest one is TEDx. One of the big challenges about change is that people need to embrace it for their own reasons, which might be different than your own. The challenge becomes what can you give them that they can co-opt as their own to drive this change forward so that you’re not pushing them to change, they are pulling. You’re giving something that empowers them, that promotes change, probably the most successful ever is TEDx. They have thousands of people running around doing all these millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of man-hours or person-hours to promote the TED conference. If you ask anybody why they do a TEDx, they’ll say they do it for themselves. That’s the conceptual model. We have a whole conceptual model around that. You have the idea of how do you scale change. Then there are several different stories that we use to conceptualize that framework so that people can understand it, TEDx is one of them. Those three things where you have an idea, a conceptual model, and a story, that is one of the frameworks I’ve seen, that I found really helpful. Ross: Yes, that really a good frame there. In terms of just your daily information habits, how do you find, filter, and discover the things which are worth spending your time on? Greg: There are several newsletters I’ve got about the news. There are things I follow on Twitter. While I’m getting ready in the morning, having my coffee, and waking up, I’m looking at those. Then I start writing. Usually, when I’m writing, I’m writing according to an outline which I’ve written at some random time before [00:22:49 check] penning it. At any given time, hopefully, I have three or four outlines. Once I start running out of outlines, that’s when I get nervous. While I’m writing, I’m usually finding gaps, and I need to go look for other things. When I find those other things, I link them to the outline that I’m using. I will research them later in the afternoon along with whatever book or books, I’m usually reading two or three books in the afternoon or evening, and I try and at least get 20 pages in. Ross: Does the framework, the article, or the post which you’re writing direct you to some research, things you need to find out, or some facts or some insights or some background? Greg: Usually, yes. Sometimes I’ll run across something, I’ll run across the article, and then that will form the basis for an outline; or if it’s an academic paper, then I’ll realize that there are pieces missing that I need to go run down. Ross: There are a couple of levels, part of it’s factual, I was just doing this little post, and I realized to make my case I need to find out the cash on hand of Facebook, which takes a little bit longer than I expected to find. But anyway, so now I know the cash on hand of Facebook, which happens to be 40 billion, which is interesting. It’s part of that framework of having all the pieces fit together and there’s a fact but a part of it is also the context, sometimes we need to dig a little deeper in terms of understanding the particular way a technology is deployed or an example of something so you can start to uncover some deeper and richer things as well as that. The fact of writing means you want to get things right, which means you do the research, and you start to build out your knowledge base. Greg: And asking what-if questions. Ross: How would you do that? Give me an example of how that might happen. Greg: I have a great one, and you’re talking about Facebook dislodged it. Back in 2010 or something. Goldman Sachs gave Facebook a $50 billion valuation. That seemed ridiculous to me. I started building the whole DCF model, discounted cash flow, and then looking around for different estimates of growth because it was private then, and what their profits are, and everything, and it forced me to ask the question, what if Facebook is worth a lot more than 50 billion? When you see this, when you uncover a new fact, is that true? If it is true, what if there’s something else I didn’t realize or wasn’t paying attention to? And always be careful about things you want to be true because that’s where you really go wrong. Ross: Yes, obviously, from that being able to recognize what it is you want things to be right or wrong, once you start to build that self-awareness, it will put you on track. But that point around saying, I think it’s really interesting when you see something, oh, I doubt that. In a way, that’s the best foundation of research. Doubt everything you read, and then say, how am I going to prove this is wrong or check that’s right, that’s when you start to really learn stuff. Greg: Right. I wrote something not too long ago because I became fascinated by the idea of Elizabeth Holmes and the Inventing Anna Sorokin, who was this young woman who just convinced everybody that she was rich, and she was running around like a rich person, she didn’t have any money and Elizabeth Holmes, the same thing. They fooled some of the richest, most powerful people in the world. In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, anybody who questioned her, they got their lives ruined. These rich, powerful men were so sure, and she wasn’t producing anything. That’s the type of subject I really love because that doesn’t fit. That doesn’t make any sense. These rich, powerful people who are extremely accomplished, Henry Kissinger was on that board who you would think would be the hardest person to fool, how could they go hook, line, and sinker on something that has no fact pattern behind it? It was just all smoke and mirrors. I asked myself, what if people who were smart and accomplished are the easiest to fool because they expect to see things others don’t? You go down to the local bar in Philly, those people are much harder to fool because they don’t expect to be smarter than everybody else. I thought that was fascinating to me because once I had that idea, it made a lot of sense. In fact, it’s the only thing that can explain things like FTX. Ross: Yes. That’s a solitary lesson for all of us to realize that things don’t always like they seem. That’s the joy of digging, don’t take things at their face value, and when you dig then you learn whatever happens. Greg: Also be careful of things that you want to be true, that Elizabeth Holmes was the next Steve Jobs. Because anybody who asked any questions about it, it became immediately obvious to them that it was a fraud. Many people over the years were whistleblowers. They were just shut down. Ross: To round out Greg, what advice do you have for somebody that’s looking to thrive in a world of unlimited information? Greg: Don’t believe everything you think. Ross: Great advice. Thank you so much for your time, Greg. It’s been a fantastic conversation. Greg: Thanks for having me, Ross. The post Greg Satell on writing daily, building your own ideas, seeking different perspectives, and conceptual models (Ep40) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“If somebody asks me to write about what’s not in my field, I push it out. I may know about it, I may feel comfortable about it. But at the end of the day, I need to make it so that my audience is defined and my information perspective is defined. Otherwise, thriving on overload, I would have been buried by overload.” – Jim Marous About Jim Marous Jim Marous is the publisher of the Digital Banking Report, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and host of the Banking Transformed Podcast. He has been named as one of the most influential people in banking, a sought-after keynote speaker, and is regularly featured in leading media such as CNBC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist. Websites: Jim Marous The Financial Brand Digital Banking Report LinkedIn: Jim Marous Facebook: Jim Marous Instagram: Jim Marous Twitter: Jim Marous What you will learn Why generosity with your insights builds your brand (02:20) How to start building your niche expertise (05:13) Why a process for a steady flow of content is vital (09:51) Why you owe it to your audience to look at alternative perspectives (14:10) What does it mean to build a framework? (20:14) Why we need to speed up our learning and execution (23:27) Why human interaction is essential to mental models and synthesis (24:40) Why you need a daily routine for information processing (28:14) Episode resources Fintech Transcript Ross Dawn: Jim, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Jim Marous: Hey, great to be on it. Ross: Throughout your career, you have been on the edge of change and seen the transformation, how do you do it, Jim? Jim: It’s interesting. A little historical reference here, I started in the banking industry over 40 years ago as a retail banker within a management training program right out of university. During my entire career, I went from being a banker to selling to banks for 25 years, and the last 12-13 years have been focused on communicating about the banking industry. But the whole background on what I was interested in throughout my career was in trying to stay ahead of what was going on, and continually learn in the process of doing what I was doing. The aha moment maybe came when I was 35, which is still over a decade ago. I was worried about becoming irrelevant. I figured out then, that the best way to not be irrelevant was to communicate to all my prospects in the universe as a whole; here’s what I see happening in banking, and here’s my interpretation of that. I started building a voice and the voice was really about I want to share what I know and share with everybody but as soon as I shared it, I emptied my bucket and had to fill it again. It was a way to not only learn but was a way to show that I am on the front edge of what is going on in banking. It just so happened 14 years ago, that was also really the beginning of social media, I realised quickly that Twitter and LinkedIn really provided me with the opportunity to broadcast that I was doing these things. I very quickly gained a fairly large following back then on the blog. I then joined a bigger organisation that uses communication in articles called The Financial Brand. That became my platform for speaking and for sharing. Then l also bought a research company, and in the last few years started a podcast but with all pretty much the same strategy, collect insights, give my perception on what those insights are, and distribute them. It became a nice business model, as I was talking to you before we came on air, even better with the advent of COVID because people couldn’t go on the road, they couldn’t sell, and they couldn’t do a lot of things so I became a resource for the distribution of thought. In some cases, it was my own thought leadership in the research we were doing but a lot of times, I’m giving perception on other people’s research and try to combine it because most of the people that are my audience, retail bankers, didn’t have the time to collate, combine, distribute and discern what was important, what wasn’t so I tried to do it for them. Knock on wood, It’s been a lot of fun. Ross: It sounds great. Obviously, you have been on that journey of creating value from information, that’s really what thriving on overload is about. When you started, when you had that insight, Alright, I need to learn about what’s changing and share that, what was the first step? How did you begin to do your first thought piece or perspective on what was changing? Jim: It was interesting because I realised very quickly I need to narrow my field of vision, retail banking, or banking, let’s take it, financial services is too broad, banking was too broad so I made it retail banking, and then my major focus was on things that impact the ultimate customer. For instance, if somebody reaches out to me and says, I would like you to write about the accounting backgrounds and how financial services should do their accounting, or regulations or something that doesn’t impact the consumer but is more back office, I pushed it out and said, that’s not my field, I may know about it, I may feel comfortable about it but at the end of the day, I need to make it so that my audience is defined and my information perspective is defined. Otherwise, thriving on overload, I would have been buried by overload. That was probably the most important thing because initially, we’re afraid that I don’t want to leave any of the marketplaces out. We see this on social media all the time, the people retweet things on seven major topics that are sometimes related, but sometimes they’re just hot topics. We see this all the time with things around AI, the metaverse, and whatever else. What happens is I end up talking about things but not defining who I am. I want people to know but from a perception base when they listen to me, read me, watch me; I kind of know where Jim’s going to go with this, I may not know specifically, but I want to be updated by him. I’m not hitting a lot of targets but the ones I’m hitting, I’m hitting pretty hard. Ross: That’s fantastic. As you suggest, a lot of people get a little too broad. It means that they can’t be the real expert. But giving that really pretty tight definition there means you can really be the expert and know more than others. Jim: Because I just didn’t have the bandwidth, I had to create content. Even though I’d be using different resources to create it, it wasn’t simply I was going to rebroadcast some things that other people did. I write two articles a day, I do two webinars a week, I do two podcasts a week, I also do virtual and live events, and I do research reports, there’s only so much bandwidth and I’m at wits’ end right now anyway but the reality is if the marketplace is too broad… I call it the dirty desk theory, I end up with a very dirty desk of thought without any real focus. I want to make sure that I’m delivering for the audience that I have selected really well and the audience may be very tightly defined. A lot of that came from the tightness of my primary vehicle for distributing the content, which is Financial Brand. I write two articles a week, one to two articles every week and they are focused on retail banking. At the very beginning, I’ve probably over-narrowed it by looking at financial marketing only for bigger banks and overseas organisations, it may expand a little bit beyond marketing. You have talked about it in your book. The biggest question you have to do is, who’s your audience? You can’t be the best at everything, as you said. You do a much better job than I do, looking at broader topics but at end of the day, if I keep on switching, I’m leaving some of my audience on the wayside. Now, I will say that on Twitter and LinkedIn, my number of followers, as new ones get reduced because the marketplace is only so big. On the other hand, that no longer became my motivation. My motivation was if I get a new follower, I’m hoping that follower is a person I just didn’t know was out there but they are 100% in my wheelhouse, which means I that… I wrote an article about space travel, and I get a bunch of space travel geeks, they’re not gonna be happy from then on because I’m not gonna talk about it anymore. Oh, by the way, I also disappointed, while they may find it entertaining, probably disappointed my regular audience as well. Ross: You do extremely well at that clarity and focus which helps with the engagement. You’ve got obviously this steady flow of content, that content is a distillation, it’s insights, it’s synthesis, it’s seeing what’s relevant, so what is your process on a weekly basis for being able to take, find, see what’s relevant, distil and synthesise that into something to share? Jim: It’s easy. All the organisations that I get insight from, the primary organisation, a lot of them are consultancies, some of them are actually financial institutions. When I find a source, I keep them and I put them on Google word so that upon an organisation publishing something that may be of interest, I get a ticker that says, it’s out there. I also do the same thing on Twitter and LinkedIn where I put search terms in that say, let me know when something comes up with this sort. I spend a lot less time on Twitter than I used to, and most of it now is simply capturing what’s out there. I scan very quickly what people are talking about and what people said, a report may have come out, but I’m not going to be too far behind. At the most, I’m maybe two weeks behind something that publishes. A lot of times, I’m within immediate, almost immediate of that. Plus, we have now other writers and financial brands that are looking at new insights that I may have missed. I read their stuff because even though they’ve written about it, I may say, Jeez, that’s a good topic, let me see if I can contact somebody that I know who talks about this in a different voice and put them on the podcast. It also happens the other way around so when I do a podcast, a lot of our other writers in the financial brands say, can we take your transcript and write about what you’re doing? We end up with a very loose-knit group of independent contractors. But that’s the key, I’ve been lucky now, 14 years into doing it the way I’m doing now to have a never-ending supply of potential content. Then it becomes a matter of okay, how do I winnow it down to what I need to talk about? How do I find a guest that’s going to be important? What simply what I write about, what may hit me as being very important from a writing perspective is different than what I do from a podcast perspective because the podcast is all about people, and it’s finding the leaders in this base, the writing may be about a topic, maybe about digital transformation, it may be about the metaverse or maybe about AI in banking as related to the consumer. That may not have any relevance or reference to a specific person. But on the other hand, on the podcast, what I’m trying to do is say, who’s best to talk about these subjects? What are the subjects people want to know about? Now, on the podcast, I am deluge right now, I’m sure you’ve been in those times where, I get a whole lot of offers from people that want to be on the podcast. Unfortunately, my Tuesday, interviews are very much long, I select whom I wanted to speak to, and it’s very infrequent that somebody has reached out to me, I go, that’s somebody I wanted to have. I have my hit list. On the other hand, on Thursdays, we do podcasts that are actually sponsored by the person I interview or by the company of that person first I interview. That gives them a great platform to still get interviews to be on the podcast, but differently in a different format. They have to pay for the Tuesday guests. But we’ve talked about before, my Tuesday guests, I try to find people that have name recognition, either from themselves or their organisation. I love it if they also have a great social influencer score. In other words, they’re heavy on social media. Because, obviously if I interview somebody that’s not only famous, but it’s also very socially active, I benefit from their audience, and they benefit from mine. It’s mutually beneficial value transfers. Ross: Absolutely. For finding the information on Twitter, do you build some Twitter lists? Jim: Yes. I do searches. I have separate groups of people that are people that I look at on social media, and on Twitter, and they cover the same general area that I do. We continually say, hey can you share what I just wrote, or what I just talked about, or what I just found? Then I also have the same thing the other way around, where I go, Hey, guys, can you share what I just found, and talked about? You get your universe of people that can feed you what’s important, either from a mental state, or a lot of times, that simply is just from my background knowledge of this has happened in the marketplace, it may be about a specific company or a major event that has happened, I may never write about it or have it on the podcast, but I can reference it, so I try to make sure that I’m not so narrowly focused on what I’ve talked about that I lose the perspective of, we’ve talked about before, the looking at all the major stations on the news network to say, it may not be what I agree with, but I got to put it in perspective on what’s important and people know about my viewpoint on branches, on bank marketing, on personalization. I gotta give the other side of that too. I’m not going to put all my money on myself thinking that I got it nailed. People will know which way I’m going to go on most things, but you need to continually view alternative perspectives to build a better overarching viewpoint on what’s going on in the marketplace. Ross: When you bring in those other perspectives, is that mainly through the conversation? I imagine that when you read something, obviously, you take it in some form, but if you have any conversation with somebody, usually they can be more convincing, is that a better format for evolving your thinking? Jim: Oh, definitely! Because it’s not only a different perspective, sometimes validation is what’s important. When I started the podcast, something that came out very early in my interviews was, there is a difference between financial technology companies, big tech companies, and legacy banking organisations. I said, what is this? Let’s dig deeper. I found that it was really around the whole thought process of leadership, what leaders were willing to embrace change, and which ones are holding back from change. Now, that doesn’t make one financial institution more successful than the other because the reality is that some of the most stodgy, conservative financial institutions are extraordinarily profitable. But when I look at who’s most prepared for the future, who’s got that challenging mindset, it became very clear that the leaders of these organisations are really setting the tone. The more I found that the more I dig into that deeper and deeper so that the takeaway from people that maybe pickup four podcasts, a quarter instead of 12 are going to say, Jim’s perspective is leadership’s got to change, and oh, by the way, we’ve got to invest in technology, and thirdly, we have to do some basic things really right because organisations will fail if they don’t do these things, and fourthly, right now, especially for financial institutions, you have to partner with outside providers to give you speed and scale, you can’t build it all internally. Chase is in the UK with a brand new digital bank that they didn’t build, they have partners that help build it for them. It’s been massively successful. Also, what they did is from guest to guest, from article to article, you start to build a new framework for what’s changed. Obviously, the pandemic changed a lot of things but so has digital technology, and so has what people get in other industries from the way they expect things. I try to take myself out of that picture of how I work with these technologies, and kind of look at what are organizations doing overall. I try to be on the cutting edge of this stuff, but I’m also one known for not being on the bleeding edge of it. I’m going to be more pragmatic but that’s because as you mentioned, the people I interview really help your pragmatic view because you’re not going to get all futurists, you’re going get some people that had to do this stuff. I get in front of people and speak, and I sometimes go, guys realise it’s been three years since I’ve been in a bank as a manager of a banking process. Sometimes you don’t disappoint, you do it exactly the same way that I did back in the day, and it was wrong then. On the other hand, I don’t want to make it look like, I do often try to make it look like, Oh, this is easy, just do this, well, the messiest reality is, oh, we don’t have money, or we’re small. What you’re trying to do is convince people with enthusiasm that there’s a better way. Your book, I didn’t even put it there, it’s been there for a while since we had our podcast interview, shows that there are new ways to look into things in every realm. I don’t do a lot of the things that you mentioned in your book very well, I’ve got to do them better, I’ve made some changes since you shared the book initially, I no longer look at every email that comes across my desk. We laughed about the fact that I still did that to decide yes or no. I know somebody looking at it before I do, saying, Oh I know this, no, no, no, and they haven’t been wrong yet. Sometimes you have the desire to know why there isn’t a need to know. That’s some of that filtering process. Ross: You mentioned a moment ago, this wonderful phrase, building a framework, which is your real foundation of knowledge. The reality is when we build a framework, a lot of that is mental as opposed to explicit or something we draw up, but when you say building a framework, what does that mean to you? How do you do that? What is the process of pulling together these pieces to build a framework for you? Jim: As I think about it, I was thinking about it before this discussion, as you said, a lot of this is mental, you just take it for granted. But number one, is it in the wheelhouse of something that’s going to make a difference in the industry that I speak to? Number two, does the topic get me excited? There’s a lot of stuff that’s happening in the industry, I go, I’ll have Bob carry her or John carry her, I’ll have somebody else write about it, but I’m going send it to them and say, this probably has some meat to it, I just don’t have the energy to dig into it. There are certain sources of information that tend to be almost always killer, I go, everybody knows in my team, by the way, that’s mine. If I don’t say no to it, I don’t want anybody else to cover it. Then the framework really is, if I can be excited about it, I’m going to do a better job with it, I’m going to be able to write better with it. Then I actually expand my universe. What happens is, let’s say I find a report, I always try to find other insights that are on that topic from maybe a different perspective, or maybe they add some lists that are really key to the illustration. I’m not just doing a book report on research, I’m trying to give my perspective on something that’s already been done, and then bring in some alternative sources that reinforce this thought process or don’t reinforce it, if that’s the case. But the framework is step-by-step, and it’s continually trying to narrow. As you’ve mentioned many times, we aren’t in a situation where I don’t have enough information, it’s a matter of saying, jeez, what do I focus on tomorrow? Again, at the end of the day, does it interest me? Because if it doesn’t interest me, it’s going to show. My producer on my podcast knows immediately how excited I was about the topics within four minutes of talking to the guests. Now, sometimes, I’ll take a topic, and be like, I cannot believe I’m doing this podcast, and all of a sudden, the guest completely surprises me. I had a guest that talked about low-code programming, I’m going like, I had to research to be able to conduct the interview. When I was done, I’m going, we kept it going, we have the audio recording of it. It went on for another 10 to 15 minutes about how people learn today with low coding. My son is in data analytics, and they’re getting their learning from YouTube as opposed to traditional learning tools. I was just so excited to talk about, jeez, I may still not understand low-code, but I understand the potential and what the power of it is, but also, more importantly, how this is all going to be the way things are done going forward. You go, okay, put that in my reservoir of information, don’t know how many times you’re going to use it, but you sometimes get surprised. Ross: Yes absolutely. That’s a great example. There’s potential for a lot of change in how organisations work and the scope of what they can do, and how fast they can move. We will need to move faster to keep up. Jim: That’s the real key, Ross. The other one of these aha moments, let’s say, you start getting more and more podcasts, you realise, it’s all about the speed and scale of what you can do. No longer can bank sit back and say, we’re going to be developing X and we’re going to have a year to develop it, we want to have X by the end of 2023, I said whatever you used to do, take those old plans and put them to the back and say whatever you said you were going to do that you haven’t yet done, you got to cut your lead time by two, three quarters. In other words, it’s got to be done by the end of March. The only way you’re able to do that is if you have partners that have already gone down this path on your behalf without you knowing it. For any of us, how can we do more, faster? I’m not quite to the point where robots are going to be writing my blogs, I’m going to keep on fighting that one as long as I can because it’s like biting the hand that feeds me. But on the other hand, I’m reading about it. Because I don’t want to be in the backside not knowing about it and say, Oh, jeez, I’m the only human that’s still writing. I don’t know if that’s going to be good or bad in the end. Ross: I think it will be good, whatever it is you are writing, Jim. There’s a mental building of framework; another way of thinking about that is the mental models, the way in which you think about things. As you’ve expressed, you have the clarity around how you see banking, what is important, how that flows through? My fifth chapter is around synthesis, pulling together the many pieces to be able to build something which is coherent and congruent with this view of the world where you can have valid insights, perspectives, and advice. Is there anything which you do or you think facilitates that process of that broad synthesis, building these coherent mental models that you practise? Jim: Essentially, it’s the human interaction, not the ones we do on Zoom, it is actually getting to be with people and ask key questions to say, am I missing a consistency or an overall thought model that I’ve not thought of before? For the last 18 months, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of people, one-on-one. It wasn’t one-on-1000s, it wasn’t zero-on-one, which is like talking to a screen, but actually being able to have drinks or have a meal or to be in a small gathering and then meet every single one of people. It’s amazing, the number of aha moments you can have when people have a completely open, unstructured dialogue. I had a meeting a few weeks ago, we were talking about a new payment product out there that I thought jeez, everybody’s going to be on the cutting edge of this. We were the biggest banks in the country and realised nobody was planning for it. The reason was, they were waiting for the business case to be made up. I’m all of a sudden almost on the floor and go: Why does this not make sense to me? Why is it that while I think that you all are going to be on the cutting edge of doing this, you all of a sudden have also come to be a fast follower? What’s interesting about that is that’s a specific example but it’s the one that opened up doors to completely different examples around financial leaders maybe not doing what they’re saying they’re going to be doing because they have their personal opinions in let’s say, as a business case, I’m not going to move forward, you go, guys, that’s a luxury to have a business case figured out when you’re supposed to be on the cutting edge. The biggest change over the last three years is when human touch interactions came back. Because you can have open conversations, we have this right here, it’s very structured, you ask me a question, and I give you an answer. It’s like having a panel discussion. What do I want? I want the interruptions, being able to meet with small financial geniuses just to realise these guys are so ahead of the curve, or with large ones and go, they’re saying good things, but they’re not doing things. I ask a couple of questions. I have a couple of triggers that helped me understand, okay, where are you really on the learning curve? They’re gotcha questions. Sometimes I ask them, how long it takes your bank to do X, and they’ll give me the time, then I go, not acceptable. It’s interesting, and it’s good to be continually challenged by the things you don’t know because if you’re continually reading the things you know and you agree with, I’ll be enthusiastic about reinforcing my perspective but it’s when you get those surprises when you get those interactions, you get those smiles that are completely impromptu. There’s never time, I’m still lucky. Never time I meet with any number of people, there’s not a moment I go, Okay, put that in my little notes and say, I got to dig this deeper. There’s a thought here that has legs. That’s, again, I’m lucky in that my background in the industry has been very long. It’s been in the same industry but I haven’t let that confine me, what it’s done is, it’s opened my eyes to Oh, jeez, they just said something vastly different than the marketplace as a whole. Then it’s, as you know, you meet somebody like that, it gets you excited to go, I want to get on their boat because they’re not living life as expected. I had a saying, years ago I used, which was, embrace change, take risks, and be willing to disrupt yourself. I put that in both the business, the corporate setting, as well as the personal setting. If you live that, you surround yourself with people that may not think like you, but stay inquisitive, the more people you put around you that are inquisitive, jeez, it takes care of a lot of your inquisitiveness yourself as well. Ross: Yes, that’s fantastic. I’ve actually experienced that as a strong insight. Reflecting exactly what you said, in a way, yes, I know that the conversations are the ones where the real insights come out. But when you say it, as you are building your mental models, as you are thinking about things, it truly is when you have the conversations that strike you with any power as opposed to reading something or engaging in another way. But it’s about attitude. Of course, you need to come to that, with that attitude of what are the gems which I can find in our conversations, and being open to being able to shift and change. It does require the right approach, that attitude to how it is you have your conversations, but I think you’re absolutely right, the conversations are the places where the distillation, where that census happens, where it refines, where you get a better understanding of the world which you’re looking at. Jim: Also, you have a situation where, if you like insights and new thoughts, you want to surround yourself with people that continually look at things from a different perspective. They’re continually learning. It’s amazing how many people I’ve gotten out of my what I call inner circle because I just feel like at some point, they decided to mail it in. They’re saying the same thing over and over again in the same way. But then you meet somebody that you don’t expect to meet, and you say, I’ve got to get in their circle, I want them in mine, I want to be in theirs. It’s interesting because if it’s the right person, you’re not asking for anything they don’t want as well. It’s one of those mutually beneficial value transfers of energy. At the end of the day, what keeps you working at this time of night where you are in Australia, or me, working early in the morning to catch some of these calls? It’s the excitement of what you don’t know that may hit you. Those guests, those people, I continually put on my ramp saying, I got to hit them again. I’m going to an event next week with a financial brand, there are going to be 2000 marketers and retail bankers, now these are the best of the best, it’s almost like a rah-rah-rally even though that’s not what it is but these people were born with energy, you cannot be in marketing and simply mail it in. We are not looking at the back-office accountants there, nothing wrong with those, there are a lot of great people in those, but I know pretty much that everybody I’m going to meet next week is going to be just filled with energy. Then I’m going to London two weeks after that for an award ceremony for the best in FinTech awards. I’m going to like, oh, my gosh, this would be another energy transfer with a bunch of people that I know. I can’t get enough of how they learn. Ross: Yeah, fantastic! That phrase excitement of what you don’t know is a lot of the heart of being able to make this all work. Jim: It’s also a way to stay young. The reality is, I tell people, I say, you’re going to know I am dead the day you do not see a podcast on a Tuesday, or do not see an article on Monday, or do not see a webinar or some other event during the week because I am lucky enough that what I do, I am very blessed, what I do, I could do it anywhere, at any time. I have had some writings that have gone through the night to make sure to get out by Monday. There are some deadlines I have missed but the reality is when you have something that if your mind stays sharp, I know there are things that can impact that, it’s a blessing to have it, but it’s continually testing what I do. I look at COVID, I look back and go, anybody who’s tired of what they’re doing, tired of their job, that did not take the COVID time as a way to just test the waters on things you don’t know, shame on you. Because the reality is, you have a lot of free time that nobody knew about; you’re still doing your job but there’s a whole lot of time, you could have a side gig and say, I want to write and research anti-cars, or toys, those toys that spin, whatever it was, you could become the specialist on this and be the best of what that is, that would be something that excited you. If nothing else, there’s no reason to be bored nowadays. Overwhelmed, yes, not bored. Ross: Fantastic, Jim. Where can people find you and your work? Jim: It’s interesting. Somebody said to me the other day, they said, Jim, why don’t you give emails or anything like that? Google Jim Marous, you’ll come across my podcasts, you’ll come across the writings I do for The Financial Brand, you’ll come across the research I do for The Digital Bank Report, you’ll also probably pick up a couple of YouTube clips or something else I’ve done. But if you’re in the banking industry, if you’re interested in financial institutions, financial industry, I’m not a bad go-to person. I tell people because nobody takes advantage of it that if you ever reach out to me and say, can you help me find this? I may not know it, but I know who does, and if somebody is trying to solve a problem in retail banking, I can certainly point them in the right direction. I’m not the know, end-all of anything but I am lucky enough to have a circle of friends who all have specialties that are better than mine. Ross: That’s fantastic. Jim, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights. Jim: I appreciate your time also. Thanks, Ross. The post Jim Marous on defining yourself, ahas from unstructured dialogue, mutually beneficial learning, and the excitement of what you don’t know (Ep39) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“People have to dedicate a chunk of time to actively make sense of the world every day. That is get out your diary and write all the thoughts you had in your head and didn’t have time to synthesize until you woke up this morning, or read the things you think are most critical to read and take notes, and capture chunks of information that you think are going to be of relevance to you in the future. You have to make that investment.” – Stowe Boyd About Stowe Boyd Stowe Boyd has been studying work and the tools we use to adapt to the future for the past three decades. Stowe coined the terms ‘hashtag’, ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, and ‘spreadbase’. Website: Work Futures Blog: Stowe Boyd LinkedIn: Stowe Boyd Twitter: Stowe Boyd What you will learn What is the following people model? (03:14) What are the advantages and how to use Obsidian (06:12) How maths is a tool for connecting information (10:08) How can we thrive on overload as individuals and as a team? (16:48) What is the role of visuals in complementing words and its role in organisations (19:00) How to nurture the process of synthesis and pulling together into a whole all of the disparate things that we see (23:19) Why you need a daily routine for information processing (28:14) Episode resources Tumblr Medium MIT Technology Review New York Times Feynman Technique Obsidian Christopher Lasch N.S. Lyons Notion Evernote The Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch Taskidian Data View and Query Tool Obsidian Kanban boards Set Theory Lambda Calculus Recursion Social Network Theory Storm Norm Model by Bruce Tuckman Swift Trust Cisco Webex Ahead John Borthwick Pace Layers Stewart Brand Transcript Ross Dawson: Stowe, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Stowe Boyd: Nice to see you again, actually, it’s been a while. Ross: It has been a very long time now. I think it’s fair to say, thrive on overload, you make sense of the world of work and where that’s going amongst many, many other things. Where does that start? What’s the starting point for you in being able to make sense of this incredible world of information that we live in? Stowe: I guess the start, in a way, was the transition from the old world onto the internet. I’d gotten involved with that relatively early and embraced all that that entails, the good and the bad. I started blogging in 1999. It was a long time ago. Around the same time, I got really interested in the transition to collaboration technologies, as most people call them, but I use different terms. I followed that very avidly for the last 20 years, honestly. That was the grounding of everything that came later. From that, I got interested in work; what people are doing aside from just the technologies that they use to do it. That’s basically the background, the foundation of everything else I’m involved in, or have been involved in for the last couple of decades. Ross: Why don’t we start from the tactical and build out into the macro of what you do? How do you choose your information sources? Where does your sensing of the world stand? What are your sources? What times of the day do you do that? How do you get to come across the things that feed your mind? Stowe: I’ve always been a real fan of the following-people model. I once said that the most important decision in a connected world is who you choose to follow. That’s a lot of it. There are specific people, hundreds of them out there, that I think highly of and are good sources. I try to follow them in whatever mechanism that comes; Newsletters now is very common but also before that things like Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, and all those kinds of platforms. That’s it principally; that and, of course, certain journals, periodicals that I think are important, MIT’s Technology Review, for example, or the New York Times, real obvious things. I’m pretty avid about keeping up with those sources. I have a deluge of newsletters coming to me all the time these days. Ross: Following these people, finding these sources, how do you pull out what is relevant? Something which you do need to capture or to do something with, how do you identify what it is? What do you do with that to pull that into your framework of thinking? Stowe: I think I’ll operate on this Feynman notion that you have a list of 20 questions or 12 questions or some number that are important to you so you’re always on the lookout for information that adds to, clarifies, or debunks things you’ve already been thinking about. I definitely have that. I’ve got this list of topics and when they reoccur, I’m very interested, I capture, read, and try to assimilate it. I was doing this in the morning before we got on the call. I was reading about this characterization of the two sides of the world, virtuals versus physicals, and people are grounded in those worlds. This aligns with other discussions that are important to me about how does the world work, and how is politics and economics changing. I copied two things that I was reading this morning, put them in my Obsidian vault, and highlighted the things I thought were critical. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, I’ll go back and write something, and pluck that quote from Christopher Lasch and that other thing from N.S. Lyons and it’ll find its way into something that I synthesize and try to help me make sense of the world, then I’ll share it somewhere. Ross: So you’re using Obsidian. I’d love to hear why you’ve chosen to use Obsidian and how specifically you use that to capture and connect. Stowe: It’s the most recent example of trying to use and maintain a body of information, what I call “My Workings” and you’ve got to keep it somewhere. In the old days, people would keep a commonplace book and write on the pages or take clippings from magazines and glue them in whatever. But, in the digital age now, I’ve tried a whole bunch of other tools. They all did what they did, and they sufficed maybe at various points in my progression. I have gone through Notion, Evernote, and a bunch of others, too many to name actually. Then, in the last year and a half, I’ve been using Obsidian, and I really like it because of its flexibility. I mean, the fact that it’s extendable, that people have built all kinds of plugins that do all kinds of interesting things, that makes it easy to cross-reference and find things. Finding is really critical. I need like 100 ways to find things because my memory is flawed and limited but I can have an infinity of markdown files on my hard drive. I want to be able to go there and say, who was the person that said, who was the guy that wrote the book The Revolt of the Elites? I don’t remember. I know today because I just put something in there but six years from now, will I remember that? Maybe, but maybe not. But I’ll search it and I’ll find out. I really require a system and Obsidian is one of many candidates that I am currently invested in. But it’s not necessarily the end-all and be-all, who knows? I might move again. Ross: I’m using Obsidian as well. There’s Roam Research, Obsidian, and Logsec and some other similar tools. Do you think there is potential for the next generation beyond that? Stowe: They’re evolving very quickly, they’re all on their own development paths but they’re all looking at each other like, they have that feature, I’ll implement that. Yes, it’s another interesting frontier technology space, very interesting stuff. Ross: You connect some when you take notes, whether that be a paragraph, an idea, a link, or so on, are there any particular ways in which you’re trying to connect that or link that to build a structure to those notes? Stowe: Yes, absolutely. I built a system inside of Obsidian I call Taskidian. It’s based on some plugins, Data View, Query Tool-a plugin, and it allows me to put metadata associated with tasks and then I can find them later, I can search, I can order them by the metadata values, and so on. I also use extensively Kanban boards inside of Obsidian. For everything I consider a project, I’m managing the information that way. That’s manual, it relies less on search and Data View kind of metadata, but because I think in projects, it’s very sensible to have an artifact that reflects the way I think about things too not just because someday I might want to be able to find things in an organized fashion. I have six Kanban boards in my side panel, and I can just click on them and say, what is the next thing I’m supposed to do or who am I waiting for to take the next step in that project. That’s kind of critical. Ross: You have a mathematical background. I think that is one of the ways in which we have overlapped in thinking about social network analysis and some related fields; you mentioned Set Theory, and so on. How do those frameworks inform how you think, how you find information, how you connect it, or how you find that again? Stowe: There are fundamentally two kinds of math, discrete math and calculus and that kind of approach, and then different tools, different ways of thinking about the world. I studied both, but my real background is computer science. It’s Set Theory and Lambda Calculus, Recursion, and all those kinds of things. Those things fundamentally structured my brain to think about things in different ways than I thought before I learned them, clearly. That means that when I look at something, I tend to use those kinds of tools to try and make sense of it. Then I learned all about Social Network Theory; the concepts of that and social network analysis obviously frame a lot of my thinking about how people interact in social groups, and so on. That’s 85% of what goes on in thinking about work, the workplace. The other 15% is technology, and how that’s influencing it, and the influence of external factors like the economic sphere in which businesses operate, and so on. Those tools are absolutely central to what I think about. I use those models as ways to structure, framework things, and help explain them to people because a lot of my work is explanatory in its nature, trying to teach things, drawing correlations between things and sharing them with people, and say, hey, you should think about this way, as opposed to some other way. Ross: The correlations or the relationships between ideas, I asked you the question before we spoke on around surfacing relationships, where are the connections? How do you identify them? You made some interesting points around the analogies or how you are making the connections between things cognitively, which, to a fair degree, is connecting the dots in ways that other people wouldn’t. What are the thinking structures that enable you to make these connections? Stowe: Here’s a good anecdote. I was working on a panel session recently, all virtual, it was kind of interesting, and I came up with an analogy during the talk while I was actually moderating this panel, which was a similarity between people’s reluctance to retreat from rising sea levels along the coastlines and instead, their natural tendency to rebuild over and over again which is going to be fruitless because the problem is just getting worse all the time. I made the analogy from that to how companies continue to invest in building teams as a central part of how to manage work and how to organize people in businesses even though all the evidence shows that mostly companies don’t get a return on investment from teams, that they’re not a great way necessarily to organize the totality of work. But we will continue to reinvest in teams because people want them to work despite the evidence that it’s not necessarily the best way to organize things. There is a real similarity there but how would you take evidence from the world of retreating from the coastlines and apply it in the business context? Maybe it’s only the analogy that is applicable, but maybe not, maybe there are actual techniques that could be applied. That’s how reasoning by analogy can actually lend itself to insights, new ideas come from that, who knows? Or maybe it’s just a wisecrack, I don’t know. Ross: That’s the thing where all analogies have some points that can be mapped against each other and others where they can’t. You always need to distinguish. You can make an analogy that is strong, useful, and relevant but you’ve got to be able to discern where the analogy applies and where it doesn’t apply. Because analogy is not complete mapping so there’s always a danger as well as value when you introduce analogy. Stowe: In the two cases in this particular instance, now people are talking about “unteams”, actually organizing things that are looser, where you do less team development, that people don’t have a sense that they are going to be working in close contact with this specific group of people over a long period of time. That drops out a whole bunch of politicking that goes on in team formation, the storm-norm model, you can just drop that out. Swift trust is something that’s been well-researched so there is a whole body of things that arise from this. I haven’t gotten around to writing much about it yet, actually, because it just occurred like two weeks ago. Ross: That brings me to another really interesting point, something which I’m thinking about a lot. I’ve been looking at these ideas of thriving on overload from an individual perspective, as individuals that process information and make sense of it, hopefully to make better decisions. But how do we map that then onto a team perspective, where as a team, we are collaborating to make sense, filter information, create things? In looking at the future of work and your structures, do you have any directions or thoughts around how it is we can collaboratively engage in that filtering, deception, and sense-making and model making? Stowe: Yes, I think there are a couple of observations. One is that each individual to whatever extent it’s possible needs to invest themselves into a process, doing it individually. As I said, all social tools start with Social Equals Me First. You’ve got to get the thing working right for the individual, and then scale it up from there. I think one of the fundamental insights that I’ve come up with, or I believe now, it’s a belief, is that we need to spend more time writing and reading and less time in meetings and talking. I’m still a believer in talking. It’s just that we have given it too much priority in the business context in group interactions. I like the idea and all the research. It’s fascinating about the value of asynchronous communication mechanisms. They also tend to balance out the differences in people’s cognitive styles whether you’re an introvert, extrovert, Night Owl, morning lark, or whatever, all of those things get smoothed a lot by shifting to asynchronous writing as a mechanism and away from the face-to-face, real-time conversation as a foundational notion of how people should interact socially. The benefits of this then accrue to the degree that people can and do invest in that as a mechanism for coordinating work, communicating, and so on. I think that’s foundational, but it’s one of those problems because the fundamental thing behind it is the notion that there’s a learning loop going on inside of organizations and it has to be given primacy, it has to be considered as important as what most people think is the central loop of business, which is producing products or services and delivering them to clients. That’s important. You’ve got to do that. But you also have to spend time on this learning loop, or else you’re failing on any kind of sustainable level for people. Likewise, now, of course, we know that there’s a third loop of well-being, we have to figure that out, or else once again, things fall apart. Ross: One of the interesting things from what you’re saying there or is a part of it: Writing is a process of actually structuring your own thoughts as well as communicating those to others, it is a way of being able to, in a way, distill and build your mental models. But some of the things that you’re saying there, I think, also maybe lend themselves to visual representations. We have words as a way of capturing, distilling, and communicating, but also visual representations is a way. Loops, for example, are difficult to represent using linear words. So I’d love to just hear about as a compliment to words, the role of visuals and how you think or find those useful or how you see those playing their role in organizations? Stowe: In some of the things I’ve written recently about these very issues like the series I did in the first half of this year for Cisco at their Webex Ahead website if anyone wants to look at it, I use the diagrammatic techniques of loops and show how our loop connects with the loops of our clients or whatever. Yes, I did that. I put the graphic in there so I can save the 1000 words by showing the picture. I think that’s critical. The same is true of all kinds of other models. I’ve shared with you the notion of my adjacency matrix kind of model of thinking about competitive structures, competitive forces inside of markets, like the marketplace for work technologies, there are all these overlapping circles and you can actually show how people move from one end of this matrix to another by changing the functionality of their tools and how people are moving from a sector and a collection of technologies to others because they are offered new and different things. For example, the transition away from work management, like task-oriented tools to things like what we were talking about, Obsidian, and other tools for thought, what I call Workings, content-centric work management. There’s clearly a movement that people are trying to embed the notion of work management inside of the context of the content, and sharing that among people, and not separating them out as something. That transition is happening based on people deciding it’s a better way, some subset of the people think it’s a better way for them to do things. Will that be a tidal wave that will sweep the world of business? I don’t know. But it’s clear that there’s a lot of investment of human energy in it and also, a lot of investment of capital is going in there. Notion is now valued at $10 billion, that’s a pretty significant uptick in just a couple of years. I think it’s a fascinating space. It represents a change in how people are thinking about thinking about things, that’s an unusual thing. It doesn’t happen that many times in a generation. Ross: It hasn’t been done enough. John Borthwick of Betaworks a little while ago had a little Twitter thread where he said to somebody the fact that the thinking tools market is not developed and there needs to be a lot more, it’s fragmented. Yes, we do. We can be helped by tools for thinking. We do have a bit of our next generation but this is potentially a bit of a wave of new software, new structures, new processes, then visual level, organizational level where we can have tools that enable us to think better, make better sense of the world and make better decisions. Stowe: Right. Let’s hope so. But at least continue to make decisions and maybe make the making of decisions easier, not necessarily just better. It would be great if we could set up systems that would help people collectively organize themselves around decision-making in a better way because the way that decisions are made often is pretty horrible. Ross: Adjacent to that or in forming that is that space of synthesis. I always believe this is the vital human capability of being able to see all the pieces across different domains and different frames, and pulling those together to make sense to have a synthesis, I’d love to hear any thoughts around how you nurture, support, enable, or go through that process of synthesis and pulling together into a whole all of the disparate things that we see. Stowe: One of the things I’ve come to appreciate in maybe the last 10 years is that thinking synthetically requires time. It’s something that I didn’t appreciate as much prior to this last decade anyway. It’s like a sedimentary process. You have to lay down layers of things over time and think about them incompletely. There’s an incompleteness that goes on, you haven’t concluded yet, you’re not even sure what the conclusion is, and you don’t know where it’s going. There is this openness to ambiguity. I think that’s essential. You have to accept that you haven’t come down on an answer, or you don’t have the answer, you don’t know exactly where it’s even headed. I think that runs counter to the go, go, quick decision-making which is a sign of leading executives, that kind of grind culture thinking has a tendency to push us away from the necessity for reflection overtime on issues that are if you will, top-level issues, the 12 key questions that someone should be pursuing throughout their life or career, whatever. I think people just don’t give it enough time a lot of the time. They’re too abrupt, they’re looking for quick answers, quick hits. For example, I’m working on a committee here in my city, appointed by the mayor. He charted us at the very beginning with finding the quick hits, what are the things we can do with the biggest impact for the lowest cost in the shortest period of time? I’m like, okay, we can also do that but don’t we have to do the other thing, too? I mean, how would you know a thing is short-term than something that’s long-term if you don’t consider the long-term things too? Because how would you even make that comparison? We did that. We did that for the mayor even though we ultimately had to spend an equal amount of time or even more time on the long-term issues. It’s essential. His hope for a two-month turnaround of low-hanging fruit, as he called it, meant that we ultimately went on a course that is now two years long, and we have the matrix of the low-hanging fruit, short-term, low-cost, easy, all the way to long-term, expensive, biggest impact. You have to do everything. I think that’s a common situation and it’s inescapable in a way. Ross: I love that idea of the sedimentary layers, being able to lay those foundations, appreciating timeframe, understanding what timeframe you’re thinking, and for a start, is something which is often neglected. Stowe: I think of a model, once again, something we’ve been talking about a lot. I think about the Pace Layers of Stewart Brand, the world has different layers, and the ones at the core at the bottom in his diagram are the slowest, but the fastest ones is like, in his example, fashion is constantly changing at a very high pace, but that impacts a lower level, and there’s some friction so that the things that go on in the fashion level influence the next layer, and that causes it to move and so on. But I think thinking about things that way is essential. That’s the kind of thinking that you don’t hear in corporate boardrooms. They think of everything as like quarter to quarter, we’ve got this project, it’s going to go an entire 18 months, it’s like, don’t you have a five-year time horizon or a decade? We’re going to be in a decade in a decade from now, you know it’s inevitable! You have to think about it. No, but often it’s the opposite. I think that’s a difficult thing. It’s a difficulty in the way that we think about time. Ross: It is. So, just in rounding out, of course, there’s real richness and depth to what we’ve just been able to touch the surface of in our conversation, but are there any recommendations that you would give to people listening to your experience to be able to say, how is it that I can make some steps to be better at making sense of this world of information profusion that we have to deal with? Stowe: I think people have to dedicate a chunk of time to actively attempting to make sense of the world every day. That is get out your diary and write all the thoughts you had in your head and didn’t have time to synthesize until you woke up this morning, or read the things you think are most critical to read and take notes, and capture chunks of information that you think are going to be of relevance to you in the future maybe. You have to make that investment. You have to be an active participant in the sedimentary nature of building up knowledge of the world. Otherwise, it won’t happen or it’ll happen obliquely only, indirectly, things will happen but you won’t have something that you can turn back to and use as a tool if you don’t craft it. In my case, for example, I have the luxury, if you will, to say I’m not going to take any phone calls in the morning unless it’s an emergency. I get up at six o’clock, I’m at my desk, and I try to make sure I don’t have any phone calls till 11 or after lunch, whatever. It gets broken up because of travel, client engagements, whatever but I start with the premise that there are no time slots that you can book when I send you a link to my request for the meeting. There are no time slots in the mornings because I want to spend that time reading and writing. At the end of 20-plus years, it starts to add up. Ross: Absolutely. That’s really important advice that just simply take the time, take the time to think, take the time to digest, take the time to make sense of it. To benefit from the fruits of all of your thinking and distilling and writing, where should people go? Stowe: There are a couple of places. One is workfutures.io where I write mostly about work-related issues. I have an interesting story about that. It’s too long to tell but basically, I got a big boost from spending time talking to my readers to help me craft a description of what it’s all about, which is really helpful. If anyone wants to see it, workfutures.io/about was really informed by a discussion with readers of the pub. The other things, I’m on Medium, I work the streams on Twitter every day, and stoweboyd.com still works, although that’s mostly like culture things these days. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Stowe. That’s been really valuable. Stowe: Thanks for having me. The post Stowe Boyd on Obsidian and Taskidian, learning loops, work management, and sedimentary thinking (Ep38) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I will be triggered by something that challenges ideas, assumptions, hypotheses that either I have, or that the wider world has. It makes you think, and that’s the only thing I want, I want to make people think, and have a deeper integration by challenging their assumptions.” – Michel Bauwens About Michel Bauwens Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation working in collaboration with global researchers in exploring the potential of peer production. Michel travels extensively giving workshops, and lectures on P2P, commons, and the opportunities of a post-capitalist world. Website: P2P Foundation LinkedIn: Michel Bauwens Twitter: Michel Bauwens Facebook: Michel Bauwens What you will learn What is the best daily habit upon waking up? (02:10) How to select books and essays to start your day (09:58) How to challenge your preconceptions (13:25) How do you assess what is worth sharing or not worth sharing? (16:48) What is the process of creating that taxonomy as a framework to clarify what the nature of peer-to-peer is? (21:02) What is a way to be integrative, synthesize, and pull together disparate ideas? (26:42) Episode resources A Theory of Everything by Ken Wilber Heurestic method Oswald Spengler Arnold Toynbee Carroll Quigley Jean Gebser Joseph Campbell Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl Episode images Slide from “The Role of the Commons in Civilizational Transitions”  Lecture delivered by Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, September 2022, at Uppsala University Transcript Ross Dawson: Michel, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Michel Bauwens: Thanks Ross. Ross: You live in a world of information, you find interesting things, you are piecing together how the world is working and what it could become, so I’d love to hear what’s your starting point. What do you do? Let’s start with your daily practices. When you get up, what do you do? Michel: The first thing I do is actually read. I have this broad idea that you have to be immersed in different temporalities at the same time. So the web is now, the zeitgeist, it’s trends and patterns that emerge, and then you have to feel whether it’s going up or down. But this is now, right? It’s embedded in more long-term patterns and structures. For that, I read essays. You write an article for the web, you probably spend a day or two, or maybe a week on it; if you write a more formal essay for a magazine, a journal, or even a peer-reviewed journal, it’s going to take you months, sometimes a bit more. It’s going to be like a synthesis of a lot more thinking and more time when you do that. But then the books for me are the ultimate. The book is the long duree, the really long flow of time. My idea is you have to mix all three all the time. I do that in a structured way. I start with reading for one hour and a half, which may not seem that much, but if you do it every day for dozens of years, it shows. Then I do half an hour of reflection on reading because I believe in anchoring. I work with questions. There are things I want to know that I don’t understand so I’ll read up to it until the moment I feel okay, I’m satisfied that at my level, at this moment, this is a good enough answer, and then I’ll move to something else. I take notes on paper. I have one of them here. This is just like a notebook and I have probably 35-40 of them. So I take notes. I have the pleasure of living in a nice village kind of environment in Northern Thailand. I can see the mountains. I just lay down in a long seat and I say: “Okay, what have I learned this morning? Is there anything that I’ve read challenging some of my presuppositions?” The reason I do that in the morning is just experience. When I start with a web, after maybe two hours, my brain just loses its capacity to focus. I feel if I wait to read as I used to do later then it’s just something that happens at an almost chemical level in my brain that just doesn’t absorb it in the same way. Okay, so that’s my morning. Then I spend three hours doing curation. That’s basically not very scientific. I’m mostly concentrating on Facebook. I manage six different forums and one is called p2p. I’m pretty systematic and maybe absolutist, so anybody who sends me anything, I open a tab. At any time I have four windows with 2000-3000 tabs, and of course, I get more tabs than I can handle. This might seem weird, but in a way, it’s a meta-curation. Why? Because I’m an influencer and I influence other influences, so most people connected with me are themselves at some level already, at a somewhat higher level than the average person in terms of how they deal with information. It’s not scientific, it’s not satisfactory, but I used to do blogs, I used to do this, and whatever you do, it’s always too much anyways. I got at some point to a level of popularity where I was just getting too many things from too many people. I want to honor what they send to me, so people are tagging me and saying: Michel, have you seen this? Michel, have you seen that? I feel the least I can do is honor that, look at it, and then re-dispatch it if I think it’s adequate in my own framing. For my framing, I still use Ken Wilber’s four quadrants because it’s non reductionist. You have subjective-objective, collective culture, and collective organizational, technical. Ross: What’s the title of the book that the framework came out in? Michel: I’m not sure but I think it’s A Theory of Everything, probably. Ross: I think so yes. Michel: I stopped reading him maybe 10 years ago, but I have the collected works, I have eight volumes. I read it in my 20s and 30s. I can critique Wilber and everything but basically, this as a heuristics method is very, very good because we don’t know what’s the chicken and the egg, is it objective material conditions which create certain ideas? But we also know ideas are important, they can change the world. So what is it? I don’t know. What I want to do is just like correlations. We know that when this happens in this area, and we can see at the same time, this is happening in this other domain. What is chicken? What is the egg? I don’t know. But when you create positive feedback loops between them, we know that that is actually paradigm-changing, and that’s enough. If you’re a change agent like I want to be, then it’s enough to know that, okay, if we can strengthen those links of co-emerging things that seem to have the same underlying logic, that’s good enough for me. The basic idea that I have about change is that we have a relatively stable dynamic complex system. I look at three of them. One is nature, climate, environment, matter, biology, and all of that. The next one is human society and culture. The third one is the constellation of consciousness. How do we look at all those things? My theory is that they change in parallel, that if you have a change in here, let’s say the objective climate, environmental area, that is a challenge which demands a responsible human society, and at a certain level, the society will fit the problem but then, paradoxically, because it solves a particular level of issues, it actually creates a new level of problems. That then can only be solved if you also then adapt your mental constellations. Ross: I want to come back to the beginning, because there are actually around 10 different questions to dig into so let’s go back to the beginning where we started, and we’ll come back to where we just got to know. You start with books or essays, how do you choose those books and essays? Do you have a list of them? Is this just part of the curation process that you line those up with? How do you select those essays or books that you start the day with? Michel: My intellectual development was that I had a big midlife crisis in my mid-40s. This is in the mid-90s. I thought that the world wasn’t evolving in a positive way, all the indicators were red in terms of biodiversity and ecological issues, but also social inequality in that, and I said, Okay, what can we do about it? My first step was to take a two-year sabbatical and look at transitions. From that, I decided that the key today was around peer-to-peer in the comments. The capacity we have today, through digital means to self-organize at a non territorial level, that’s the p2p part. The second part is the capacity that we have to mutualize knowledge and human organization doing that. So those two things, in my opinion, are the seeds of the future. So I look at seed farms. Then in my second step, I looked at, okay, what is happening around this today? I look at open source, open design, and open hardware, then I looked at urban commons, then I looked at emerging new systems of monetary organizations like Bitcoin and the blockchain and etc. The thesis is that there is a geographic world but we are adding a new layer, the newest ferric layer, which has its forms of non territorial organization, and how are these two mergings converging and adapting or not adapting to each other? That’s the theme. Then I felt, this is more recent, actually, with COVID that, okay, I have to go back to the basics a bit more, because what I’m seeing is that there is not going to be a smooth transition. It feels like we are in decay, in decline, institutions are losing trust, and are working less and less efficiently. I did a second round, and I call this civilization analysis. I have a list. I’m systematically going through the macro-historians, Oswald Spangler, Toynbee, Carroll Quigley, Jean Gebser, Joseph Campbell, it’s a very long list, I will die before I’m finished, let’s put it that way, it’s an impossible task. Ross: So you start with a theme or what sounds in a way posing question. There is a question or set of questions from which you find the essays from all of human history. Michel: Yes, so the key question for me today is, okay, what were transitions like in the past? Is there anything we can learn today from those patterns that can help us find our way in the current transition? Have at least some idea of where we are going? That’s it? That’s the question. Ross: It’s a nice big question. Michel: I know, yes. It’s impossible to answer but the path is the way. Ross: You said that after you read, you lie down, then sit back and think about anything that challenges your preconceptions? That’s what not that many people are very good at. Is there a way that you just sit with this and say, is there something there, which meshes or doesn’t mesh? Do you take notes about that? How do you integrate that? Michel: The hardest thing for me, and sorry, it’s a bit controversial, but before 1789, everything was religious. If you wanted to change the world, you would come up with some religious argument that the Bible says this or the Bible says that or the Buddha said this or the Buddha said that. That was the framing of any debate. After 1789, it becomes political. It’s basically the left and the right. In different iterations, they’re not the same all the time, but they remain as those two polarities. I’ve come to the conclusion that this polarity is no longer functioning. In other words, we need to go to an integral and an integrative point of view. The problem is that the transition is just the opposite that happens. Imagine this, you have an ideational glue that holds the system together, and then you either have a loss of capacity of the system to handle an existing level of complexity or a new level of complexity that it can’t handle. For example, new medium like print or the internet, that just overwhelms the capacity of the system to hold things together. Then you get fragmentation, and then you get polarization. You have the Christians versus the Pagans, the Reformation versus the Catholics, and now it’s the culture war. The problem for me, and it’s very hard to live that, is that at the very moment, I want to go in integration, the world is going in the opposite direction. I was a leftist all my life, I was committed to this particular set, and I’m saying, well, it seems like no, this is not working and this is actually degrading, and the other side is also missing something so can we create some kind of environment in which we can talk about the relative truth value of progressive leftists’ convictions but also on the right? It’s a hard thing to do. It’s a very controversial thing to do because we’re back into the index times, where there are forbidden books, there are forbidden people, and there are forbidden ideas. It’s very hard to do this but you have to think about what’s next. Right now, it’s counter-cyclical, but it’s the only way out of a bad situation. You have to go beyond those antagonisms because the new will be some combination of the old and then stuff added to it. Ross: This seems to be, in a way, a link between as you say, you start with the reading, the ingestion, you’ve got the fundamental ideas and questions, looking for the deepest ideas you can find to be able to feed that into question and to build your models, but then it’s going into the curation, which is the sharing. This is part of where you are finding, uncovering the ideas which within the community can then go out. You have thousands of tabs you said, so lots of things are thrown at you. So what are the filters? What are the ways in which you say, this is worth sharing, this is not worth sharing? How do you assess that? Is there a frame of mind? Is there a criterion? Michel: Remember four levels in Wilber, the four domains. I start with the idea that I’ll have three from each, so only 12. That’s the idea, minimum 12 items that are the most significant in those domains. The first thing, and I cannot explain this, this is something that happens in my brain. It’s like “Is this article crossing a threshold that it’s actually worth talking about?” 80% of what I see, I just don’t do anything with it, because I feel it’s repetitive, it’s the same old, doesn’t bring anything new, okay, don’t pay attention to it. But I will be triggered by things, so okay, this is something that challenges some ideas, assumptions, hypotheses that either I have, or that the wider world has. It makes you think, and that’s the only thing I want, I want to make people think, and have a deeper integration by challenging their assumptions. I do that in my Facebook groups and that, of course, is ephemeral, people don’t go back to the archives. Then I have my wiki. My wiki has 23,000 articles divided into a few dozen sections, and there we’ll have an encyclopedia because a tag in a wiki creates its own directory, and then I will have the section page that is like an ongoing synthesis, that makes sense of the database. If you want to know p2p in the commons, in transportation, in health, in my wiki, you’ll feel kind of like a preliminary synthesis of what is happening. Then every year, I write some kind of report that takes some area. I did one on urban commons. What’s happening around urban commons and public policies around urban commons? I did one on new firms of accounting, post-capitalist accounting, environmental accounting, and all those things. I did one on the thermodynamics of peer production. How can we use virtualization and peer-to-peer to bring down our usage of matter and energy? Every year, we’ll take something of that nature and then make a synthesis. And that’s the body of my work. Then I have this service orientation where if somebody makes a comment, at the very least, we’ll like it, or say thank you, or, say I will check your reference so just making sure that people feel that it’s not an empty bucket in which they’re reacting but there’s a gardener behind the scenes that keeps the whole thing moving. Ross: There’s so much to dig into relevant to thriving on overload. One of the things is frameworks, and so I would suggest that your categories or your structure or taxonomy for the P2P foundation site is a framework. I presume that that has evolved. It’s not as if you in one moment came up with that. So touching talk a little bit about the process of creating that taxonomy as a framework for elucidating what the nature or the aspects of peer-to-peer is. Michel: Right. The base level will just be looking at different domains and what’s happening in a different domain. That’s the base level, so health, spirituality, and I do everything, and that’s not given to everybody to do that. It’s maybe because of my life history, I was a leftist militant, I did a lot of human potential work, I studied spirituality, I was into Western esoteric stuff, then I was a startupper so I know the business world, I had two companies that I started, I made a movie, I was editor-in-chief, so there are not so many people that can hop from one world to another. Now, I’m not saying I know everything, of course not but most people have one or two domains, and I have a bit more than them so that allows me to have this bigger-picture approach. The next level would be either the four quadrants of Wilber or the three complex systems that I just explained. We have an objective world, I believe; I’m a bit of pre-postmodern in that, I believe there is something out there. Then there is a human society that in different ways, according to its civilization values tries to cope with what it is given. Then there is whether our ways of approaching it are actually appropriate or not at a particular time. So there are times when people reacted more magically, there are times when people reacted more mythologically, and there are times when people acted more rationally, and maybe now we’re ready for something else. Because I think we are, this is Jean Gebser, the basic idea that we are now in a deficient rational mode, that the calculating mode has taken over everything, and that we are no longer able to see quality and subjectivity so we have this technocratic machine that is waltzing over everything and denying most of our realities out of efficiency-driven, profit-driven motivations. We’re going in a wall, that’s my profound conviction that we’re going into the wall, and there’s nothing we can do about going into the wall but we can start thinking about what’s on the other side of the wall, and how can at least the maximum amount of people go through this huge transition. It’s the most difficult transition we had because civilization was a response to climate change. You have the post-Ice Age and that’s what flooded the plains of Egypt and Mesopotamia and dried out Northern Africa, and that created civilization, people decided, no, we want to stay here so we need to dominate nature. Civilization has always been about dominating nature. Now, we are at a stage where we have to find some other paradigm to deal with nature because we overcompensated as humans. Basically, we have 10,000 years of mental structures that have to be overridden, and that’s extremely difficult. I don’t even claim I can do it. I’m just like everybody else, I’m a product of my time. Ross: We are, necessarily. Michel: Yes, we cannot be anything else. So how do we do that? I look at the past and, for the moment I’m very interested in monasteries like the Romans in the Roman Empire completely destroyed local agriculture. Then you have a bunch of people like St. Benedict or St. Bernard, and they create one little thing that becomes viral and spreads in 70 years all over the continent. What’s the equivalent of this today? I don’t know. But looking at all the people trying this, that’s my job, it’s observing what today pioneers are doing. When a system is in crisis, the solution is not going to be in the same paradigm as the system in crisis. What’s the underlying paradigm and logic of the people trying to solve these fundamental issues in a new way? What is working? What is not working? That’s my approach. I don’t have the answer but I try to learn from people who are experimenting in finding the answer. Ross: We have to explore in order, go ahead and explore and find that. The fifth of what I call the five powers of thriving on overload is synthesis, and we talked about synthesis, integration, and as you say, in a world, fragmentation of ideas, societies, the cultures, that we need to integrate into all of those levels. What advice can you give to those who are wanting to be on that path of being integrative, to synthesize, and to be able to pull together disparate ideas? What have you learned? Or what is it that you can share that others can learn from, that attitude, that propensity, that capability? Michel: Well, for me, the most important now is that we need to make sure we have a plural information basis. Before, we were all happy to watch television, and we had a pretty much-controlled environment. Then we got this explosion of the internet, and all kinds of people come out of the woodwork and have a voice. The way I feel the system is reacting to it now is, one is by reducing the narrative to a massive narrative, which is repeated over and over again, whether COVID or Ukraine, you get one story, and it’s just repeated over and over. Then the second step would be doing algorithmic control, making sure the other voices kind of stay in the background and don’t come up. I don’t know if you’re aware of this but nowadays, you do a Google search, it used to be that you had the most important answers in the beginning, and then you could go down, that’s gone, you should try it. If they just keep repeating the top answers over and over again, they literally disappear the internet, they are actively making sure that you don’t get to see challenging ideas. I’m not saying these challenge ideas are right, I’m just saying that you should make an effort to make sure that you have a broad variety of information sources. You can build it over time if you trust them, if you think that they’re coherent and factual enough, then you keep them independent of how they see the world because you want to know how other people see the world. Then out of that, I just make my own narrative. I have three simple rules, is it true? That means that you have to be ready to ditch something if you have countervailing facts, like, you believe vaccines work and then surveys and the research comes out, and turns out they didn’t work as well as we thought they were, well, okay, that’s new facts, You adapt yourself to the scientific research. The second level is, with all those facts, what is the most coherent story that I can maintain? That’s the second. Just coherence, nothing else. It’s not full and we all have our level of how much coherence we can build depending on our flexibility and knowledge. The third level is how much hope can we create out of this. Because whether the hope is real or not, I’m always reminded of the story of Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, where he said in the concentration camps, only two groups of people survived, the Catholics and the communists because anybody else who could not project outside of the hell they were living in let themselves die because if this is life, it’s not worth living and I’m going to die anyway so I might as well suffer less long. Those people were able to project either to the next world or to the next physical world as an utopia, and because they share their ideas, the second level advantage was they could organize together, so they became a counterpower. Then he also says, this is very interesting, he says, if you’re a pilot, and you want to go from A to B, and for B, you will never get there, because the wind will push you away, you always need to aim for C even in order to get to B. So I think hope, active hope, it’s not a guarantee, I don’t know if we will succeed or not, but the realistic hope is something that mobilizes your energy and that it will give you more chance to survive and thrive than if you don’t have it. But it has to be grounded. I’m for a “nonutopian” utopia in a way. That’s why I focus on concrete utopias. People are trying out things so you know that this is real, this could work, it works for them, it might work for other people. That’s the kind of idea. Let’s look at all the good stuff that people are doing today amongst this sea of bad news and disintegration. Ross: I absolutely agree. For me, hope as in the sense of yes it is possible to create something better, let’s find how. It has to be the foundation of how we approach our lives. Hope is probably a pretty good concluding piece there. You could spend forever in delving deep because there is great depth to your structures and your thinking, but if people want to find your curation and the things that you share, and you write, where’s the best place for them to go? Michel: Okay, so the central group is on Facebook. It’s called Open p2p. If you do that in the search box, you’ll find that. Then the second is wiki.p2pfoundation.net. They are on the main page, so the wiki will see our structure. The middle layer has all the topics that we cover in the wiki. Then I wrote quite a few things so if you’re interested, you just look it up on Google under my name, you’ll find various reports: the thermodynamics of peer production, p2p accounting for planetary survival, neutralizing urban provisioning systems, so I have these synthetic reports that you can look for. Ross: Yes. Fantastic resources that you have compiled and shared and created. Thank you for your contributions, Michel. Michel: Yes, thank you, Ross. Thank you for interviewing me and reconnecting. We’re more or less the same in trying to curate and open up the minds, that’s what you try to do as well, opening of minds, keeping our societies tolerant, that we can learn from each other. Nobody has a truth. We all have part of the truth and the more perspectives we combine, the more light we can shine on an object. Ross: Absolutely, yes. That’s part of thriving on overload, we live in a world where I’ve learned that thriving is a collective thing, as of course, all of your workbooks. So thank you so much, Michel. Michel: Thanks, Ross. The post Michel Bauwens on challenging presuppositions, meta-curation, changing paradigms, and creating narratives (Ep37) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Whether you love it or loathe it, technology is here to stay. A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with our digital devices. My approach is that it’s here to stay, regardless of our approach. I believe we need to learn how to use technology in ways that are congruent with how our brains and bodies are designed” – Dr Kristy Goodwin About Dr Kristy Goodwin Kristy is a digital wellbeing and productivity researcher, speaker, author, and consultant, helping corporations promote employee digital wellbeing and performance in the workplace. Website: Dr Kristy Goodwin Blog: Dr Kristy Goodwin LinkedIn: Dr Kristy Goodwin Facebook: Dr Kristy Goodwin Instagram: Dr Kristy Goodwin Twitter: Dr Kristy Goodwin What you will learn What are the four pillars to peak performance in the digital age? (03:33) Why instead of digital detoxes, we need take control of our time with technology (08:39) Based on scientific research, what are best practices to find information and insight ? (11:27) How to create a system using Pocket, Evernote, and your inbox (12:50) What is the difference between scanning and assimilating? (15:14) How to find the best resources on social media platforms (17:01) Is there a way to control negativity bias? (20:40) What is the best way to set borders and boundaries? (22:01) How groups and teams can work better with “techspectations” (24:24) Top three recommendations to thrive on overload (30:46) Episode resources Resumption Lag Pocket Evernote Google Docs Google Sheets The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Zoom Microsoft Teams Whatsapp Transcript Ross Dawson: Kristy, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. So, we live in a world immersed with information, and you focus on this idea of digital well-being, which we all can relate to, where the digital brings us many good things but if we don’t treat it the right way, it might lead us astray. How should we be thinking about, how should we be dealing with this world of digital wonder and danger? Dr Kristy Goodwin: I often say whether you love it or loathe it, technology is here to stay. A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with our digital devices. My approach is that it’s here to stay, regardless of our approach. I believe we need to learn how to use technology in ways that are congruent with how our brains and bodies are designed, what I call our HOS, our Human Operating System. I’m worried that so many of us are using devices in ways that are completely incongruent and out of alignment with how our brains and bodies are designed, and this is why so many people are feeling overwhelmed, they’re feeling stressed, they’re distracted, and exhausted because our digital habits are out of alignment with how we are designed as humans. I often say we’ve got a biological blueprint, we cannot avoid that blueprint, and we have to start to work with it rather than against it. Ross: A bit later, I’d want to dig into what you do. But firstly, I’d like to just pull back to some general prescriptions. You work with schoolchildren as well as grown adults, and we’d love to hear what your advice is, and how you help them to deal with a very common challenge we all have. Kristy: I often say there are four pillars to peak performance in the digital age. It doesn’t matter if you’re a screen-ager, a teenager who has a digital infatuation with your phone or your gaming console, or whether you’re an adult, if we were all really honest, many of us would admit that we are tethered to technology. Adults often justify it, in terms of saying I need it for work, or I need to be responsive, maybe I’ve got aging parents or young children to care for, but the reality is that many of us have developed some unhealthy digital behaviors and dependencies. I say if we want to thrive in this digital world that we’ve all inherited, there are four pillars for peak performance. The first thing that we have to do whether we’re a parent, a child, or an adult, is we have to create our digital guardrails. We have to have some digital borders and boundaries because we know technology has crept into every single crevice of our lives. Research tells us that upwards of 47% of us now toilet-tweet, that is we use our devices in the bathroom. Some other studies tell us that 90% of adults reach for their phone before their partner, first thing in the morning. If we don’t put some parameters in place, technology seeps into every part of our life, so the first pillar is borders and boundaries. The second pillar is what I call neuro-productivity principles. We have to start to use technology in ways that work with our brains and bodies. For example, I often debunk the myth of multitasking. Many people today, however, are doing video calls and triaging their inboxes, they’re at home and watching Netflix and they’re also triaging their inboxes. We are working for really long stretches of time and our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that does that heavy lifting, is not biologically designed to work for long stretches of time. We’re just working against our neurobiology, so the second pillar is neuro-productivity principles. The third pillar is around disabling digital distractions. We know that not only are distractions deadly to our focus, but they have a really strong lag effect. A study was done a couple of years ago that looked at once a person is distracted, be that with the ping of an email, be that a physical person coming to your desk and interrupting you, once we are distracted, it takes the average adult 23 minutes and 15 seconds to reorient their attention back into that deep focus state. It’s called the Resumption Lag. I really think we need to take back our control. We are being peppered throughout the day now with digital distractions, with alerts and notifications and reminders, and they’re really deadly to our focus and our well-being. The fourth pillar is digital disconnection. We have to unplug. We are designed to take regular breaks. I don’t know about you, Ross, but I’ve never had a great idea in my inbox or an Excel spreadsheet, my great ideas come in the shower, they come when I go for a run, when I go for a swim, when I go on a plane with no Wi-Fi. We need that opportunity to enter what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network. Those four pillars are borders and boundaries or those guardrails. Neuro-productivity principles are working the way our brains are designed, digital distractions, controlling those, and digital disconnection. If we can get those four things right, we can thrive in this digital landscape that we all now find ourselves in. Ross: Yes, absolutely. Our brains were developed quite a while ago, and this digital world is quite new. It’s a little bit of environment that our brains are used to, so those seem like some really valuable principles to follow. Kristy: We have ancient Paleolithic brains, you’re exactly right. Our brains’ hard drives were designed pre-computers and pre-technology. We have brains that are biologically designed to go and forage and hunt and seek information. We used to go and borrow a book or read an encyclopedia, we used to go and get information. Today, we find ourselves in a world where we have information constantly thrust at us. The digital demands and the digital intensity of our day has grown exponentially in recent years, hence why so many people are overwhelmed. Our brain isn’t designed to have information constantly coming to us. In fact, our brain perceives anything that comes to us as a potential threat. Our brain cannot actually differentiate between a tiger chasing us and the Team’s notification pinging at us. Our brain goes “Huh!” external source or external trigger, I’m in panic or threat mode, and yet, this is how many of us now operate on a day-to-day basis. Ross: One of the things we could perhaps distill from your principles is we have times when we are engaged with the digital world, and there are times when we are not engaged with the digital world, preferably, for example, when we’re in the bathroom, or with our partner, or other things which may have a higher priority, would that be right? Kristy: Absolutely. I often say digital detoxes or digital amputation if you’re a parent are not feasible strategies. We have to learn to live with technology but we have to take back our control. Because, again, if many of us critically examined the relationship we have with our myriad of devices, many of us would have to acknowledge that we have an unhealthy dependence. Our phone pings and we salivate like Pavlov’s dogs. We are really finding it hard to break away. We need to remember that to function optimally, we have that biological blueprint that I mentioned earlier, we have some hard biological needs that have to be met. I’m worried that our digital habits are encroaching on some of those basic needs. We need rest, we need to sleep, we need to be physically active, we need exposure to sunlight, and our digital behaviors have all significantly shaped and influenced each of those biological needs in some way. Ross: The way I put it sometimes is that almost all of us are addicts to digital distraction. We have to just recognize that we are addicts so we need to try to control our behavior. But unfortunately, for example, in the case of alcohol, it’s not something we can give up completely because we do require our digital devices so we have to manage it, we have to be able to control, get the value from but also be able to let go of. Kristy: Absolutely. That’s why I often say that we don’t need to strive for a digital detox or have really clear breaks from technology because the harsh reality is we’re going to live in a digitally saturated world. We often know that when people do take a significant break from technology, it often creates a binge and purge cycle, so they have three days offline but come back on Monday morning and catch up on the myriad of emails and messages that were awaiting them. What I think we’re better off to do is to create sustainable long-term behaviors and habits that will allow us to take back our control of technology and not be as digitally dependent as what many of us are. Ross: I’d like to come back to this idea of what it is we can do to recreate those borders and boundaries, but I’d also like to dig in what happens when we are engaged with digital technology. A lot of your work is deeply research-based, you’re keeping across the science, so when you are engaged with not necessarily digital but probably largely digital sources, in your research, how is it that you find the best information? How do you identify sources? How do you focus your time? What are the ways and practices where you find the most relevant information and pull that together to the insights that you gain? Kristy: Believe it or not, I do find some social media platforms a great starting point for current research, particularly LinkedIn is a great platform, especially with current research in terms of how people are working in hybrid and remote fashions. There’s some really current research being conducted and often initially disseminated or synthesized on those platforms. I then like to go a little bit deeper. I have some Google alerts set up so I am across any current news trends with key terms that I use for my research and keynote speaking, so I can stay up to date in terms of that. I have some journals that I subscribe to, so it is a matter of scanning the contents list and figuring out what articles warrant further investigation. A really simple tool I have found is a tool called Pocket. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Pocket, Ross. It’s a plugin. I love Pockets. I gather any research articles or blog posts or longer forms of content and I love the Pocket feature of it being able to read the audio back to me so that I can digest that information sometimes on the go as well. I try and use a myriad of different approaches. I still love reading books. There’s a real merit in terms of reading traditional printed books, not audiobooks, I need to highlight, I need to scribe. This is still a work in process, how do I synthesize the information I get from those myriads of sources? And for me, I use predominantly Evernote, to keep track of information and notes. Then I have some running Google Docs and Google Sheets where I’ve come up with some frameworks along those four pillars that I mentioned before, where I try and archive, synthesize, paraphrase, and cite sources so that when it comes to doing something like writing a book or doing something where I need to draw on that research, I’ve got a central source of truth for where all that disparate knowledge and those sources have come from. Ross: Is there a way that you link Pocket and Evernote? Or do you use those separately? Kristy: I tend to use them separately. If I found something that I really enjoyed listening to in Pocket, I definitely then pop it in Evernote. But a Pocket is more my form of digesting content. So when I don’t want to get sucked into the digital vortex when I go in my inbox and see a link to an article that I know will be really pertinent, it’s so easy for me to click on it, and the one email that I went into my inbox to find, I’ve forgotten about it and I’m off down the digital rabbit hole reading a paper that really shouldn’t be done during that time. I’ve also found scheduling time so that I do have time to digest that information on Pocket or anything in my inbox. I’ve got a five-folder method in my inbox, and one of the folders is the Digest folder, so any information that I know I want to consume, I’ve assigned some time in my calendar each week where I will have designated time to consume the information, which is a core part of my job, staying current and up-to-date with the research is a really fundamental, if not the most critical, part of my job. Ross: Absolutely. It’s what I describe as the difference between scanning and assimilating, so you can scan to be able to find things and then a separate period of time which is the assimilating, and that’s when you can take it in and make it part of your understanding, your knowledge, and mental models. Kristy: A couple of years ago, Nicholas Carr wrote a book about what the internet is doing to our brain and I loved the analogy in that book where he talked about how many of us now because of this infobesity, this constant saturation of information, have become jet-ski riders instead of deep-sea divers. In years gone by, we used to read the entire article from top to tail but now we’re looking for headlines, pull-out boxes, subtext, so we are really skimming the surface. Sometimes out of necessity, we do need to do that but we need to carve out time to do that deep, reflective thinking, and have that uninterrupted time where we can read something in its entirety, and make those mental connections as well. Ross: Yes, that book in some countries is called The Shallows so it’s where most people spend their time. A lot of the value is not at the surface but deeper below. It’s a habit we need to pull back. In the beginning, you started talking about LinkedIn, for example, as a source. LinkedIn, or any social platform, they all have value, but they can also be abused, used in abuse. Of course, there’s a wealth of wonderful resources on LinkedIn, but it can also have its own trap, so how specifically do you make sure that you are finding the best resources on LinkedIn, for example? Kristy: I’ve been selective about who I’ve elected to follow, about what hashtags I’ve elected to also follow, and I find that really helps me to curate a really positive and helpful experience. I have a three-strikes policy, so if I see somebody sharing content that just doesn’t resonate, or is no longer of interest to me, if that comes across my radar roughly three times, I don’t have a formal striking system, but roughly three times, then I choose to unfollow or unsubscribe if they were sending newsletters, for example, so it’s really about being intentional. A lot of us have forgotten we do, and I know the algorithm serves us content, that it predicts very accurately, might I add, what would be of interest to us? But at the end of the day, we really do have a lot more control over who and what content comes into our feed than we often assume. Ross: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic policy, this idea, whatever the social platform, if it’s not good, then you get it out of your stream. As you say, the platforms pick up on your behavior, so if you engage with content, it will assume that you like it, so only engage with things you want to see more on. Kristy: Absolutely. We have to also be mindful because as humans, we have a negativity bias, we are naturally much more likely to click on a negative headline or something that insinuates perhaps something more negative will be in the article. Again, thinking of the time of the day when we do use social media. I often say to people don’t bookend your day with social media, so first thing in the morning and last thing at night. From a sleep perspective, we know obviously, at night, being on a blue-lit device can be really detrimental not only to the quality of our sleep but also the quantity of our sleep. But psychologically, being on a device, particularly if it’s a touchscreen, we’re very interactive so it’s not just passive, it can really hyper-arouse our brain. Equally in the morning, you only need to see one upsetting story or one upsetting news headline, which isn’t very hard to avoid these days, and you activate your limbic brain, that fight, flight or flee response, just by scrolling what we consume. Often at night, our prefrontal cortex that helps us regulate our behavior, it basically limps to the finish line, it’s worked hard all day, in our roles, and it is often exhausted, so when we are tired, our prefrontal cortex that manages our impulses and our self-regulation, it doesn’t work as effectively, and part of the brain called our amygdala, at night, our amygdala fires up, which is the emotional hub of our brain, so we’re much more likely to click on something with a negative connotation or an upsetting headline, and this sends powerful messages to the Google recommendation algorithm that serve me up more of this content. If we’re careful about the time of the day when we use social media and have some parameters around who we follow, we can have a really healthy and positive relationship with it. Ross: You mentioned negativity bias and certainly, we know that the news, any news source we choose to go to, will be almost all negative; not many good news stories around. I presume this is a cognitive finding in terms of a negativity bias, so where does that come from? Is there any way that we can control that negativity bias? Kristy: It’s part of our biological DNA almost that in order for us to survive as a species, we had to be on the lookout, we had to be on the hunt for any potential threats or dangers. It’s baked into our biology to have that negative response. If there was a loud noise, it might be a predator approaching me, it might be a potential storm on the horizon. This is, again, why alerts and notifications are so detrimental to us because it’s an external threat that comes to us, it automatically kicks off that negative way of thinking, this is a danger, this is urgent, this is important, I’m under potential threat, where it’s just a Team’s notification or a reminder on your calendar. It is traced back to our ancestral roots as a human that in order for us to survive, we had to first assume that it was a negative or a dire experience on the horizon. Ross: In terms of defining those borders or boundaries, that was the first principle, set some borders or boundaries, how do you go about that? Do you choose times? Do you choose places? If you’re telling somebody to define some borders and boundaries, how should they do that? Kristy: Most certainly, all of those boundaries that you suggested, we need to have some firm, I call them our digital guardrails, about where we’ll use technology, where in your home are the no-go tech zones? Is it the meal area? Is it your bedroom? Is it the bathroom? If you’ve got young children, is it the car? Is that that car trip? That sacred place for conversation and engagement? We need to have really firm boundaries, this is where I’m working with a lot of organizations at the moment to establish their teams’ digital guardrails around when do we use technology. Recent Microsoft data was telling us that 28% of knowledge workers are now working between 10 and 11 pm at night, that is a staggering finding. People are saying they can’t switch off, they feel they need to be responsive. Many people are saying they’re spending the preponderance of their work day going from one Zoom or Teams meeting to another with very little time now for their deep-focused work, hence why they’re working late into the evening. We need to have parameters around when we’ll use technology. A part of this digital guardrail is coming up with what I call a communication escalation plan, so when there is a critical time-sensitive piece of information that you need to disseminate to your team, you know the one platform or one tool through which that will be communicated, so people don’t feel they need to be constantly checking emails or the Teams messages. Those boundaries around most certainly, when we use technology and where we use it, coming up with some parameters around how are we using it, are we going to have a digital curfew, for example, that’s something I recommend, that people switch off ideally 60 minutes before they want to fall asleep, and avoid using any small backlit and blue-lit devices, so coming up with some of those parameters, again, so that we take back control, rather than the other way around where technology really controls us and dominates our days and nights. Ross: It’s interesting how few people actually explicitly set those parameters. They may have better habits than others, but not actually set specific boundaries. That’s something that could be of enormous value. Kristy: It is, and that’s what I’m finding with teams, the teams that I have worked with to articulate their digital guardrails, these are team agreements, but where people come up with what I colloquially refer to as their “techspectations”. What’s an acceptable email response rate? When do I use a Teams chat versus an email versus the 15 WhatsApp messages that I bombard you with? Again, this is almost giving people permission to put focus mode on so that your Slack or your Teams notification communicates that you’re in a deep focus state and you don’t want to be interrupted. Yes, there are tools now that we can use to override so if someone is in a deep focus state and there is a time-sensitive, critical piece of information, you can in some instances override that, but coming up with those parameters in a team level really has made a big difference with people, not only their productivity, they’re saying now I feel like I’ve almost got permission to carve out deep, uninterrupted, focused periods of time, but also their well-being because people are saying, I feel I can switch off, if everybody’s singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s almost as though I’ve got a mental nod that it’s okay for me to unplug and disconnect. Ross: That’s fantastic. When you talk about a team, coming to these kinds of agreements, typically, how large are these teams? Kristy: I’ve worked with both small and large organizations, and with some smaller organizations. There are a few steps. The first part of this process is doing a digital audit. A lot of organizations at the moment are using Microsoft so they can get some data from their Viva Insights tool, which tells us how long they’re spending on meetings, how many emails, what time emails are going out, some really granular, non-identifiable data that we can look for the patterns and digital ways of working. Then I often run focus groups, and this depends on the size of the organization. Sometimes an organization picks a small team to roll this out with. Other times, I’ve worked with a really large organization, and that focus group involved participants from several different teams, from several different parts of the business, and with several different levels within their organizational ranks. We had a real cross-section because it’s been really interesting the way that leaders often think that their teams are using technology, and the way that their teams are using it but wish their leaders would use it in a different way, has been really interesting. Once we’ve done the data analysis, we’ve had some focus groups, then I formulate a draft set of these digital guardrails, it then goes back to the focus groups, they then sometimes run it past their teams, or their divisions, or their fellow leaders, and then come back with feedback, and I revise a second copy of the guardrails, and again, it goes through the next process, and there’s very little that often is changed from then, and then it’s presenting it to the bigger team or the organization. But also bearing in mind that this is a living, breathing document because things are evolving. Anyone that tells you this is how hybrid-work works, he’s duping you because everybody’s figuring this out as we go. Ross: Absolutely. In some cases, these agreements would go across the entire organization. Kristy: They are, and with the caveat that understanding some teams might have a certain deadline or a project that might need a revision or adjustment, some teams operate and might have a different operational cadence, so there’s some variation, and because it’s an agreement, it’s not a policy, it’s not a strict you-must-do-this, but what we’re hearing from the teams that have rolled this out across their organization is that people feel like they can stick to some of the digital borders and boundaries that they want to put in place because there’s a unanimous agreement that this is how we’ll operate. It’s also giving people a common language. I don’t want to say call people out, but to hold others to account. If they are, peppering their teammates with emails at 11 pm, at night, you can gently remind them, hey, remember, we said, we schedule those emails to go out during traditional business hours, by all means, if you have more flexible work arrangements, which means you are by choice wanting to work at night and send those emails, you can do so but please don’t send them out to land in other people’s inboxes. We come up with norms, practices, and principles around how do we use video meetings in an optimal way. How do we manage emails? When do I send an email versus a Teams chat? So really coming up with almost the digital parameters. Again, it is evolving and changing as we’ve got people going back into the office, and some people still working predominantly remotely. But it is a really good starting point, at least, for those organizations. Ross: Absolutely, there’s a big difference between those organizations where these issues aren’t even discussed and where there is some kind of recognition that there are better and worse ways to do it. Kristy: This is one of my concerns, we’d all agree, and the data is corroborating this, that rates of burnout are really at concerning levels. One of the chief reasons, not the only reason but one of the chief reasons, is that we have, and again, through no fault of our own, in March 2020, many team members took their laptop under their arm and said go home and work from home for a little while, so we’ve tried to come up with these digital ways of working on the fly. There was no big ramp-up period to undergoing a huge change program, which most of us did. What’s happened is we’ve embedded some unhealthy, unsustainable digital habits and behaviors and that is why so many people are experiencing clinical symptoms of burnout or concerning levels of burnout because we’re using technology in ways that are completely misaligned with how our brains and bodies work best. Ross: Indeed. To round out on this theme of thriving on overload, prospering in a world of unlimited information, what are any concluding recommendations you would make to people that want to deal well with this world? Kristy: I often talk about micro-habits. It’s not about going through a digital detox or a radical overhaul of your digital ways of working, it’s just making small little micro-adjustments, simple things like putting your phone somewhere where you cannot see it when you want to get your deep-focused work done. Why? A study told us from the University of Austin, Texas, that just seeing your phone, even if it is on silent and face down, if our phone is in our line of sight, it drops our cognitive performance by around 10%. I often say to people seeing your phone makes you 10% dumber, so popping your phone in a drawer, in another room when you want to get that focused work done, disabling nonessential notifications, bundling, or batching, most platforms now, and apps give you the option of scheduling, what time do you want the notifications to come to you, creating VIP notification, so if you’re working with a colleague or a client on a time-sensitive project, when you put focus mode or Do Not Disturb mode on, everybody else is blocked but those people on the VIP list get through. My third one would be unplugging. We’ve lost the art of being idle with our thoughts. Every piece of our white space now, waiting for the coffee while the barista makes your coffee, we pick up our phones, sitting at the red light, at the traffic lights, people pull out their phones. Our mind needs to meander. This is where we come up with creative ideas. I am worried we have become so accustomed to constantly consuming information that we don’t have the time that our brain desperately needs for ideation and also for creative thinking and a sense of identity. They’d be my three top ones, put your phone somewhere where you can’t see it, control your notifications, and digitally disconnect and daydream. Ross: That’s fantastic advice. Anybody listening just needs to do one or even all three of those easy things and their life will be better. Kristy, where can people find more about your work? Kristy: The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m encouraging people to digitally disconnect. But if you do want to consume, if I’m not hopefully going to get three strikes from you, I try and share bite-sized really practical bits of information. Yes, I’m a researcher, but someone introduced me the other day and said Kristy is a Pracademic and I thought they meant practically an academic. They said, No, you’re practical, and you’re an academic. I try and provide science-backed solutions, but really simple practical things we can do to tame our tech habits. I’m at drkristygoodwin.com and I try to share practical helpful information on LinkedIn and also on Instagram. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, Kristy. It’s been really valuable and insightful. Kristy: Pleasure Ross. Thank you. The post Dr Kristy Goodwin on the four pillars to peak performance, digital guardrails, working with your biological blueprint, and improving micro-habits (Ep36) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“The recipe is do not trust the algorithm, do not trust mainstream media for the most part, search for individuals who you have a strong affinity with and to whom you can apply strong filters about credibility, trust, integrity, the way they conduct the work, the way they show their sources, and how much they’re transparent about the way they conduct their business and their lives, and maintain these lists while updating it because your trusted sources, your trusted advisors, as I call them, are the key source to discovering new sources. “ – Robin Good About Robin Good Robin Good is a writer, speaker, and change agent focused on content curation, learning, and collaboration. By emphasizing quality, credibility, and shared values, Robin has been helping entrepreneurs and small businesses share their content to develop long-lasting relationships and become reference points in their online market niches. Website: Robin Good Blog: Robin Good LinkedIn: Robin Good Facebook: Robin Good Instagram: Robin Good Twitter: Robin Good Book: From Brand to Friend What you will learn What are the key capabilities to curate this world of information? (02:41) What are the two requirements for doubting authority or expertise the right way? (05:21) What is the recipe for sourcing information? (07:42) Are there tools or approaches to capture, collect, distil, and make sense of information? (11:53) What are the steps or structures to create something of value? (18:55) Are there suitable software tools for information gathering? (22:22) What are the tools or approaches for communicating in terms of visual design for sharing and communicating effectively? (26:15) Why managing distractions is a key focus to thriving on overload (32:22) Episode resources Evernote Obsidian Notion Roam xTiles Earning Trust In Business Superguide Ted Nelson Apple HyperCard Edward Tufte Jakob Nielsen Karen Schriver Dynamics in Document Design by Karen Schriver Teledream or Pager Transcript Ross Dawson: Robin, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Robin Good: Thank you, Ross, it’s such a pleasure for me as well to see you again and to be in such a position to be able to discuss the things that are close to my heart, together. Ross: Indeed. For the very long time, I’ve known you, it’s certainly more than a dozen years you have been the master at content creation and curation. This is where you are thriving on overload, in a world of information, you’re finding what is valuable for yourself, and others. I and my listeners would love to find out how you do it. What’s the starting point for you? What are the key skills? What are the key capabilities for you in being able to curate this world of information? Robin: It all starts from curiosity and with a strong attitude against authority. These are the two key elements that made me who I am. That is by questioning deeply authority, I connect immediately to information, news, propaganda, misinformation, fake news, or whatever you have classified in your head, and that is the ability not to take anything for granted, no matter where it comes from, or who it comes from, but questioning everything and going into asking, is this really so? Or I’m just taking it at face value because Ross just said it, or James just said it? I have this attitude, kind of challenging, provocative attitude toward whatever has been coming my way. I want to see whether the things that I learned are really the way they’re presented or they’re somewhat different. I have to say, no matter how crazy I will sound that most of the time, things are not the way they look, and they’re presented. That doesn’t mean that what you say or what other authors that I read, write are not on the spot, but many of the basic ideas that we have about how things work, how life is, what’s the cause of this or that are not the ones that we are being presented, especially through education, through school, or university. I’ve been very rebellious against the education system because it does limit our ability to question things. We’re taught from the very first day to be right, to have the correct answer. If you don’t have it, if you question your teacher, you’re going to be in trouble. That really stifles your creativity, your ability to explore, to be curious, and it’s so precious for somebody who wants to deal with information, tell stories, explore how life is, and so. It all starts with curiosity, and with a little provocative attitude against whoever says they know it all. Ross: That’s fantastic in many ways. I know you as very authoritarian, questioning, and provocative. I’m also a big believer in schools just stifling anything which is wonderful within us. I wonder how people can nurture that; not just curiosity, as you say, that’s the starting point, that ability to question everything. Is it something we should nurture and always look for in terms of trying to always doubt the authority or expertise? Robin: I think that the key thing is not just to be passive on whatever information comes to you, from your friends, from your teacher, from your guru, from your trainer, and ask many questions. My fencing teacher may even tell me don’t hold that position where I feel so good in striking my adversary but I don’t know exactly why, so I ask exactly why is this so? Why it cannot be this way? Many times we bypass these asking questions because we feel we may sound stupid or not able to understand things, and we want to feel immediately at the level of our teacher or master. Instead, I think that by questioning things, by asking questions, specifically, you allow yourself to understand better. Many times we take for granted that the reason for something is not the actual reason for that something but we make it up because we didn’t ask. The other thing we can do to nurture this curiosity, and questioning ability is to try to see our perspective on things that is, try to understand why we like or don’t like something, and explore that thing, write about it, think over it, discuss it with somebody else not with the idea of winning, but of clarifying what you have gotten into your head. These two elements may help that nurturing. Ross: That’s fantastic. I’d like to come back to that. But in a way, this leads us to sources. We have any number of sources available in the world. We would try to find some sources that we trust more than others, but without getting locked into a particular set. How do you find information? What sources do you go to? What are the places you find good starting points or useful resources in your searches? Robin: Number one, do not trust algorithms. This is the first key to finding sources and good information, not that the algorithm is always wrong or brings you the bad stuff but just to be very skeptical of the algorithm and it guessing what you want is a good starting point. Because most of the sources of information now play that game of the algorithm of serving your personalized information and sources and discovering new stuff but I really am deeply skeptical about that ability, at least in my situation. I don’t think the algorithms they’ve put out really get to know me that well to do a good job. My key source of information is newsletters. My trusted source of information is people who write newsletters. I have replaced all together mainstream news of any kind and that includes any super commercial entity that produces news, that could be something maybe even at the level of Wired or TechCrunch, which was not traditionally considered mainstream news. It is for me now, mainstream news. I look for individuals to which I apply very strict filtering criteria regarding their credibility, their trust, their intent, their goals, and their prejudices. I try to maintain a list of trusted advisors that continuously updates over time because even people do change. People that I thought were extremely insightful and so inspiring and wonderful for me, all of a sudden, disappear into nothingness because I discovered they have some big blind spots, which they never expose, so I cannot trust them anymore. Or if I catch some of the new trusted advisors, putting out the links or resources that I see, they have not explored deeply, they have not verified and they’re just adding them to their newsletter to make it richer, and bigger, I completely lose the trust in a matter of seconds. I do write to them and I say, Why do you do this? Why? I see so many don’t have the integrity to stand up to what they do. It’s very rare and difficult to find truly valuable, trusted advisors, but these are my sources. The recipe is do not trust the algorithm, do not trust mainstream media for the most part, search for individuals who you have a strong affinity with and to whom you can apply strong filters about credibility, trust, integrity, the way they conduct the work, the way they show their sources, and how much they’re transparent about the way they conduct their business and their lives, and maintain these lists while updating it because your trusted sources, your trusted advisors, as I call them, are the key source to discovering new sources. Working on individuals, for me is the road to make sense of my jangle exploration throughout life. I’ve been changing and refining this list all the time. You certainly have been on my list and have not gone out but many have entered and disappeared over time. Ross: Right, you mentioned making sense, so for me, that’s part of the thing of taking all of these pieces and pulling that into some kind of synthesis in your mind. That involves taking the bits that you like, to be able to piece those together, to organize them, to structure them. Are there tools or approaches that you use to capture, collect and store, or distill value and make sense of them? Robin: Let’s be practical. I will play very low tools. I don’t think we have tremendous tools to do what you just described. But our approach to distilling and capturing things makes the difference. The first practical actionable advice is to take notes and to take notes in a timely way, that is not bring a notebook with you and a pen in your backpack, and then something happens, then you say, Okay, later, when I stop, I’m going to take note of this, that note is not going to ever take place because, by the time you stop and have a rest, you won’t have that clear thing in your head. Timeliness in taking notes about what happens around you, what you just notice, what you saw beyond the surface, in a discussion among people in front of you, what came up while you were walking, needs to be noted now. It may break your flow, it may break your sunset, it may break your love story, but that’s the way you capture it, you have got to take it the moment you feel it. That’s why there are not many people doing that, that’s why there are not many trusted advisors out there because there are not many people wanting to take notes the moment they come to them, we’re not just trained to do that. I wish, why they didn’t do that to me in school because that’s where I should have taken the habit. It just came naturally afterward. I noticed that when I take those timely notes, it does make a difference. When I do a second actionable advice thing, something better happens, that is when I manipulate that note. You could take thousands of notes and leave them there, and close the book; Tomorrow, you open the book, you take another note and another one, but the magic happens when you go back to the book to do something with that note, either to revise it, to expand it, or to act upon it because you want to put it to use for something for a collection for an article, for a guide, to make a presentation, to discuss a matter of importance with a friend; the moment you go back to it and you handle it, there is some learning taking place. There is no learning taking place when you take the note. There is a realization, there is an opening, a perspective, a light you see in the distance, the moment you come back to it, your eyes adjust and you start to see something taking shape and having a bigger and deeper meaning. Handling it in whichever way you want to do it, rewriting it, discussing it, expanding it, searching for more, does help making it yours. Then the third important thing, at least for me is to create something with it that is of value to me, that excites me to create. If it is something that relates to philosophy or intellectual ideas, maybe write an article or some deep reflections on it. If it is a tool or an application for a tool, find other similar ones and bring them together so you could build a toolkit or a manual of methods to do something. If it is an artist or an expert telling you something, go out and search for other artists and bring together other ideas that conflict and synergize with those. All these manipulations from the very first note, strike, or idea, enrich your ability so much to see, explore, and report to others. The final action ideal is always to share this information with others, keeping it all inside your brain doesn’t help very much, and sometimes it leads to loops that don’t have a great exit, that great realization. The moment you put it out, you may find surprising conflicts that stem from the judgment of others or ways to look at things that you had not considered. The final expression of distilling, organizing, and filtering information takes place when you share it with others. The more focused you are in sharing toward a specific goal, and a specific tribe, that is, what you would call the target group in the advertising world, makes things valuable because you can just share your realization for what they are in absolute terms, they increase in value significantly. The moment that you target your exploration to a goal, to an audience, that there’s some specific need, some specific expectation, that is thriving on information overload, it may apply and may uncover wonderful new ways of doing things, depending on who you talk to about this. I’m a full supporter of entrepreneurs, curators, of knowledge managers, to not try to be everything to everyone, though sometimes it’s good to be, but to try as much as possible to define who you’re talking to, and what are the problems that you’re trying to solve so that you help unique valuable information for that direction and those people to emerge, which is not easy. Ross: No, it’s not easy. Let’s think you want to create an article or a toolkit or a manual, so you’ve got to have some starting ideas. You’ve captured some ideas, and you want to be able to create something of value, so what are the intermediary steps? Is there a structure? Is there a particular software you use? Do you simply just lay out all your ideas in a document and then revisit them and pull them together in your brain? Are there any tools or ways of storing or connecting things that can be useful in building those things which we can share? Robin: As you know there are a million ways to do this. Today, there is the emergence of so-called frameworks, which make it very easy, or much easier than it was before for a lot of people who don’t have experience in building up content to do so by following a certain predefined structure or sequence of elements. I have to say, I don’t like to marry any specific solution. I’d always like to be on the front, and fail a few times so that I can explore new stuff. In my specific case, I will explore new frameworks, new structures, copy and try to go better than my best competitor or friend, as I would prefer to call it. I don’t stand still on any specific solution to build content. But yes, my sequence is basically to collect information for a very long time on a topic before writing about it so that I have a lot of sources and a lot of elements so they can play together. In general, one popular well-functioning approach is one of bringing up what is the problem first clearly, what is the frustration that I want to overcome or that I needed to overcome? Explore the different opportunities and roads to see their plus and minus, and eventually identify a possible road or recount the story of the road you’ve taken to overcome that obstacle, which tools you’ve used, and what procedures you have taken. That is one, but again, I feel completely a failure in saying that this is the instruction that should be used to present some information ideas. There are a million different ones, it could be a personal discussion you have inside your head with yourself, you split yourself into two personalities and you have them discuss one against the other, and you can be the best devil’s advocate in both defending a topic and trying to dismantle it; that’s a wonderful approach to use, or having a face-to-face confrontation with somebody who thinks the opposite of that topic. We’re too much stuck into not only algorithms, but this SEO trash, cultural heritage, which has taken away the ability to think in creative ways about the way you can write, explore, and present information. It has made most of the content available out there a copycat symbol, a copycat tradition, and it has made the quality of the content very shallow in many situations. Ross: These are all cognitive structures, these are ways of thinking, but are there any software tools, either old or new that you find useful or worth considering in being able to assist in that journey of piecing together those elements into something structured and valuable to others? Robin: Yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that there are simple tools, and there is no clear winner, that help you in taking notes, they can be Apple notes, they can be Evernote, they can be Obsidian, they can be Notion, Roam, and all those many other notes-taking tools that have come out in recent times. But then to structure that information and present it, we’re still at the level of Google documents or Notion with blogs. That’s all we have, these still bloody linear up and down documents where there is a sequence of stuff. I’m very tired of this, and I don’t understand why nobody complains about this. The tools are not yet there, they’re starting to appear but it is taking such an incredibly long time for people to see that to organize and present information, you need things that are not there in Word and Google documents, like being able to compare things, to be able to see the overview and the detail not just through the index but in better ways, to have a super view of what the contents are, where new ones or older ones are, the type of contents that are there, and zoom in and zoom out at the speed of light. There is very little in the form of nonlinear documents, multi-dimensional documents that help you explore information from the synthesis part to the smallest detail. That’s what we lack. We’re seeing some interesting new things coming up. What could I mention? Let me mention, for example, xTiles. xTiles is a new app, maybe it will be dead in a few months, or will become a leader in the market, I have no idea. But they are exploring ways that allow you to organize information differently. I have experimented with it. You can Google and see what you can get out of these more structured thinking tools. You can search on Google for earning trust in business. I’ve created what I call tentatively a super guide, which is not a linear document, about trust inside the business. Go check it out and see where I think we’re headed. Ross: Fantastic. I agree that it seems very strange in 2022 that we don’t have very good tools for thinking. The promise was there. You, I, and other people saw, well, just think of what we’ll be able to do, but we’re only just beginning to get there. There’s promising; the last few years have shown promising new tools emerging. Robin: I was just thinking of Ted Nelson and his wonderful vision. It is still up to date what he saw so many years ago. Ross: I was going to say when you were describing those tools, I was thinking of Apple HyperCard. It’s pretty hard to beat that. That was a revelation for me and many other people. There’s not much around which is quite like that. Robin: Yes, indeed. Ross: In terms of communicating, how to present, how to communicate, so you’ve distilled your ideas, you’ve brought those together, what are the tools or approaches for communicating beyond articles in terms of visual presentation or other tools for designing information and sharing and communicating effectively? Robin: On this front, one aspect that has eluded most of the writers has been the information design side. We’ve taken for granted that by understanding a topic or having some insights into it, we just need to put it in black and white on paper, and the rest happens automatically. I value very much instead, how that information is shared. You could think until now about, for example, the difference between somebody who just wrote a text, and somebody who would illustrate some of that text. Okay, that’s level one. If you want to go to level 2, 3, 4, 5, and beyond, what do you do? You have to understand what information design is and understand how people read information online, offline, in print, or on a screen, because that changes a lot how it will be appropriate to present and structure that information. For example, we take for granted that writing the way we write a book and writing the way we write a guide, that’s pretty similar; I don’t think so. I don’t think it should be that way. A print has very strict limitations on the economic side of the materials. On the paper, you use many pages, the weight, and the cost that it’s going to derive; you’re going to have that issue online, that should have been evident since the dawn of time of the digital era, but we have forgotten it. We write many times like we were writing in a book, we have a wall of text, and we have little ways to jump from one place to another or see connections that are taking place at certain points. Most of it, we have very little knowledge of how people read and how their eyes move on a digital screen. We have this F pattern that is very important to understand that is whenever we see something new that is based on text, we read across the first couple of lines, and then we just look across the left margin to find points that may be of interest to us. The elements of chunking are very important, that is chunking is to break up into many little pieces whatever you’re writing, never have a wall of text, even five or six lines together, break it up, break it up, break it up. Then when you start to break it up, you break it up into chapters and subchapters, and these chapters and subchapters have very specific titles, and these titles to be read on a digital screen need to be short, and to the point, you can write a title of 6, 7, 8 words and expect that to be something digitally effective for the reader is just too long. You have to make titles that one can read at a glance, the eye will see those 2, 3, 4 words and it will make sense of them in one swap. Instead, we still write, where you really need to pay attention to the single words, we have long paragraphs of text. We don’t help the eye catch the key points on the left margin where you can pick up, for example, the tradition of bolding text, inside paragraphs of text is very widely used but that creates all-in-the-digital ecosystem and context, more confusion to the eye. Because there’s already so much text generally, you don’t have the physical page that limits you to a frame so you have a lot of stuff to jump in and out of. The bolding can be used in an innovative way inside the digital screen by placing it only near the left margin that is only in the beginning words of certain paragraphs so that the eye can hook on to them and discover important points. One other thing that we often forget on the web is line length. That is how long the line needs to be for people to decide to keep reading for the next 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 lines afterward. That makes a big difference because if you have a line that is short typically like it will be on Medium, then you will read and keep on reading. But if you buy a template, a theme, or start publishing today in WordPress, you won’t get the short line which is about 10 to 12 words per line, you will get a line that goes from the left margin of your screen to the right margin of your screen no matter how larger your screen, and if you have a 25-inch screen, you will have these immense lines, how can people read it? These simple things escape us and these simple things are what I call information design. Who do you look up to to learn about information design? The absolute authorities in this field are a mix of people I simply adore and these are Edward Tufte, Jakob Nielsen, and a little-known lady called Karen Schriver, who wrote a book that’s called “Dynamics in Document Design”, which all provide very different angles in understanding better how to present information so that people can read it. Ross: That’s fantastic. There’s a lot of value and insights you’ve packed into that. So to round out, maybe reiterating some of the things you’ve said or anything new, what are a few recommendations you would make to somebody that says I’m overloaded, how can I thrive? Robin: Oh, yes, I do have a lot of recommendations for that guy and that girl. These are to now take into very serious consideration the deep change in habits that could be the titled kill distractions altogether. I’ve gone through this in my life with very specific actions. They started for the first time, it was the 80s, we didn’t have smartphones, we didn’t have cell phones, we had something in Italy, it was called Teledream. It was this little box you put on your belt and BBZZ it told you somebody’s looking for you, go call this number. That gave me a hint that I could be freed of this pressure of somebody ringing you in the middle of something. As soon as these appeared gradually, I went into a mode of considering putting away the telephone altogether, and gradually, bit by bit, I did. Although this is very radical, and most people will not accept it, I have eliminated the telephone from my life. Nobody, almost nobody will ring my phone because they know I will not answer. When they ring and there is no answer, and they complain, I tell them the story that I have decided to put my phone not only on vibration but not to hold it anymore on my body at any time during the day. At certain times during the day, I go check my phone, somebody has rung me, somebody has sent me a message, somebody more educated has sent me a request to talk to me, when do I have time? Can we set a time? Then when we do that educated thing, I’m very happy to talk to anybody over the phone or any other technology. But I’m not willing anymore in my life to have a little plastic box ring and interrupt whatever I’m doing, that is number one. Number two, I’ve decided to separate as much as possible work from distraction. That at a certain age may be home, family, or places where there’s a lot of noise and a lot of distractions. Well, if you go into those places or if you decide to establish your focus point there, you’re lost. That’s not going to help you very much, you’re not going to find a lot of motivation. I have eliminated the watch from my arms, It’s in front of me when I watch the digital screen at all times but it’s just better not to be having to watch that wrist anymore for me. I also think that to improve that situation, one key thing is to introduce more life. That means I used to spend most of the day in front of the digital screen, I now have reduced, without having reduced my profits, revenue, business opportunities, my time in front of the computer, and I’ve increased drastically my life outside, near Palm trees, under blue skies, in the water, running, playing frisbee, volleyball, meeting new people, playing music, I have gone back to my first career, which was one of a DJ, which I started when I was 14, in a professional way. Now it’s again part of my life, it’s not part of my professional serious life but it does recharge my batteries a hell a lot better than anything else that I used to do when I was sitting in front of my screen before. Turning off all notifications, all of them, no notifications coming on my computer screen or my smartphone, are all essential elements. To kill all of the distractions, to me is the key to focus, and to be able to conduct good work, like fewer people are doing because they’re all on Instagram, TikTok, and being distracted by dling, dlong, dlang, and all these noises, I just can’t respect them anymore, I’m sorry. I find living life in that way wasted. That’s how I feel. But there is a big preoccupation. Let me jump to another topic, because you may not be asking me about this. There is a topic about information and it may be related also to information overload, that is close to my heart and needs to have more attention from everybody in general, and that is: since I’m now 24, almost 30, I start to have worries about things that I didn’t have worries 10 or 20 years ago, and that is mainly what’s going to happen to all the work that I’ve published when I’m not here anymore, or when I don’t have the money to pay the server, the hosting provider. We are overloaded with information but nobody is worrying about all the information we are losing every day. Great stuff, great articles, great blogs, a great website that just disappears. You may say Oh, but there is the Internet Archive. Yeah, but for how long? And for really all the pages that are out? No, it’s not for all the pages that are out there. We don’t know for how long and what interests are behind the Internet Archive, we should need two or three of those, different ones, and in different ways. I don’t see anybody taking into serious consideration how we can keep this cultural heritage that we have developed in the last 22 years by writing online, where’s all this stuff going to go? Who’s going to keep it there? You are going to have to die, you just have to be in trouble in some way or lose your mind in some way, and that stuff is just going to disappear completely. This needs some attention to it because no matter how much superficiality we put out there, there are a lot of little golden gems out there; Billions, rare, hard to find but there are. I’m keen to find ways and have people reflect on the importance of not losing this stuff. If you can transform it into a book, whatever you’ve written, it’s a good bloody idea to do that. Because that book for now has a longer lifetime than anything you write online. Number two, I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but are you sure you want to write on your own blog or website because that’s the first that’s going to go away, not if you have written on, it doesn’t matter how much you hate it, on Facebook, or Instagram, or Medium for that matter; the stuff you’ve written on these other platforms is going to last much longer than whatever you write on your blog post unless you read in a testament and instruct your kids or your best friend to take over when you suddenly disappear and they don’t know any of the passwords and that stuff is just going to go PFFFTTT. What do you think about that? Ross: It’s probably how evanescent… are you creating content for now or do you want to create content for the future? I think it is different. Sometimes we are creating some content for now and some content we are creating for the longer future. So we have, hopefully, different strategies for that. But it’s time to wrap up. It’s a good place to end there. Just where can people find your current work? Where’s the best place to find your work? Robin: Robingood.substack.com is the best place to see what I’m following, reading, selecting, and sharing with others. That’s the best destination you can go to. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Robin, it’s been a fascinating conversation. Robin: Thank you, Ross, for inviting me. It’s been such an honor and a pleasure to be discussing with you again, thank you so much for the opportunity, and good luck for the book. The title is conflicting in some way but that strikes as a possibility to increase my interest to see what you have written inside. I have to say that is my desire. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you. Robin: You’re welcome. Thank you, Ross. Bye. The post Robin Good on questioning authority, finding trusted advisors, focus sharing, and information design (Ep35) appeared first on Humans + AI.