Humans + AI

“It comes down to establishing why is it relevant for you. If it is meaningful, and you can use the information that you get, then you will become more interested in it.“ – Nick Abrahams About Nick Abrahams Nick Abrahams is a leading lawyer, futurist, and keynote speaker. He is the Global Co-leader of the Digital Transformation Practice at Norton Rose Fulbright advising major organisations on technology M&A, blockchain and cryptocurrency, and digital transformation. He is also the co-founder of the leading legal tech venture LawPath, and he created the world’s first AI-enabled privacy chatbot, Parker.  He was was a category winner in the Financial Times Asia-Pac Innovator of the Year Awards in 2020. Website: Nick Abrahams Blog: Nick Abrahams Podcasts: Nick Abrahams LinkedIn: Nick Abrahams Twitter: Nick Abrahams Facebook: Nick Abrahams Books Big Data, Big Responsibilities Digital Disruption In Australia What you will learn How to keep up with the speed of information change in legislation and technology (01:58) How to prioritise the right items with the right amount of attention (03:09) How to frame an area of expertise that is important to you (06:33) Why you need to make sure you learn from others (09:33) What is the best way to take notes and build a system for it (12:04) How to talk to people to develop expertise through deliberate steps or osmosis (13:37) How whiteboards can be best for understanding and mind mapping  (22:35) How to deliver messages and ideas through stories (21:43) How to avoid getting trapped in a bubble with information that is constantly and rapidly changing (24:20) Episode resources PWC Decentralised autonomous organisations Paris Hilton Wally Lewis NFT JPEG The Breakthrough Lawyer Transcript Ross Dawson: Nick, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Nick Abrahams: Ross, thank you very much. I’m excited. Ross: You bring together two very fast-moving worlds. One is the law. As a top lawyer, you have to keep across all of the new legislation of which there is plenty and at the same time, you’re a technology lawyer, and that’s a pretty fast-moving place there, and you’re on top of the pace of change in technology, so in a nutshell, how do you do that? How do you keep across this incredibly fast pace of change? Nick: There are loads of things going on in any one day. The critical issue is around prioritizing my time. There’s time spent doing client work. There’s time spent marketing. I’m on three boards. I have my own separate business that I started, Lawpath. Now I’m a professional speaker as well, so yes, trying to keep up with everything requires every day just shuffling priorities and making sure we hit the right ones first with the right amount of attention. Ross: I always have this idea of purpose as knowing why. I’m interested, how do you frame your priorities? I mean, if they keep on changing, as you get different insights or perspectives, do you set those for the year or the month or your lifetime? How is it that you get that guidance what your priorities are? Nick: If we’re zooming out, I definitely set priorities for my lifetime. Years ago, I did something which I think a lot of people do. If you haven’t, then you should definitely do it because it’s great for bringing things into sharp perspective: I wrote my own obituary. What did I want to be remembered for? It was very interesting, when I sat down to do that, I realized that much of what I was actually doing wasn’t relevant to the way that I wanted to be remembered, I guess that was the way that I’ve wanted to live my life. That helped me form a number of key priorities around things that I wanted to do and how I would shape my life. So yes, very much going from the big picture around what is my life’s purpose? What can I do to help people in this lifetime? And then really dropping down, going from there to a yearly check-in that I do, where I have a list that I go through, last year’s list, and update it so that gives me the very real goal. They will be very specifically set out goals, which are capable of either yes, I’ve done that, or no, I have not done that. They’re not general. In that sense, it’s not like I should be a better person, it’s I’m going to do this much volunteering, or whatever it is. Then I check in on that, that’s a little more ad hoc, during the year, but certainly, at least once every two months, just make sure I’m headed in the right direction. That’s the overarching macro picture of what I’m trying to do. Then obviously, there’s the day-to-day as well. Ross: I don’t think that many people have the discipline to do that, but the only way you can actually get a real sense of why you’re doing what you’re doing is if you do continue to check in as you do. Nick: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s the critical part. I didn’t make any of this stuff up obviously, this has all come from books I’ve read and people I’ve listened to. I think it depends on the sort of person that you are as well. I know that I’m good if I’ve got some clear goals, then I will continue to strive for them. I have a whole range of different things I want to achieve across a range of different areas of life. I don’t think there’s one size fits all for any of this. There may be people out there who this is like, oh, that sounds horrible, and may well not work, but it just works for me. Ross: Drilling down to the information part of this; We’re overloaded in many ways; All of the things we would love to be able to do, but can’t do at all. But part of that is the information which is the development of your expertise, it’s the knowledge, it’s the understanding, it’s finding your path; so in terms of prioritizing what it is you need to keep current with or ahead of others on, how do you frame those areas of expertise, or the knowledge, or the understanding that is important to you? Nick: Critically for me, absent the reading or listening things, the most valuable thing that I do is talking to people. I happen to be a talker, so that’s quite good. I love talking to people. That is something that I’m very focused on. As we know, relationships are critical to success in life whether it’s going to be in your job, family, etc. I prioritize people and talking to people effectively as a number one issue. Then the way that I manage that, because I speak to a lot of people in the course of any one day, that might be specifically work-related, might be related to one of the board, and also a lot of marketing, I’ve got this rule, because I’ve been around the tech world for so long, I get approached by lots of early-stage companies, I have a rule, I’ll always give them half an hour, just to help them out. I need to be very deliberate in the way that I manage those particular engagements. I’ve tried to limit, if possible, every meeting to 30 minutes, sometimes if we can get it done in 20, that’s terrific, and just trying to really work it so that I’m talking to a lot of people, getting a lot of information from them, and helping them where I can. That’s why things like Teams and Zoom, have just been unbelievable. The productivity that I’ve gotten there, I’m very happy with the remote style of working. I’m not one of those people who feels I need to meet people in-person, that just doesn’t necessarily ring true for me. I know, it does for loads of people, that’s their thing, but I love it. So strict 30 minutes, no more. Obviously, if it’s work-related and we need to go on for an hour or more then have to do that. First and foremost is prioritizing people. Then happy to talk about how I do my keeping up to date, if you want. Ross: Part of those conversations, people are asking you for your insights since you have such a deep understanding of these domains, do you always try to make sure that you learn from them in those meetings? Are you asking questions back? Nick: Yes, absolutely. I’m intensely interested in what people do, maybe too much so. Particularly being a lawyer has been fantastic, because I’ve had the opportunity to work with so many great companies and entrepreneurs over the years. When you’re a lawyer, you can ask them whatever you want about their business, and they will tell you. I find that very gratifying and a source of great information. Then as I’m learning from them, equally they’ve called me or they want to speak to me because they are after some information, or often they’re looking for a connection, they’re looking for funding, or they’re looking for a board member to join their board, or they’re looking for a new chief marketing officer, something like that, so always trying to give value in those sessions where I can do it. I try to make sure with every call that I do, where this is a work-related call of the negotiation about an agreement, or if it’s just a more simple discussion, or getting to know you, I try to always set out an agenda at the beginning so that we’re all crystal clear what the expectation is around the meeting and what part everyone is going to play, what topics we’re going to discuss, and what we will walk away with, so trying to have that degree of clarity, I think just helps everyone know what to expect from the session. Ross: Yes, absolutely. I had a very good education a long time ago when I was a journalist. I went into a CEO’s office once and did this interview. I said, Okay, great, thank you very much, and he said, Hey, hold on, not so quick, I’ve got to ask you some questions. He got his pound of flesh by asking me about what other people were telling me and things like that. That’s one of the great insights, as you can learn from everyone. You have to not only be the font of wisdom but learn from others as you go on that journey. Nick: Yes, for sure. Ross: Do you take notes in your meetings? If your meetings are one of your prime ways of learning and finding out what’s going on, do you take any notes? Do you just let it all soak in? What is the way of structuring what it is you are coming across? Nick: That’s pretty regimented. I have an iPad, which is a critical device for the way that I work. When I’m talking to people, if there’s a relevant point, I will jot that down, I’ll type it into the iPad, and then I’ll just send it to myself, along with the name of the person who I’m speaking to. Generally speaking, with most meetings, I will have some notes around it and the person’s name and title, so I can come back to that. Then importantly, when there’s an action item, then I will send that email to myself with the action item, and then that gets a red flag, just in my email. Then what I’ve tried to do is if it is relatively simple to do whatever that action item is, and more often than not that action item is me introducing people to someone else, I will try to do that as soon as possible after the meeting, because otherwise, it gets delayed and then starts to cause anxiety for me, because I’m like, I’ve got to get around to that, so I try to get it done; But I do nothing in paper. Ross: For example, you have been becoming an expert in blockchain, Web3.0, NFTs, and a whole variety of rapidly emerging technologies, is this something where you deliberately sit down and structure your learning? Is it all through osmosis? How is it that you have developed and continue to develop your expertise in what’s happening, particularly since these are so fast-moving? Nick: Yes, it is incredibly fast-moving, that whole Web3.0 space, the crypto, NFT, Metaverse, and blockchain. I was a chief operating officer of a reasonably large australian.com during the original.com back in 1999-2000, I think what we’re seeing with Web3.0 is bigger and faster than anything we saw in .com, the amount of money that’s being transacted; Back then you had to go and raise money in the traditional way to buy shares, now we’re having coin offerings, and it is remarkable, the speed of it. The way that I keep up to date is, once again, finding people who know about this stuff and talking to them so that’s incredibly helpful. Reading the way that I do my reading, so that is every day I’m devoting between 30 and 60 minutes a day, just to reading about Web3.0. That’s probably not enough, given the speed with which this is going. Particularly with things like crypto, and I know this late, crypto probably only being involved in the space for the last two and a bit years, so I’m not a deep crypto native. But it’s been a steep learning curve, which I’ve come up a little bit, I think. So devoting myself to looking at relevant websites that compile whatever is the news of the day, something like the coin telegraph. There are also sites that bring all of that news together, so they’re helpful. Then among a number of newsletter, chains around Web3.0. I’ve also got my own, it’s through a solution we’ve got at the office, which basically just summarizes every time certain keywords have been used in major media publications globally. I get that every day and look at that then. What I try to do is to post on LinkedIn every day about Web3.0 because I think, one, it forces me to actually keep up to date, and two, I find that some of the insights that I derive from my interactions on LinkedIn are just sensational. I’ve met some wonderful people who had some great work coming in through LinkedIn as well. I’m quite happy to test an opinion out there around various things. I’ve been quite deliberate in some of the discussions that I will have because I want to understand more. I see things a particular way and I want to try and test to see is there something that I’m missing? So I find that LinkedIn is a wonderful way of testing my knowledge and finding other like-minded people as well. Ross: You’re not hedging, you’re just putting some strong opinions forward in the hope that someone will shoot them down or come up with some other perspectives? Nick: I don’t do that every time, obviously many times it’s just sharing a piece of the relevant piece of information, something like PwC opened an office in the metaverse, I’ll put that out because I think that’s interesting, my little summary of what I think that means. But yet where I think there are contentious issues around things, when there are these things called DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations, I have been quite deliberate around that, because I’m concerned about the structures of those and what that means from a legal point of view, practical point of view, and so forth. I’ve been very happy. I get some grief. So long as it’s likely dimm too. At least people are respectful on LinkedIn. I put some stuff on Twitter. If LinkedIn is a group hug, then Twitter is a fistfight because there’s some very aggressive people on there. I tend to leave my bigger opinions, I leave those on LinkedIn. Ross: That’s great. I think that this is an extension of your conversation, finding the right people who can add value through engaging with your ideas. I’ve always believed in structuring or framing your ideas. I know the one way you do that is you run webinars on these things. Of course, you need to structure your thoughts in order to be able to do that. But are there any other ways that you do it? Do you draw mind maps, or visuals, or any other kind of structure to help you unpick your understanding of these spaces? Nick: Yes, I do find talking on these things as in delivering a webinar or similar sorts of training, I find that that very much helps to solidify my thinking about things and drives me to have a deeper analysis, which, frankly, I wouldn’t do just for the sake of my own personal understanding, I wouldn’t sort of sit there and go, I need to understand why certain NFTs sell for a certain $24 million and other NFTs don’t sell for that. I wouldn’t just do that unless I was putting myself in the position of trying to educate others about that; Then I know I’m going to really research this. My process is I gather a lot of research material, which I will then read through. I have a very large whiteboard, which I love tremendously. What I will do is once I’ve read through things, I will put things into the iPad, as I’m going through them. Then once I’ve read through most of the material on a particular topic, I will then on the whiteboard put up there, what I feel are the strongest ideas that I’ve been left with as a result of that. It’s multiple colors and so forth. I’m looking at it now. It’s something I did on the weekend, actually about NFTs. I can see that I’ve got Paris Hilton NFT trading cards, the new Wally Lewis written up there, so I think about how can we categorize these things. It’s just different colors, and it does help me. The visual, I can’t. I’ve tried doing it on computers, on the iPad, and it works nowhere near as well as being able to sit back and look at it on a whiteboard. Ross: Yes, absolutely. I think there’s this physical component to it, but also just the visual and mapping that out. Think about a synthesis as in pulling together of all of these multiple ideas, is there any way in which you get yourself in a frame of mind, or to help to distill, or synthesize, or pull together ideas in a way that brings that higher-level understanding? Nick: I don’t have a particular framework that I always use. When I’m delivering sessions, I’m trying to think of it from the audience’s point of view. Most importantly, what message am I getting across, that is going to be relevant to these folks? How’s it going to change what they do or impact them? So I’m always trying to think of what he said. For example, the NFT session that I’m working on, and I’ve been speaking to people about this, there are a lot of questions out there, particularly questions around how could these things be worth so much, they’re only digital files, they’re only JPEGs. Then challenging myself to explain that what is the rationale, and then from that, I think to try to simplify it down; in the case of NFTs, I’ve got six key categories of NFTs, and they all have different attributes. It’s trying to figure out what is the simplest way to explain a difficult concept. That may be either, as I’ve done with the NFT, six different categories, or it might be just trying to look for an analogy in real life. The more that we can get analogies, the better. Then, obviously what really works and resonates with people is stories, telling them stories about what you’ve done, I find that that’s one of the things that works very well, which is just telling stories about matters that I’ve worked on. It’s like revealing confidential information, but really just giving people stories and trying to working as many learnings into each story as possible. Ross: Yes, absolutely. You learn by teaching, and part of it is because you do need to distill and bring together the metaphors or analogies which bring out the key characteristics. Nick: Yes. Ross: If you’re thinking about somebody who is an entrepreneur, or a lawyer, it will be interesting if there is any differences between those, what is the advice which you would give to somebody who is saying, all right, there’s just way too much, I’m trying to keep across the edge of change, and I’m not able to do that? What would your advice be on things which we haven’t covered so far, in terms of how it is that people living on the edge can thrive in that space? Nick: It’s a challenge because there’s so much out there. One way it’s defined, I guess, people that you trust, who are across it, and then following them or listening to their podcasts. I’m big believer, I devour a lot of podcasts, I listen to them in the car and actually got over the idea that the kids may not be interested in the podcast, and now I don’t really care about that. They’re forced to listen to that or put their earphones in. I guess one of the approaches is finding a couple of people who you think know what’s happening, and then following them, and just seeing what they think is appropriate. The problem with that is you tend to get caught up in a little bit of a bubble, so you might end up with the wrong idea. At its core, I think maybe the way to look at it… sorry, I’m absolutely just meandering here, but maybe if we pull it back to what is important for you to learn; say, for example, with lawyers, so I do this program for lawyers called The Breakthrough Lawyer, and with that, I try to give people a sense of what is important for you to understand about the future of the law because you don’t necessarily have to understand everything about the future. If you don’t do court work, maybe the future of what’s going to happen in courts is irrelevant to you. I think trying to narrow down, what will be meaningful to me, and what could I meaningfully use to change my life. Then once you do that, hopefully that dictates the priorities. Harder with an entrepreneur, because when you are an entrepreneur, there are so many different things that you have to be across, obviously your product, but then there’s partnering and effective partnering, there’s raising capital, there’s the regulatory landscape, there is an enormous number of things there. With entrepreneurs, probably the best advice there is actually partnering with another founder, so having co-founder, we certainly see the benefit of co-founders, each of whom brings a different skill set, sometimes quite a different skill set. But I guess it comes down to establishing why is it relevant for me. If it is meaningful, and you can use the information that you get, then you will become more interested in it. Ross: Yes, absolutely. I think part of that is frame of working out what’s important, and what is going to be meaningful. I think you’ve shared a very people-centric view of how to learn, engage and keep across the edge of change. That’s not everybody’s approach, but I mean, certainly, one, which I’ve personally, and I’ve seen a lot of other people thrive on, because if you want to keep across the edge of change, then there are some people who can guide you on that journey. Nick: Yes. Ross: In conclusion, any other final thoughts, or recommendations, or practices around what it is that you do, which were in your very evidence thriving on extreme overload? Nick: Maybe, it’s just luck. But I am intensely curious about a whole range of different topics. Not everything, there are some things I’m not concerned about, that other people are curious about. But for me, I have some deep curiosity about some specific things. I’ve figured out a way that they’re relevant to my work, particularly, but also potentially, to my life. I think it’s not just curiosity for the sake of curiosity, it’s curiosity to determine how could that improve my life and help me to help others. For me, once I got that bridge, it made it all very easy, so I find it intensely fascinating to be learning about these things, but then also to applying it because it’s not just learning for the sake of learning. Ross: Absolutely. You do an outstanding job of it. Nick: Thank you. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Nick. Speaking with you has been fantastic. Nick: Thank you Ross and you’ve got a new book coming out that I’m looking forward to reading, best wishes with that, and best wishes with the podcast. Thank you. Ross: Thank you. The post Nick Abrahams on purpose and prioritisation, talking for mutual value, deliberate sharing and engagement, and telling stories for understanding (Ep23) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“In order to write, I scan over 80 or more newsletters and magazines. If I get a newsletter and there isn’t something in there that I’ve used in a while then I’ll just unsubscribe from that one and look for another one that might be better.“ – Joyce Gioia About Joyce Gioia Joyce is a strategic business futurist and President of The Herman Group, which serves a wide range of clients globally with The Herman Trend Report and other services, and is on the board of the Association of Professional Futurists. She is the author or co-author of six books, including Experience Rules, and appears regularly in the media, including in Entrepreneur Magazine, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Website: Joyce Gioia LinkedIn: Joyce Gioia Twitter: Joyce Gioia Facebook: Joyce Gioia Books Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People How to Choose your Next Employer How to Become an Employer of Choice Workforce Stability: Your Competitive Edge Lean & Meaningful: A New Culture for Corporate America What you will learn Using trend alert tools (01:46) How to select information sources and keep them up to date (05:43) Why it may be better to deal with information as it comes instead of on a schedule (08:36) Why the futurist’s job is making big concepts understandable to your audience (11:35) What makes an excellent futurist (14:52) Why it is important to engage stakeholders other than your customers (20:16) How the Chief Experience Officer frames a company externally and internally  (22:35) Why taking care of your physical health is just as important as mental health (25:52) Episode resources Herman Trend Alert DuckDuckGo South by Southwest Rhodium Research Ray Kurzweil Bertalan Mesko The Great Resignation 75 cent words Gregory Bateson League of Legends Chief Experience Officer Transcript Ross Dawson: Joyce, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Joyce Gioia: It’s great to be with you, Ross. Ross: Joyce, you help organizations and leaders to understand what’s going on, understand what’s changing, and to be able to act on that, how do you do that? Joyce: The major vehicle that I use is something that I call the Herman Trend Alert. It’s read by close to 30,000 people every week in 92 countries. In order to write that I scan over 80 newsletters and magazines, probably over the course of a month or more even because some of the newsletters are compendiums of highlights from other newsletters, so the best of. I probably cover close to 200 with all the different newsletters and magazines that I look at. When I find something that interests me, that I think I’d like to learn more about and I have a boundless curiosity like a kid, I try to find if they have something digital on it, if it’s an article online, I’ll grab the URL, and/or I’ll copy the item and just dump it into a new word file. When it’s from a magazine, I’ll tear out the pages or even look for that item online so that I don’t even have to translate the ink on paper into a digital format. Sometimes I’ll even hear a radio segment that’s on something that I want to cover. In that case, I’ll look for the transcript. I’ll keep the URL and the copy of the material in my trend alerts directory. I’ll have dozens of items waiting for processing at any given time. Then when I’m ready, I’ll pull up the file and if I need more information, I’ll search it out on the web using DuckDuckGo. I like to use DuckDuckGo because it’s more private. It doesn’t share information as much as Google does. I’m getting upset with Google about the way that it’s blocking certain other systems. But anyway, I digress. If I’m low on trend alert topics, which rarely happens, I’ll set aside some blocks on my calendar for uninterrupted research, but that very very rarely happens because so much comes into my inbox. I just need to look through the newsletters and see what interests me. This week’s trend alert is about growing third teeth. In order to get additional insight into that, I called a friend of mine whom I met at South by Southwest. Her company is Rhodium Research and what she does is she sends stem cells up into space to see what effect that will have and it turns out that stem cells multiply much faster in a microgravity situation. I had no idea. Ross: Wow, that’s fabulous. I’d love to dig into what you’ve just told me. There’s a lot in there. Let’s start with the magazines, the newsletters, and your sources for use. How do you select them or how have you selected them and how do you keep those up to date or current with making sure those are the sources which can feed what you need? Joyce: If I get a newsletter and there isn’t something in there that I’ve used in a while then I’ll just unsubscribe from that one and look for another one that might be better. You’ve got things like Ray Kurzweil’s organization and Bertalan Mesko who is the medical futurist, and I’m fascinated by medicine because my dad was a physician, my brother’s a physician, my daughter is a physician. Yes, you have my permission to feel sorry for me. Ross: In some cases, it could be a boon. Joyce: Yes, in some cases, it’s a great advantage to have doctors in the family, and other times not so much. Ross: This gives you a head start on understanding your medical or biological issues, which are of course, so important at the moment. Are many of these sources more general ones who are also scanning the trends and the edge of the future, or do you look into ones that are very specific in industry or topic? Joyce: The answer to your question is yes, I will look at specific industry ones as well as ones that are doing their own scanning of industries, so it’s a combination. If there are thought leaders, people who come up with ideas that I haven’t thought of, that are in my spaces, like my new book is called Experience Rules, how positive experiences will drive profit into the future. There’s a webinar that I’m attending tomorrow at 11 o’clock. That’s about the audio, the neuroscience of audio in webinars, and I always use music to set up my audience when I do webinars because I think that using multimedia, using music and beautiful pictures just adds additional dimensions to the whole presentation. It’s not just a talking head. I’m adding sight sound in motion. Besides me who’s very enthusiastic about whatever I’m talking about. Ross: In terms of scanning, you’ve mentioned before that you blocked out time in your calendar, is this daily? Do you spend time looking at all of your sources or what’s your schedule? Joyce: No, as they come in I’ll look at them because I want to be as up-to-date and as right-on-target for what’s happening at that point if I can. There are times when the media escape is just so focused on something political, that it just doesn’t make sense. That’s when I go to my growing third teach kind of articles. For instance, if there was a solar eclipse, I might talk about magnetic resonance, solar eclipse, and how sunspots affect the telecommunications on the planet. I look for ways to tie what is current to what I’m talking about. I’ve done a lot of work because HR is very, very important to me and I’m very enthusiastic about helping employers to be better. I’ve covered a lot about the Great Resignation and how to avoid that happening in people’s organizations. During COVID, I believed that people needed a trusted source for information on infections, masking, and vaccines so I became a real expert in COVID-19. I would have conversations with people and they would say how long have you been an epidemiologist? I would say, I haven’t. It’s just that I’ve done a lot of research in the field. Ross: Hopping on the note-taking, you were saying that you captured the URLs, the content, and topics so what is your system? Where do you keep things stored? How do you relate things or tag things or note them? Joyce: Very simple. I just keep them in a Word file and I suspect I’m not doing my brain a lot of favors, but I don’t have a tagging system. I just have a good memory. I’m blessed that way. Ross: Then the process of distilling that into your report, are you choosing one topic or more than one topic and then pulling that all together and being able to then provide it in a distilled or digestible format? Is there any process to that? Joyce: Yes, most definitely. One of the things is I do not want to ever use 75 cent words and that gets really difficult when you’re trying to explain something like quantum computing, really difficult; but I believe that it’s part of my job to take really complicated information without losing the basic meaning to bring it to the point where it is digestible by ordinary people. I believe that that’s part of my job as a futurist. Another part of my job as a futurist is to make sure that I am making whatever it is that I’m delivering just as valuable as it possibly could be to my audience. I want to talk about what are the implications of this for them, for their families, for the future, for their futures, and to do that, I will take a page from how I developed a process for writing advertising copy and that is that I will literally put on the persona of the person who would be reading the article, and I will look out through their eyes and I will say, Okay, I just read ABCD, what do I want to know about this? What has not been covered here? And what else do I need from this article to have that be really valuable for me? Ross: Fantastic. Joyce: Of course, then I jump back into the person who’s writing it and I write it. Ross: So being able to asking the questions that are relevant to that particular person? Joyce: Exactly. What I sometimes find when I do that is that there are whole paragraphs that are irrelevant to that audience and I just get rid of them. Ross: That magic, part of it is being able to see the sense of the trend and to be able to work out what the implications are? Are there any processes of that sense-making or synthesis that goes on in your mind? Joyce: Yes. Do you remember I told you I had a pretty good memory? Ross: Yes. Joyce: I believe that what makes me good as a futurist is that I can take what to other people seem like totally disparate, trends and things that are happening in the world, and pull them together and see that they, in fact, are related to each other and therefore, the world is going in a particular direction. Let me give you a great example of that. My new book is called Experience Rules, how positive experiences will drive profit into the future. I started understanding the importance of experiences more than 20 years ago when I saw that regular consumers were looking for more and more extreme and intense experiences and I wrote about it. I called it Experience Junkies. I talked about extreme sports, reality television, extreme food, and all kinds of extreme activities that people were doing like biking, hiking, and bicycling. It was just really extreme. When people were talking about food, it was food that would burn some people’s mouths that some others were gravitating toward. I saw that something was going on there. I realized that, to a degree, humanity was becoming jaded, that it took greater and greater experiences to turn them on, to make them feel. It went right along with the fact that the baby boomers were aging and typically when people age, they lose the ability to taste to a degree. We lose taste buds or some of us do anyway in our mouths and tongues. I pulled those together and I did that. That was the seed for understanding that experience was important. Fast forward to about 10 or 12 years later, now we’re talking about CX, the customer experience, and marketers were focusing on the customer experience. Then very shortly thereafter, because companies realized that without good employees, they were going to be in bad shape, they started focusing on the employee experience. That’s when I started getting interested. Because I said, Okay if we’ve got some people focusing on the customer experience and others focusing on the employee experience, what about the other stakeholder groups? What about the families of employees whom Microsoft and others go a long distance to relate with, and have a good relationship with? So why not the families of employees who Microsoft and Adobe are going to great lengths to relate with, or the families of customers the packaged goods companies go to great lengths to relate with? Then I started doing some research, do we have investor relations experienced consultants? In fact, yes, there are investor experience consultants and they are thriving. Now I’m beginning to get a holistic picture and a bigger picture. I started thinking okay, so all of these different stakeholders are very important to companies. Why is nobody talking about it? Ross: A lot of the process then is thinking of the stakeholders, the people involved, the many perspectives. As Gregory Bateson said, knowledge comes from a single perspective, wisdom comes from many perspectives, so then it sounds like your process is keeping on asking and identifying those other perspectives and looking at it from that viewpoint. Joyce: Indeed. What I also did was then I wanted to look at not only the stakeholder groups but how the new technologies were being used. I looked at AR, VR, and AI, and how they’re being used to connect with these different groups. Then I also wanted to talk about gamification and simulation, and I took it a step further even. I talk about something that I call “workafication”, which is taking the installed databases of things like League of Legends, which have over 10 million installed players, and finding a way to incorporate work into those games. I think that’s what’s coming next. But anyway, I took all of those technologies and I put them into the book, and then I said, Okay, how do I make this again, putting on the persona, I’ve got all this information about how different companies, over hundreds of companies, are bonding with different groups of stakeholders, I’ve got all of the technologies, so where does the company begin to use this information and drive profit? I realized that the model was already there in looking at the customer journey. What I said was we’re already mapping the customer journey, why aren’t we mapping the employee journey? Why aren’t we mapping the supplier-vendor journey? Why aren’t we mapping the journey for the families, investors, and all of those different things? That’s the next step. But then companies need someone to oversee all of this work. I forecast the rise of someone called the CEXO, the chief experience officer, whose job will be to coordinate all of the messaging, branding, and advertising for all of those stakeholder groups. Ross: You’re bringing together all of these different perspectives, as you say, all of these different journeys and so on, in terms of just the cognition in the mind, what is then the process for you or that CEXO to be able to pull these together into a whole because there are so many different perspectives. Is there any state of mind or process or ways of synthesizing or bringing these together? Joyce: The key is that CEXO has to realize that all of the branding has to be aligned, and all of the messaging has to be aligned because if the employee message is different than the customer message, that’s not going to work. It’s their job to look at how do they create the congruence between all of these messages? And it’s very interesting that there are two companies that are looking at a much more holistic approach to doing business. Both of them have come up with a single word, which doesn’t surprise me, the word is “caring”. When I needed to change the TEDTalk, which I did in New Zealand in 2018, or something, to make it more consumer-oriented, I used the title creating a culture of caring. I started by talking about the relationships between parents and children, then evolved it to our work families, and ended by talking about what I’ve just shared with you. Ross: Fantastic. I think it’s really insightful, that process of bringing together those ideas and being able to see the point of some of the major things emerging. To round out, is there any advice you would give to those who are seeking to thrive in a world of excessive information? Joyce: Yes, in the process of collecting, being a sponge, and having this unbounded curiosity, which I highly recommend because it works very well for me, understand that you have to take care of your body as well. What that means is, I get daily exercise, I’m still trying to get eight hours of sleep a night, I haven’t mastered that one yet. Although many times I’ll get four hours early in the evening, get up and do stuff, and then go back and get another four hours, it doesn’t serve me and I’m trying to get out of that. My husband says that I have two speeds, supersonic and off. It’s really vital to turn off and just be sometimes. What that means is not necessarily meditation, but just giving yourself time to breathe. Give yourself time to just relax and just take in the world. How does your body feel against the seat of the chair or wherever you are? What is going on? How does the air feel on your skin? Just tuning in to your body for short periods of time, a minute here, a minute there, but it’s an opportunity for a reset, for us to just reset ourselves, relax, and then we can turn back on the brain, we can turn back on all the senses and we come to a degree with fresh eyes and ears because we have given ourselves this opportunity to just relax, and be with ourselves for a short time. Ross: Fantastic. I think it’s not only sound advice, many people don’t recognize, to the degree they can, going supersonic requires those stop times as well. Is there anything, any way you would point to people to find some of the best of what you do? Joyce: Right now, it’s still at www.hermangroup.com. However, I am working on a new website, which is joycegioia.com. I’ll also have much more information on another site called experiencerules.com. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Joyce, it has been a real pleasure. Joyce: Thank you so much. Ross. The post Joyce Gioia on identifying trends, scanning processes, stakeholder experience, and adopting personas for communicating (Ep22) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“It’s about not getting so constrained by the channel of information and see it as a sole purpose, but being able to see the connection points to other things that are relevant to you.” – Stephen Poor About Stephen Poor Stephen is Chair Emeritus of leading employment law firm Seyfarth & Shaw, which has 900 lawyers across 17 offices and multiple continents. He led the firm as Chairman for 15 years, introducing a range of industry-leading innovations, and he now focuses on the firm’s client-facing technology strategy which includes robotics, AI, and cognitive computing. Website: Stephen Poor LinkedIn: Stephen Poor Twitter: Stephen Poor What you will learn What is a good practice when reading books (01:48) How to keep on top of changing legislative information (05:09) How law firms keep up with information overload (08:56) Why focus not on information but on connection points (15:06) How to define your need and look for outside solutions (17:25) Why structured thinking is needed to filter information (19:26) How to apply your frameworks to new and different scenarios (21:31) How to occasionally go broad to find context and relevance (26:38) Episode resources Lexis Westlaw Seyfarth Shaw LLP Ed Walters Bob Ambrogi Transcript Ross Dawson: Stephen, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Stephen Poor: Ross, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. Ross: You are a lawyer, you also run… Stephen: Do you have to say that with such hesitation, Ross? Ross: There is so much more than that. That’s why I’m saying, your starting point is you’re a lawyer, you run a major law firm, and you also delve deep into the emerging technologies that are changing the legal industry. There’s plenty to keep on top of there. I’d like to just actually go back to the beginning when you were a law student, when you were studying law. Did you have any practices that enabled you to take in the amount of information that it requires to pass your legal degrees? Stephen: I’ll give you some context first. I’m old enough now that when I was in law school, it was pre-internet, computer-assisted research was only just starting. We had these fancy things called Lexis and Westlaw terminals, but nobody knew how to use them. The information you needed was in these things we used to have called books. I know you’re writing one. As you are looking at information for learning to be a law student, you’re getting it from your colleagues, your other law students, the professors, and the books. What’s interesting about the books, it’s something I picked up in your book, a theme you picked up on, which was that one of the things you had to learn was what you referred to as keynotes; synthesized information where they’re trying to sort the cases into topics. Oftentimes, you got the most useful information, not by the keynote you’re particularly on, but by ones your eyes happen to catch by going through the book, by going through the pages. I always found that to be fascinating. It’s replicated itself over the years in different formats where useful information is not always exactly what you’re looking for, sometimes peripheral or in a framework, that’s not usually capturable that easy. It was a lot of time in the library. I was on the law review so there was a lot of information, each member then reviewed, distilled and shared with other members of the review. It was that sort of thing, and I’m still not sure we capture the information we needed to become a good lawyer. In fact, I’m certain we didn’t. We became good law students, not necessarily trained to be good lawyers. Ross: Yes. We can always point to ways our education system can improve to create people ready for the workforce. Stephen: Yes, I’ve got a whole riff on that but that’s not the point of this discussion. Ross: Moving on to the next step. To a point when you’re a legal student, it’s relatively static law, that is the law as it stands and you’ll be able to then grasp that, and understand that, and be able to use that as a foundation for practicing law. The next step is that the law is changing, and bringing in new cases or changes, or different legislations, or different situations, so as you are evolving as a lawyer, what are the practices that enable you to keep on top of the change that mattered to you? Stephen: One of the things the firm was always good about, still is good about, is trying to make sure its lawyers stayed abreast of changes in the law that were applicable to their practice and there are many specific areas of the practice of law. I grew up as an employment lawyer here in the States. The firm was always good about everyday publishing digest of new cases, of legislative developments. Now you couldn’t keep abreast of what was going on in all 50 states. It was mostly federal cases and cases in the state in which your office was located. Particularly early on, you didn’t do a lot of work outside of the state in which your office was located, at least as an associate. You had a more of a confined sphere, that you had to keep track of, that changed over the years. Every day you would get some publications, CCH, PNA, where they would distill this information and they would sell it to law firms who in turn would distribute it to their attorneys. Every day, you’d get a list of blurbs of cases or legislative developments that you had to look at and see how they fit within the practice you’re developing, and some did and some didn’t but that’s basically how you did it. Ross: That’s reading material, part of it is being able to flag as you say, the degree of relevance to you. It is then ways of taking notes or to referencing or other ways to pull that into that… when you know that it is relevant, it just starts to become part of your own knowledge base. Stephen: That’s right. Obviously, it’s moved to electronic format now, but the same systems still exist, different companies, different sources, but yes, you would get it either back in the day in written format, or now electronically, and you had to discern its relevance and how it applied to you, and how that fit sort of depended on where you were in your career. As a young associate, you’re responsible for writing briefs, writing memos, knowing the specific case law. As you moved into partner and more senior attorney level, you needed to know more trend lines, as you’re advising your client, trying to understand the developments in the sense of where things are likely to go, what it means going forward, as opposed to what it meant going backward. You’re looking at the same information, but as your career is evolving, you’re looking at the information differently, and using the information differently. Ross: I would like to come back to flush that out a little bit, perhaps going on to this additional theme, which almost all lawyers need to be across and certainly you are deeply, is how technologies are changing the nature of law. That involves understanding the technologies, or the underlying technologies to a degree, what are some of the new offerings, the new companies, the ways in which it still is being applied? How are legal firms changing? How have you gone about keeping abreast of all of these shifts? Stephen: It’s a real challenge, Ross, because just to give a sense for your listeners of my career, I ran a law firm for 15 years. Then five or six years ago, I stepped down and now I help lead our Tech, R&D function. To your point, my job now is exactly what you just described it as. I thought about that piece of it in preparation for our discussion today, we sort of broke it into two parts. One, when I first took on the responsibility of working with the units called Seyfarth Labs, when I first started working with labs, I had a baseline knowledge of technology, but I was not and am not a technologist. I don’t know how to code. I now know what Python means from a technology standpoint, but at the time, I thought it was a snake. The first thing I had to do was to find the information I needed to get up to a baseline knowledge set, to be able to simply function as one of the leaders of this particular part of the organization. I did that in a variety of ways. One, by talking to the fellow who now has day to day leadership with a function, who’s a fabulous technologist, a fellow named Byong Kim, and Byong was kind enough to help educate me on the technology side of it. I was already pretty facile with changes in the profession, and the functionality we needed to provide but I wasn’t that facile with the technology and how the technology fit within that changing functionality. As I got more facile with that, then the question becomes, Okay, what’s next? What’s developing out there? The world of legal technology, and technology in general, is moving so quickly and developing so fastly. So fast, that it’s incredibly difficult to keep up with it. I use a couple of sources. One, I also have a podcast. On the podcast, I’ve talked to a lot of people who are legal technologists or in the field. Simply by preparing for their discussions, I learned a lot about what’s new and what’s developing. There’s a conversation piece with people who are experts in the field, that’s a key component to me. Then there are sources you have to find on the internet, that talk about it. Now, you’ve got to filter the information, because a lot of it’s run through company’s marketing functions. You have to learn how to look at the information and pull out from it what’s real, what’s not real? What’s hype? What’s substance? There are a few organizations out there who’ve been around for a while, Ed Walters at the Fastcase, for example, has been around for a very long time. They’ve got a solid organization, and you read his writings, you read his blogs, Bob Ambrogi is another guy, you read his writings, you listen to their podcast, you always get quality information. It’s a matter of figuring out what sources you need to get the information you need. Ross: What are the reliable sources, the ones which will give you insight, which you pre-assess that you don’t need to keep on working out whether it’s biased or not? Stephen: Yeah, particularly in this space, there’s so much excitement, and people get so worked up about the promise of their idea. Promise is great but what I need for my job now is to know what’s real now, what’s the functionality of this particular software, this particular technology offers now? So I can figure out how it works to move the business and our client relationships forward. Now, not a year from now, not two years from now, not three years from now, but now. People get genuinely excited about their idea. You got to figure out what problem are they solving. Are they, in fact, solving it? And are they solving it now? Or are they on track to solve it a year or two from now? Ross: What strikes me with all of this is the synthesis, as in building the foundational knowledge and legal tech in this case, and then being able to get to the point where you can discern what is present, what is promise, and how this could be applied in practice. Are there any processes in your mind to be able to draw from the elements from the input over time into building that bigger picture of what is the understanding of the space? Stephen: It’s a couple of things. I don’t know that there’s any process that my mind works on. I haven’t trained the way I think, I don’t believe. But it’s a matter of seeing connection points. Oftentimes, you’ll see someone has developed a piece of technology, a piece of software that does X, and X doesn’t have any particular relevance to what we’re doing, for example, but you’ll look at how they articulate X and you’ll think, why wouldn’t that work for Y? Now, Y is something that is a problem we’re struggling with, what we’re trying to solve. There have been several times where I’ve said to the developer of the software, the technology, have you applied it to Y? Well, no, we haven’t. Well, would it work for Y? Ha, maybe it would. We’ve been able to take a particular piece of technology that was developed for one purpose, and reuse it with some minor adaptations to achieve a result that we needed for the organization. To me, it’s a matter about not getting so constrained by the channel of information; channel is the wrong word; the focus of information you’re getting, and see it as a sole purpose, but be able to see the connection points to other things that are relevant to you. Ross: That’s interesting. It’s a slightly different point but Procter and Gamble has been very big on open innovation and one of the ways they’ve done that is articulate their needs. Each of the business units says this is what we need to be able to be clear for themselves. In this case, actually opening that out, not just to people inside the organization but beyond; But that articulation is saying this clearly, that’s what we need, then there’s number of other junctures for you to come across, which then can say, Oh, well, that doesn’t plug right in, but having identified the need, there are all sorts of things which could be adapted to solve that. Stephen: Yes, it’s about identifying what the need or problem is you’re trying to solve. Too often, people who get enamored with technology, or get enamored with software, fail to identify the problem they’re trying to solve or their need they’re trying to meet. They find something that does something cool but then they don’t know what to do with it. I had not heard the Procter and Gamble example before, but it’s a great one. I need X, I need this problem solved, help me solve it; if you articulate it that way, you find people can frame their solution sets much more precisely, and much more accurately for you. Ross: You’ve been educated as a lawyer, you’ve been a lawyer all your life, and now applying that in a quite different way; it is a very specific thought way of thinking, which has, arguably, some strengths in a particular domain and may not always be the most applicable to all situations. Stephen: It has its downsides, yes. Ross: Would you point to any strengths of the legal ways of thinking as it were the structure of legal thinking, which are valuable in being able to make sense of the world, because that is part of what lawyers do, to be able to make better action, make better decisions, and pull that all together? Stephen: It’s probably better to describe all the downsides of legal training, but I’ll give it a go with the upsides. The major upside is you’re trained as a lawyer, you’re trained to distill facts and to look for what’s relevant to a set of analytical structures that are typically pre-existing, piece of legislation, case law, structure, it may be ambiguous, it may have room for dispute but you’ve got a basic framework. For most legal problems, you’re taking these facts and you’re pulling out what’s relevant, and you’re applying them to this framework. That ability to have this critical thinking component to be able to sort through what’s relevant to your inquiry or what’s not relevant to the inquiry is a very useful trait, particularly when you’re dealing with so much information it’s going on now, being able to parse through it with that skill set is useful. Ross: Yes, the word distill is very important because that is part of the training and the approach is to take things and boil it down or distill that to the essence of the fundamentals. This is a fundamental skill today as we have more and more things that we need to distill in order to get to the essence. Stephen: Yes, that’s right. The trick for me, as my career morphed and evolved over the years, and the job changed dramatically, two or three different times, was about applying that ability to distill information to the second half of it, which is the analytical framework for the problem you’re trying to solve. Because as you move into law for management or now leading a tech function, learning the framework against which you are applying the information changed. As I said before, I had to learn some of the structure around legal technology and legal technology development, to be able to apply the information. I give an example. I was keynoting at a conference in Nashville several years ago now, five or six years pre-pandemic, whatever that was. I struck up a conversation with a woman from one of the big four, and their consulting group. She introduced herself saying she was in the robotics practice group. I thought that was pretty cool, so thinking that they have developed Jetsons kind of robotics, I said, what does that mean? And she gave me a primer on robotic process automation. I was able to take that information and take what she described and put it in because I had gotten up to speed on some of the frameworks we needed. I was able to see the connection point to what we’re trying to achieve. I said, has anybody ever applied it in legal? Has anybody ever applied it to this type of scenario? She said, no, I don’t think so. Well, could we? Well, I don’t see why not. Pretty soon we were the first firm to apply robotic process automation into the legal practice, which now a lot of firms are doing. But it’s that two sides of the coin, the ability to distill the information, and the ability to understand the problem set or the analytical framework against which you’re applying it. That’s key to figuring out the relevancy of the information. Ross: In crude terms, you can think of the analysis as the reduction and synthesis as the aggregation. These are both critical skills. Those fit together, the analysis and the synthesis or bringing the antithesis, but in many domains, in engineering, and accounting, and then legal practice, and so on, the emphasis is so much on the analysis, it is the breaking down into the components, and this has its value, it is critical, it is part of the process, but, it also needs to be balanced with this synthesis us to be able to pull that together and being able to see the connections, as you did in this case with the robotic process automation and seeing, understanding, having the context to understand that and then see the applications on how that could be applied with that more syncretic or broad perspective. Stephen: I encourage everyone who’s listening to this to get your book because you provide some fascinating structure to deal with the information flow that we’re dealing with. What I found, it gave me a structure I hadn’t thought about before, but one that makes a lot of sense. This flood of information if you’re not able to quickly parse it, and sort it mentally, and then put it into context for what’s relevant for you, you make the point in your book about the different areas of various domains in which we gather information, we’re talking about professional domains, but the same applies to personal or cultural or general information, because there’s so much information out there, if you’re not able to distill it and apply it, you get overwhelmed by it. Ross: One of the things I’m picking the most out of this conversation is that idea of the relevance. This idea is not purely for the legal domain but this is something which is very central to the legal ways of thinking. Relevance requires you to have that context, you need to know what is the context for which this is relevant. I think this is the form where the analysis can be very valuable in being able to have that clarity where you can identify relevance or potential relevance, and then to be able to, hopefully, make the connections between those pieces, as you observe those and hopefully discard the things which are outside, that you don’t need to pay attention to right now. Stephen: Yes. It’s very easy to go off on paths that aren’t connected to what your main purpose is. Sometimes that’s just fascinating to do because you wind up in places you never expected to do. You turn right, as opposed to going straight, and next thing you know, you’re looking at a beautiful sunset off of a beach, that you never expected. Lawyers have a tendency to stay on the straight path as opposed to very off. I’m not suggesting there’s not a time and a place for an adventure in the information gathering, because it can lead you to interesting places, but one’s time is not infinite. If you’re going to make that journey off the path you think you’re on, I tried to do that consciously to see how the connections are bringing, see if it’s likely to lead to something interesting, if it is, that’s cool. I’m at the point in my life where I’ve got a little more time to do that but particularly back when I was running the firm, time was a really precious commodity. One of the decision points you had to make was, how much can I go off on this frolic and detours? And how much do I have to stay on what I need to know? And what’s important to my job, or to my family, or whatever it is? And you’re constantly adjusting that as you go through life. Ross: Yes, that’s a really important lesson. Both, this consciousness of how much is appropriate to stay on the straight and narrow as it were in terms of attention or go more broadly but also that that is changing. There are different phases or times. Then there are times when it is entirely appropriate to go a lot broader or sometimes not so much. Stephen: Yes, sometimes if you go broader than you think you need to, it can lead you to really interesting places and can bring you back around to more useful information. But if you do that too often, you wind up spinning more in circles than anything else. Ross: Stephen, do you have any closing advice for those who are seeking to make sense of change, and massive information, and shifting technologies, as you are? Stephen: For me, and this echoes some themes in your book, it’s about being mindful about what you’re using the information for and the purpose of it. By mindful, I don’t mean it has to be just business-oriented or a specific set, it could be gathering information just for the pure joy of learning something as well, but to be thoughtful and conscious about how you’re using information, because if you don’t, you just get overwhelmed by it. Ross: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Stephen, we really appreciate it. Stephen: Well, thank you very much for having me on and good luck with the book. Ross: Thank you. The post Stephen Poor on discerning relevance, distilling facts, thriving for lawyers and legal students, and consciously seeing connections (Ep21) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“You could spend all your life just drinking from that firehose and not making sense of it, or you can say, Okay, enough, let me try and structure this. That’s really the magic.” – Abhijit Bhaduri About Abhijit Bhaduri Abhijit is an author, blogger, podcaster, keynote speaker, and influencer focusing on the future of work. His 5 books include most recently Dreamers and Unicorns and The Digital Tsunami, as well as 2 novels. Before starting his solo career he was CLO at Indian tech giant Wipro. Website: Abhijit Bhaduri Newsletter: Abhijit Bhaduri LinkedIn: Abhijit Bhaduri Twitter: Abhijit Bhaduri Substack: Abhjit Bhaduri Facebook: Abhijit Bhaduri Books Dreamers and Unicorns The Digital Tsunami Don’t Hire The Best Mediocre But Arrogant Married But Available What you will learn What mentality is needed to thrive on overload (01:51) How to structure your engagement with information (03:31) How to convert the divergent into a convergence (05:01) Using sketchnotes for sensemaking (07:20) How to pull and distil the essence of complex ideas (11:10) How to organise information visually (14:11) Developing a thriving community by being accessible (16:10) How organisations can help their employees to deal with information overload (21:26) What is the way to teach learning to learn in a world of fast change (27:45) Why conversation is a powerful tool to thrive on overload (30:54) Episode resources Wipro Google Keep Malcolm Gladwell Defi movement Prezi Transcript Ross Dawson: Abhijit, it’s an honor and a delight to have you on the show. Abhijit Bhaduri: Thank you. Likewise, it’s so lovely to be here with you. Ross: What I want to dig into is not only how you thrive on overload, but also many others whom you have helped through your career to thrive in a very fast-paced environment. We will try to unpack these but what’s the starting point? What’s the mentality that we should be approaching in making sense of unlimited information? Abhijit: I think one of the things that have changed is the number of sources of information that we’ve had. There was a phase where you had the standard newspapers. In India, we went from one official government-run television channel to two, and then suddenly, as private television happened, satellite TV happened, now we have 700 channels to choose from; and besides, of course, all the others that keep showing up on the internet. Everybody with a camera, and a microphone is now a content creator, so that has just exploded. I think it’s moved exponentially from one or two to 700 to now literally billions. That’s really what is causing this amazing thing plus so many platforms where you’re consuming it. I read stuff in the newspapers, on the internet, there are communities, you talk to people, and there are various places, it’s just incredible. You could spend all your life just drinking from that firehose and not making sense of it or you can sort of say is, Okay, enough, let me try and structure this. That’s really the magic of how do you balance these two or three things. Ross: Structure, that’s a wonderful word. How do you structure your engagement with information? Abhijit: I would say that there are three distinct phases. One is the phase that is divergent, where you’re looking for things that are of interest to you but your sources are multiple. There are some people sources, for example, I always find that talking to creators is very insightful, talking to people who are at the fringes, a lot of the futurists, people who write about that, some of the clubhouse rooms which talk about that. One of my favorites is one called trends and weak signals, which happens most Saturdays, India Time at 7:30 pm. It has got seven, eight people who are polymaths, who have very different interests, and what they interpret is sort of a seemingly innocuous weak signal. You suddenly begin to see it popping up in so many places, so that’s quite fascinating. Conferences, podcasts, YouTube, and of course, there’s social media, the usual books, magazines, movies, it’s just so many things; there is a people site, and then there is your curated content, which is available, so you just dip into both. Ross: You’re starting with the divergent as in going out and getting everything from all sides of a few carefully selected sources, what comes after the divergent phase? Abhijit: At that point in time it’s a sense-making phase where it is convergent, and you do it as part of your natural routine. When I consult with organizations, I get a chance to talk to the C suite but I also get a chance to talk to the employees; it gives me a view of what do the people at the top think? What is it that they are missing? Then you talk to industry experts, you read some of these reports. One of the ways to make sense in that convergent model is actually the way you structure your information. In my case, I use some of the apps which are there; I use Google Keep, I use Apple for some of the stuff, sometimes I email stuff and then build on the same topic, I use alerts, so that’s one way in which you are curating content on a particular theme. But in the sensemaking phase, you’re really looking for patterns. What is repeating? What is showing up in unconnected areas? For me, that’s the more fascinating piece. Let’s say the decentralization movement, I was attending the Adobe conference, and Malcolm Gladwell talked about from a hierarchical structure to networks, so that was one piece. Then you read about the Defi movement, then you look at the autonomous organization, crypto, then you say are these related? Is this a part of a broader trend? And which is what you then distill and say, how will this change a certain aspect? What problems will it solve? What problems will it create? That’s really the place where you use a multidisciplinary approach to make sense of things. That’s really your second phase. Ross: I’d like to dig more into that in how you do that but I know that you use sketch notes as part of your sense-making, and perhaps you can share with our listeners, what sketch notes are and how you use them? Abhijit: When I’m reading something, usually what I do is I try and distribute the stuff between the different senses given the fact that the amount of texts that we consume on any given day is phenomenal. Podcasts is one method, but I also use sketch notes liberally, which is, I illustrate that. If I read something, I try and summarize it. Let’s say if somebody who has not read that book or the article, or listened to that podcast, whatever I’m summarizing visually, what is it that would make sense to that person? What are some of the key takeaways? It’s not like a detailed note-taking of all 100 pages of whatever the person has spoken, but think about it, like, the chapter headings of a book, and you sort of do that, sometimes there’s a data piece that makes all of it come to life, and it tells people why it is so important. You do that, and I try and illustrate it. Sometimes I use visual symbols, sometimes I just draw a cartoon, sometimes I use an illustration of some of those vectors that you see. I use a combination of various things to really create a visual that people can keep in their minds. It gives you a recap of everything around that idea. I found that very useful. My readers love It. That’s something that I find very useful. It’s the way that I’ve traditionally taken notes. The only difference is now when I put it out for other people, I’ll show off a little bit; I use a little bit of color and do all that but it’s effectively the same notes, which are there. I just use a little bit of crayon or something to jazz it up but otherwise, it’s not very different. Ross: In the show notes we’ll have links to some of your wonderful sketch notes. How do you lay that out? People will think about mind maps, a lot of people have been trained on mind maps where you get a central idea and branches, and you sometimes bring in drawings. Is there any particular logical structural way that you put the ideas on the page? Abhijit: For most people, when they read a book, it’s the easiest. Books have chapters, which tell you how the thought is organized. Usually, I try and limit the sketch note to two or three of the most important ideas, sometimes you combine them, and you think of two or three or four blocks. Because more than that, it becomes really cluttered, then you’re just adding to the confusion. You just want to make it actionable. In my case, what I do is sometimes put the stuff in a LinkedIn post, which is my first starting point. When you begin to see a couple of posts which are there, that typically show up in my LinkedIn newsletter, or it will be an article that I write for a magazine or some such thing because then I’m trying out the idea for different audiences. You get the feedback from that which is precious, and then multiple articles combined together, create a book or a keynote, multiple articles can be curated into a keynote. A post becomes a newsletter, a newsletter becomes a keynote, keynote becomes a book. That’s typically the way most of the times it flows. Ross: It’s difficult to look inside your own mind but obviously, you are a master at distilling the ideas. How do you say okay, there are 10 concepts in this book, I’m going to pull them down into four or whatever is a logical thing? Is there any process that you can share about how it is that you pull back, distill, or take the essence of what are more complex ideas? Abhijit: Most of the time when you look at information, for me, sense-making is typically a multi-disciplinary process. As part of my conversations and things like that, I talk to people from different disciplines. What happens is you begin to see the world from two perspectives, that I use. One, what is it that I noticed which is going to impact multiple disciplines? Let’s see, is there a political implication? Is there an economic implication? Is there a social implication? Is there a tech implication? And then you try and see whose problems can be solved with this particular insight? Is it going to be something that is going to impact the learning and development community? So It’s something that I will put together for that. Is it going to be something for an individual when they’re making choices about their career? So I’ll write about that. Is it going to impact the CEO who’s going to think about how do we make a call about getting people back to work or not? Does it mean you change the rulebook? Does it mean you change the talent pool that you’re working with? Does it mean you change the processes that you’re working with? Do you combine all of it? Those are some of the things that I use to distill stuff. What you write about effectively comes back because you get feedback from people, people will say, that was really useful. You get all your likes and all the analytics, and you understand where the people have put more comments, what are the things people have shared a lot of. That’s something people find useful. Then that’s a feedback mechanism to you. Then you build a community of readers who are always giving you feedback saying, I found this useful, but I didn’t like what you said about ABC. You build that one-to-one connection with a number of people. Ross: That’s really interesting, a number of particularly interesting things there. One is, this immediately going to implications. If there is anything, then I’ll say, what does that mean? What does that imply? What does that lead to? Which is again very much futurist style thinking. Another is, you mentioned a number of themes there, as in learning and development or the future of work or other things, have you created different themes around specifically what is of interest to you? And when you capture information, do you use tags, folders, or other ways to be able to organize that information? Abhijit: For me, I find that creating the sketch notes is the most powerful way of finally distilling something that I’m going to weave together either for an article or something. Even when I write, in the process of writing if I get stuck, which is very often, I would then switch to drawing it out because that gives me clarity and saying, okay, what am I trying to say? What’s the problem I’m trying to solve here? When you do that visually, it forces you because you’re spending time explaining something, and then when you draw it, you realize that okay, with the drawing I’m giving the impression it’s something that impacts only women, because there are only women characters, that’s not true. Should I change it? Is it different? Is it something that is going to impact India more? Then I would create characters who are wearing an Indian dress or some such thing. Depending on who I’m writing it for, sometimes the visual actually gets me a lot more clarity about the language. Then from language to the visual, the visual to the language, it’s an iterative process. Ross: Another thing that is really interesting is the feedback from your community, and you’ve obviously got a wonderful community. This is a type of collective intelligence, which is one of the most important themes we have. I’d love to just hear your reflections on how your community which you engage with participates as it were in your thinking process. Abhijit: Most of the time the first most visible piece is the comments, the re-shares, and all that. That gives you a perspective. Most of the times people will give you a nuanced view of a problem and they’ll say you’ve written about this, it’d be useful if you wrote about this problem that I noticed in many organizations. That can really throw light on a blind spot of mine, because then you say that, okay, I never thought about that but that’s a useful piece. Then I’ll go digging into that, to respond to that. The other could be that as you’re consulting, you begin to see things that you may have written about, but very clearly, when you see it happening on the ground, you get a far deeper sense of what are people really talking about? I do a number of conversations with groups of employees, which is very useful for me because it gives me a chance to vicariously participate in some of these conversations. When they say that what you wrote about in this, our CEO would never do this. Then you say, why would they not do it? And then they would have their own hypothesis. If you get a chance to talk to the CEO, you begin to see both sides. In that sense, you are able to then say, Okay, here’s where I need to create content, should it be visual? Could it be a keynote? Should I do it as part of a workshop that I’m doing for these people? So you put all of it together. When I create keynotes, I use a lot of these sketches, because people are used to seeing a lot of content. People use stock photos; you see the same photo 15 times in a keynote. But when you do a sketch, which is usually unique, and nobody else has it, it’s also a great way that people can focus on listening to you rather than taking notes. At the end of it, I combine all the ideas into a sketch note and share it out, which they can keep. Then it becomes a great visual summary. It’s easy to recall. Then I put my email or something out there, so people will write back with more ideas and all that. As you make yourself more accessible, people will come back and give you more ideas and suggestions. Also, a lot of people help me with all the typos that show up in my writing. They will say, by the way, you’ve got a typo and then fix it, they are kind enough to do it discreetly, they’ll DM me. I have a very powerful set of people who look out for me, which is I’m grateful for. Ross: I think the essence of that is that you are asking, interested, and responsive. The reason why people say how about this is they know that you are going to listen, and you’re going to respond to that. I think there are many others who have very engaged social communities where they don’t expect any response. Whereas I think because you are actively listening to and responding to those requests is that’s when you start to tease out those interesting perspectives that you might not have had otherwise. Abhijit: If you ask people for suggestions and don’t act on them, after the second time, they stop giving you suggestions. It’s like employee surveys. You say, tell me what you don’t like about the company, and they’ll generously flood you with ideas. Then if you don’t do anything about it and ask again, tell me what you don’t like about the company, they’re not going to take you seriously. So yes, that’s very true. Ross: As you may know, I also create what I call visual frameworks, concept frameworks, and they’re a lot more complex than your sketch notes. They’re probably too complicated sometimes. But for the times for keynotes, what I’ve done is actually just take a single page and use a Prezi to move around and look at different parts of the visual to tell one story. Abhijit: Yes, maybe we should do a combination sometime. One of your ideas, turn it into a sketch note, use that and see, I’d be happy to do that for you. Ross: You are Chief Talent Officer at Wipro, your learning and development is core to your work; of course, I’m interested in how you thrive on overload but how it is that you do, or you could, or we can help the so many people? I think tech services is one great example where it’s moving pretty fast, how can organizations help their employees to be able to deal with massive degree of change in information and knowledge, and prosper in that world? Abhijit: Let me first step back and talk to you about how the thing happened when I was at Wipro as the chief learning officer. The first thing that confronted me was the scale of the organization. At that point in time, it was 150,000 employees. By the time I left, it was 175,000. Now it has about 200,000 employees. Obviously, the scale is phenomenal. It’s across different countries, more than 50-70 countries, so very diverse groups. My first thought was, if I do the traditional route of in-person classrooms and all that stuff, then that’s going to be a long time. That was one of the things that the company heavily invested in, which is great, so it gave me a chance to do a lot of that. I defined my role in three chunks. One was to say that, you need to be a person who could look around the corners and say, How’s business going to change in the next 18 months, and for that, you combine internal feedback mechanisms and external factors. Let’s say if you see a lot of consolidation happening in the banking sector, and if our internal stuff is not up to snuff on that, then you will see that banking is going to take a dip next year. If you are able to create credibility by doing some kind of a prediction for the near term, people begin to take your longer time horizons a little more seriously. You say this is what’s going to happen tomorrow and if it does, then it’s much easier for you to build credibility, to talk about what’s going to happen next month, and so on and so forth. To look at the corners, in the next 18 to 24 months, and then translate it down to the skills that will become very important, so what’s the portfolio of skills? The framework that I used to use is that I think there are three kinds of skills, what is commodified, which is you may have the skill but nobody pays you to have that, for example, if you say, I know how to use Word or PowerPoint, nobody’s going to get impressed and say, Oh my God, that’s so amazing that you know how to do that because it’s become a commodity, everybody has it. Then there is a middle layer of that pyramid, which is the marketable skills, which is things which people get certified in, which get you employed, things which you get typically learned from an educational institution, and now more and more outside of educational institutions as well. Those are the things which you can learn in the community. Things that you will pick up in a Github kind of community, which is the second chunk, it’s marketable, because you get paid for it, and you get hired for it, and you get promotions for it. The third one is the most difficult thing, which is the niche. The niche skills are the ones that people gather by talking to individuals. You can’t learn it in a structured way because it’s so much out there, it’s in the fringes so that actually comes from the kind of people that you engage with. It can happen through social media, it’s powerful, I get to talk to smart people like you, that happens only through social media. You build your connections, you are part of communities. The interesting thing is you can never enter any of these networks, communities or talk to these individuals if your first thought is what can I get out of it. The principle is given take. You always give first before you take. If you’ve earned enough credibility by saying, yes, you contribute as generously as you swipe your goodwill card, then people are kind enough to help you out when you’re looking at that. They’ll connect you to the people in their network and then say, actually, I don’t know enough, the person you should talk to is this guy. Those are probably some of your gems. They are the people that are the hardest to reach. The only way they’ll take your call is because it comes from that person. That is very difficult to learn how to do. You only do it over a span of time. You pick up and build your own network, and then that network gets you to other networks. There’s a people process that works and then there’s a technology process which is through, as you said, algorithms, and social media, and all that stuff, so both are important. Technology is more powerful for the convergent pieces but for the divergent pieces, those experts will say, this is rubbish, nothing of this is going to happen, I’ve looked at these five industries, and here is how it is going to pan out, that’s a very great way to cut out the noise. Also, they will tell you that, okay, nobody’s talking about that but this is going to be a big problem tomorrow. I think it’s this combination. Ross: I talk a lot about peer learning as in you learn from your peers, and particularly, as you say, on the edge, when you’re creating new knowledge, the books haven’t been written yet, so you’re on the edge with other people who are learning and that requires the communities. But this is about this learning to learn, and the learning to learn is also about learning to learn in communities and networks, and to build those, and as you say, this is difficult to teach in a way you’re trying to find it. If we can distill it down, what are any key points? What’s at the heart of being able to teach these potentially exceptional people that learning to learn in a world of fast change? Abhijit: I’d say that conversations are usually indicative of weak signals and trends. When you look at newsletters and articles, that’s slightly more aged, so it is, Yes, it’s probably a reasonably large trend because otherwise, it wouldn’t appear in a newsletter, because not enough people would read it, so the newsletter is typically a sign that it’s in that marketable kind of a face. When it’s in the book, it’s the knowledge that you should have, and it’s potentially in the face of getting commoditized because you said, everybody knows that. I think conversations for me are always the most precious, and they are unstructured, they’re chaotic but I find that when you talk to people who are polymaths, they can actually make great connections, and creators make great connections in their own way. Somebody will talk about a certain kind of thing happening, say, on Instagram, and have no clue what that is, and this person builds a community of people who are really fascinated by that entire thing that you are sharing, so you get a chance to see something like that. Then you see a little more structure in other places. Audio is easy because you’re getting into different conversations, which is in real-time, you’re sort of doing that. I take notes diligently when I am in the clubhouse, or in LinkedIn audio when I’m doing that. These conversations are very powerful because these can be 20-minute conversations, and that’s a gem. The trick is not to get fascinated by numbers and say, oh, I had 7000 people; no, you could have had a deep conversation with one person who’s a stranger and that’s probably precious because you’re getting to see the world from a person who you don’t even know. That is usually one way to break the algorithm that you are stuck into because you begin to see more people like yourself, that’s a bias you have to avoid. Ross: Absolutely. Rounding out, is there anything we’ve missed or advice you would give to people who are seeking to thrive in a world of excessive information? Abhijit: I think the kind of podcasts that you’re doing, you’re bringing together a lot of people who are creating their own frameworks. For example, a couple of people who I found of great value in the conversations that you had. What Harold Josh talks about, how do you find that knowledge, seek that knowledge? The process is roughly the same. There’s a divergent phase, there’s a convergent phase, and then there’s the action phase. Now that action phase can be creating the action that others can take which could be through sketch notes, articles, blog posts, etc. Books give you a chance to reflect on some of the stuff, the trends. Book reviews are great places that you look at. I just read a book review and say, oh, that’s interesting. But there are people; I always find it fascinating to talk to authors, because they are people who have looked at something in depth. I like to talk to journalists, because they’re people who scan the horizon, very often they are sniffing out the edges, and they are looking at things that have not yet taken shape. They don’t have names for it, but they know that there’s something brewing there. That’s what I find. Ross: That’s fantastic. I think conversations are basically at the heart of it but as I was saying before, it is how you go about the conversations, where the magic really happens. We will obviously have links to all of your work in the show notes but where should people go if they want to find out more about your fascinating work, Abhijit? Abhijit: You can follow me on linkedin.com/in/abhijitbhaduri. There’s my newsletter, where I curate a number of my ideas, and I have tons of sketch notes, or you can email me abhijitbhaduri@live.com. Ross: That’s fantastic. Your openness is part of what enables you to learn so much and so extensively. Thank you so much for your time. That’s been a fantastic conversation. Abhijit: Thank you so much, Ross. It’s a privilege to be on your show. Thank you. The post Abhijit Bhaduri on divergence and convergence, the power of sketchnotes, multidisciplinary sensemaking, and skill portfolios (Ep20) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Sometimes you just have to say, I don’t know why, I have no idea what that is. I think a lot of people are under a lot of pressure to know everything, understand everything, especially in our business, and you just can’t.” – Gerd Leonhard About Gerd Leonhard Gerd is a Futurist and a Humanist, a leading global Keynote Speaker (live-on-stage as well as virtually and remotely), the author of 5 books including ‘Technology & Humanity’ and ‘The Future of Content’. He is the CEO of The Futures Agency, and was named in Wired UK’s most influential people in Europe, among other accolades. Website: Gerd Leonhard LinkedIn: Gerd Leonhard Twitter: Gerd Leonhard YouTube: Gerd Leonhard Books Techology Vs Humanity The Future of Content Videos:  The Good Future What you will learn Why thriving on overload is practice (01:56) How to make the most of your time while travelling (03:30) How to make feeds work for you (05:58) Pulling together, digesting, then making sense of information (08:47) How to make ideas, sentences, and phrases and distill them into your own (10:32) Knowing your purpose is the best filter for information (12:39) Why the shiny new technology also has disadvantages (17:22) How to manage your attention for focus and refreshing (18:44) How to organise information with hashtags (23:27) How to be ruthless when filtering information by picking out good sources (28:20) Episode resources Instapaper Pocket Kindle Spotify The Guardian The Economist The New York Times The Wall Street Journal The Financial Times (FT) Pinboard Apple Notes Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View Alvin Toffler Peter Drucker Transhumanism Singularity Nature-Deficit Disorder Book Brown Noise Ray Kurzweil Google Workspace  Hey.com  Slack pCloud Dropbox Google Drive MacBook Pro Transcript Ross Dawson: Fantastic to have you on the show Gerd. Gerd Leonhard: Thanks for having me. Ross: You’ve been a futurist for how many years? Gerd: Almost 20 now, I feel old. Ross: In that role of a futurist, you have to keep across an extraordinary amount of change. All these news items that are going on, you’re scanning that, making sense of it, helping people going out in the world. What’s the most important thing? How on earth do you do it? Gerd: You have to practice over time to deal with a huge amount of information and understanding. I think the most important thing I’ve realized over the years, is it’s not so important just to understand in terms of logic, with reports and spreadsheets, but it’s important to understand between the lines. That requires a wide reading. Basically, 90% of what I do is reading, research, and talking to people about stuff, it has just become a lifestyle. Something we have to watch out for, I think as a professional, as futurist, to do a lot of different topics, is overload. What I call digital obesity, is to get fat with information. Basically, I have a certain diet, I read three or four books a month on the Kindle, I have thousands of feeds, I monitor different topics, I talk to a lot of people, I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. Yes, it’s wide, but you really have to practice not getting overloaded or being bogged down. Part of that includes what I call offline luxury. Offline is the new luxury because you go off into nature, things can settle down a little bit more. But I think it’s something you practice, it’s not something that is easy to achieve when you’re first getting started because the field is overwhelming. Ross: Yes, there’s plenty out there to overwhelm us! Do you have a daily or a weekly schedule? There are things which you do at particular times of day, checking your feeds, or having time for reading books? Gerd: Yes, I have to admit, I probably do most of my reading when I’m traveling because the traveling is conducive to not sitting down with your designing keynote slides or writing something besides but to just browse, so most of my work on reading is done on the mobile, and on the iPad. I use a bunch of amazing tools that are out there now, including, of course, Instapaper, which is my favorite app. Instapaper saves stuff to offline, so I do that. I have at least 300,000 articles on there. I use Pocket, which is also an offline saver, and the Kindle for reading, for underlining, and all these kinds of things. I use a lot of different tools for that to be able to read when I’m waiting for the taxi or sitting at the lounge, that’s where I do most of my reading. My routine during the week is usually about 50% research, and then 50% production for my keynotes, speeches, and preparation. It’s very much driven by the assignments I get. For example, now I’m working on a major talk about the metaverse and I’ve been doing a lot of talking about the metaverse. I have a gig coming up in Greece, for a very big gaming community, so I’m preparing for being able to work on new topics. Just like you, working on new topics is basically mandatory, because this is how you keep interested, and this is also how you feed your own information and your own thinking. Ross: Absolutely. People are not interested in what was happening yesterday. They want to know what’s happening today and tomorrow. Gerd: It’s almost a mix. I’ve been quite good in the past few years to always be a little bit early, sometimes way too early. I started an internet company in the late 90s that was doing what Spotify is now. That was, of course, way too early and I lost lots of money doing that. Now I’m trying to figure out what’s going to happen in the next five years. What are the interesting topics? I’m looking at things like the metaverse, I’m looking at things like cryptocurrencies, and all that kind of stuff. That has been a big shift in my work, away from the business-only topics to the social, political, cultural topics about society, basically, because those are the coming burning issues now. Ross: Absolutely. In terms of your feeds, is that a key part of your scanning? How do you build your thousands of feeds and how do you use those? Gerd: I subscribe to my favourite publications like The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the FT, like most people do, and I read them pretty religiously. Whenever I can I read the paper has gone out of style, especially now on airplanes or lounges, no more papers, they probably won’t be coming back, but I used to like the browsing effect for breakfast. I’m 60 years old so I like paper. But anyway, I have digital subscriptions, and I bookmark all of that stuff. I also use Pinboard for saving my stuff. Then I use Apple notes which is amazing now, great updates on that one. I have a directory of about 350,000 notes. If I’m looking to say something about the future of oil, I can always browse what I have already read. It’s funny now, I’ve been publishing part of my findings, kind of memes and ideas on this thing GerdFeed, which is a joke, but it’s gerdfeed.com. Everything that I highlight on the newspaper shows up on Gerdfeeds; there are something around 200,000. Everybody can see what I’ve been looking at, which has been very helpful for my own research, because at GerdFeed, I can just go and look, and that’s been really good. I think the main thing is about getting organized so you remember stuff. You create a mental help scenario so you can actually recover stuff again because there’s just so much happening. Ross: Do you tag any of the articles, notes, or draw links between them? Or do you just use text search? Gerd: To find the sources, of course, I’ve been doing it for a long time so I read the obvious sources like WIRED Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and 95% is in English, because my work even though I’m German, it’s all in English. I don’t read much German stuff I have to admit. I tag all of those things, and I have feeds coming in. I use the sources like Bloomberg, and I subscribe to like a dozen great newsletters, like Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View, and I have my own newsletter so there’s a lot of information going around. Then I follow at least 100 people, including yourself who are always posting interesting stuff on Twitter and that is a great source. This is why I love Twitter. If I want to look for the future of distributed organizations, I can definitely find good stuff on Twitter. I have all of those pretty well-organized lists and all that kind of stuff. That’s been a godsend, really. Ross: A lot of this is about sense-making, the synthesis, pulling it all together into an original or interesting view. Is there any particular way that you digest, pull together the links, make sense, or create frameworks? What’s your process? Gerd: I kind of look at this like cooking. When you cook something really interesting, it’s not that you need 50 ingredients, you don’t. It’s just making sense out of the ones that you have, or leaving out stuff, not make it too complicated, and this is how I look at my keynotes. I want to cook the perfect meal, I don’t want to cook 17 courses of 50,000 calories, that’s I look at it. Most of it is really a creative process where some stuff comes up and other stuff doesn’t. It’s like when I was a musician; it’s a little bit like, not everything that you know, that you’ve done can pop up in one solo that you do on a song. It just comes out like a blend, like a cocktail blend, throw it all in there, and out comes the drink. Imagine if you have a drink with 50 different things in it, it’s just not going to work, so that’s how I look at it. It’s really a creative process of leaving out stuff. Usually, when I prepare for a keynote, for example, I may have 150 slides that I’ve looked at. Then it’s about whittling it down, making sense, and creating a storyline. But that’s always changing. When you write a book, it’s a little bit like this and this is why book writing is so painful because you try to constantly improve and make more sense, and then you’re always changing things and you never get finished. This is something to be aware of that eventually you have to be finished. Ross: You mentioned before a couple of interesting phrases, and I think that’s something which helps people understand, coming up with these intriguing phrases that distill ideas. Is that just come up with you as you’re wandering along the street or do you have a process to be able to come up with these interesting, provocative phrases? Gerd: When I read stuff, and I work on things, I usually come across a phrase from others that I like, and then I just turn that around into my own. Basically, it’s the bottom line so that I know when I’m on stage, for example, speaking, and I deliver certain bottom lines, I can see that people react to this. For example, one of the memes that I use a lot is that I say you will not find happiness on the screen or in the cloud. I took this from Alvin Toffler in some other way that he said that; like Peter Drucker once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Now I say, culture eats technology for breakfast. I turn those things around into something that fits me, and I’ve got hundreds of them. I wish I could remember all of them. I always come up with new ones that are basically bottom lines. For most people that if you speak to people about the future, you can be happy in the end, if they remember two or three penny drop moments. That is what you have to deliver in those short statements. Ross: Yes, so the distillation into something which resonates? Gerd: As you know, as a futurist, sometimes we have to simplify; How do you explain artificial intelligence to an audience of, let’s say, newspaper publishers? Some of them are getting more used to it now but I’m not a scientist so I don’t need to explain that all in-depth, it would take me three days to do that. I have very short descriptions for all that stuff, like crypto and metaverse. I try to boil it down to something that is manageable, and I think it’s a skill you need to practice. It’s just like cooking again, it’s something you practice and then, in the end, the taste is awful, or it’s great, you don’t know. Ross: In that process, one of the key things I say to people is you need to know what your purpose is, what information is useful and relevant to you. As a futurist, that’s not very helpful, because everything is relevant and interesting because it all ties into the big picture. Part of it, of course, is driven by as you say, if you have any client engagements, that defines what it is you’re seeking, but when you’re scanning, do you have any guiding reference point around what it is that does intrigue you, which you do want to dig into more? Gerd: That depends very much on the emphasis topics. For me, over the years, it’s moved more from business and technology towards culture and humanity. That humanity future topic, that’s my key topic; technology and humanity. Now I have a new topic I started last year when I made the film called the Good Future. You can find this at thegoodfuturefilm.com. The Good Future topic is basically a topic saying, Okay, what does a good future look like? How could we agree on what is good? Which we actually do for the most part. How would we get there? Because of that topic, and the technology-humanity topic, I have a filter mostly for those things. I’m interested to find out how does technology increase happiness or not? How can we solve global problems like inequality, education, health care, and so on, by working together for that good future? It’s the larger topics that I’m interested in; I’m not that interested in figuring out how to use robotic process automation to make more money, lots of people can tell you about that. I’m trying to focus on the important topics, the important topics for humans; humanity is not necessarily about business. There are a lot of those, and I always touch on those, but it’s really about the larger story, what do we want to be? That’s why I speak about transhumanism and singularity, one of my favorite topics as to why I think that’s crap. I focus on the things that are important to me and that make a difference. That’s really what I seek to do. Ross: Creating a good future is a very good frame on how you make sense of the world. In your keynotes, you’re very visual in the slide which you use, but more generally, do you use any visual framework to try to either organize or make sense for yourself or to help communicate to others the essence of ideas to organize or connect your thinking? Gerd: I have a team that does that for me, and I tell them what I want which sometimes is hard to understand. For example, we were working on this topic called the nature deficit disorder, there’s a book with that title, which deals with the fact that we are disconnected from nature now, because so many times we are looking at screens, and we’re not getting out with COVID, we’re staying in the home, so there’s a deficit of connecting with nature, which is detrimental to health and wellbeing. I think in Sydney, you may have better cards for that, to connect to nature, because it’s so easy. But so many people in cities are disconnected from nature. When we have this kind of theme, then basically my team and me, I have an editor and I have a researcher, then we get together, we think about how that could look like, the mean, as we call it. My editor’s producing all of the videos and the designs, and sometimes we hire people to make a cartoon, but we have a huge library of at least 1000 items that express the things that I talk about. That library is organized in a tagged way so I can easily drag and drop. I have about 4800 slides with different versions of themes, background videos, and all. It’s a huge library of things that we create, or we license from iStock photo, but generally, I don’t use a lot of templates, because they’re just not good enough for what I want to say. Ross: Are these metaphors? Are these the essence of visual representation of the idea? Gerd: Basically, a lot of times when you look at other things that you see, like YouTube videos, or tweets and stuff, there’s an idea in there that sticks. For example, when I started talking about the metaverse, I was looking at all the discussions about what’s happening there, and why that’s good or not. I came up with the concept of the meta perverse, which is basically saying that yes, it’s interesting, but it could be a perverse use of technology for humans. Imagine you lived in virtual reality, you actually lived there, this is what Zuckerberg wants us to do, to actually live there, that’s perversion in my view, perversion of technology and perversion of humanity, because it leaves out all the good stuff that we like. I always say one hug is worth more than 100 Zoom calls. That’s why I came up with a motif. Then from there, we create artwork that reflects the meta perverse. Ross: That’s a lovely phrase. Gerd: I also have a GerdaVerse. I have my own metaverse called the Gerdaverse. That’s a joke. But basically, it’s the virtual Gerd. You can see the difference. It’s just like a Roblox version of the future which can’t be good, no matter how you look at it. Ross: In terms of managing your attention, discipline may or may not be the right word, how do you structure your attention so that you both have the focus to require digging into things, but also, as you said before, the time to go out into nature and refresh yourself? How do you manage your attention? Gerd: Well, I have a wife, she does that for me. This is a natural process as to how much you can take. The certain amount of work that you do that is about thinking, that’s maxing out at four, five, or six hours a day for heavy lifting. Then you’re like, oh, my God, my head is exploding. Then you can do other things like snip stuff from images, look for interesting videos, or do emails. Basically, the focus is really important to get stuff done, to leave out other things. For example, when I’m working on a mission, and I have to deliver a speech tomorrow, then I do nothing else; of course, you have to, it’s like you have a gig tomorrow, you got to focus on exactly that and everything else has to wait. I have my team that does other things for me while I’m doing the stuff that I pay attention to, but getting organized and not multitasking, that’s a really hard temptation. Multitasking doesn’t work for me, it works for some people, but for most, it doesn’t. It removes your attention and frays the mind so it’s much better to not attempt multitasking, like doing emails, PowerPoint, and the phone call at the same time. That also makes it simple. I have a very big computer set up at home. We’re organized. I have three monitors, sometimes four, where I put stuff, and that’s just waiting there until I get to the stuff that’s there. I don’t do a lot of to-do lists, because I find it increases the pressure. It’s a natural process. I realize the next step is this and this and this, I don’t do a lot of over-organization, or task lists, or pin things, or notifications, I switch off all the notifications, that kind of stuff just really distracts people. I think being distracted and trying to multitask are things that definitely don’t work for us. Ross: If you do have a deep-dive focus on either developing an idea or working on somebody, do you carve out specific time for that? Gerd: Yes. I have certain times when I do that, usually in the early morning, where I sit down, say, Okay, now I’m going to sit down and figure this out. I take an hour or two before I do anything else. Sometimes like this, and sometimes it just happens when I’m on the plane somewhere. I have like a brain fart. Being on the airplane is very good for this, because of the kind of solitude that you have there. The hissing of the engine helps the mind; at least it does it with mine. I do a lot of work like that on the airplane, just pen, and paper, saying, Okay, now I’m going to figure out what exactly I’m trying to say here. Ross: Interestingly, Amy Webb says she likes brown noise as a background for her focus times. Gerd: Yes, everybody thinks differently. I think very much in pictures and because I’m a musician, also in sound, so videos and that sort of thing is very important. I’m going to use more music in my work, it’s always a problem to use music because of the damn copyright bullshit, that you’re encountering on gigs, and on YouTube, which is such a pain in the butt. You can license as much as you want, but you’re always going to get a notice that you haven’t licensed something. It’s incredible; the regime that has taken over there. I have people sending me messages saying that I used the picture that was through an RSS feed from some magazine that I should have paid $200 for, to display; I’m like, come on now. There’s a lot of that sort of thing going on. Using those resources, you have to be quite diligent, which I’ve done over the years. But because I’m a musician, I like videos, I like images, I like music, I like audio so I use audio examples in my speeches, and I download at least 30-40 videos per day, to keep them around for later. Ross: In terms of all this content you’ve got, we talked earlier about the tagging and other things, do you have any organizational systems, just the internal search, or tags, or transcriptions, or other things which help you sort through the massive amount of content you have? Gerd: It gets more complicated when you have more materials. But I use a lot of hashtags now. I use Google, I use Apple notes. For example, I put a hashtag #endofoil, or so and then I look for the hashtag, and all the stuff I’ve found comes up there. I do other things, like when you browse for files, sometimes you don’t know what the file was called, or the hashtag, you just remember the picture, so I use Google Photos to upload all of my stuff. I’ve got 200,000 things there, and that has been pretty good. When I’m looking for something I just go through the photo wall, and say, ah, that’s what I was looking for. Sometimes visual, sometimes it’s text. But imagine if you’re looking for an interesting theme, for example, on globalization, then you found something really interesting six months ago, but you didn’t tag it as globalization but as politics or something, so how do you find that? That’s why the visual stuff is good. Using a visual catalog, I have a pin wall that I use here at home, a huge monitor with all my latest stuff that sits there so I can always remember that I have new things that I need to use. But in the end, it’s your brain. If your brain isn’t firing, then you won’t find anything. This is really important to maintain good health so that you can find stuff. That’s another one of those regimes that’s really important. I use a cross-trainer and I take certain supplements, not like Ray Kurzweil by any means. Then again, I don’t want to live forever. so leave that. Ross: You’re using a lot of interesting software tools. Is there anything else in terms of software tools for thriving on overload that you think are worth mentioning? Gerd: There’s a ton of really amazing stuff out there. For example, just using Gmail professional, the business solution from Gmail has saved the day, because there’s a snooze button. I love the snooze button. I get an average of 800 emails per day. Many of them are urgent, and other ones are not. Then basically, if they’re not so urgent, I snooze them, pop up on Saturday, that’s been a lifesaver. I have a flagging system I use on the mail, where different flags mean different things with different tags. When I look at the wall of mails, I can always see the tags, the topics, and the people. That’s been really good. Notification systems are only half on. I use a second email app called hey.com, which is absolutely amazing. That’s a new service from the Bay Area. What they do is they allow you to notify individual messages. If I have a really high-priority customer that is going crazy with prep time for the gig, I see their mail pop up on my iPhone every time they mail, but it’s only them, not everybody else. Of course, we use Slack for changing information. Everything that we do is in the cloud, and free clouds, actually, pCloud here in Switzerland, and Dropbox, and Google Drive. If I want to search for things, I can also search on the cloud. Sometimes I’m better off finding stuff there because it’s tagged differently, or the logic is different. There’s a lot of tech involved like using an iPad, iPhone, three computers. After a while, you get used to it, and then I buy the most powerful MacBook I can find because I find it when I work on stuff, I don’t want the computer to churn and look for stuff. Ross: When you have 200 tabs open? Gerd: Yes, I don’t want the computer to churn. The new MacBook with the M1, 16 inches is just amazing. It’s the first computer that can keep up with my own mental speed in terms of how quickly I want to find things. I’m quite happy about that. Ross: Yes, you would want the computers to keep pace. Sometimes, they crash with a lot of stuff. Gerd: Well, it’s just that the quality of technology that you use really is a survival tool especially when you’re in a hurry, or you’re under a deadline or so, you have to have great tools to find things, and to retrieve, and to use. Just using the image, we’ve got like 14 terabytes of stuff. There’s just no way that you can do all that work with a computer that just doesn’t index. It’s so important. Ross: Absolutely. Rounding out, what would be your advice to someone who is saying, Oh, this is a bit too much. How can I get on top of this to create value from all of the information that’s out there? What are some of your recommendations? Gerd: Yes, not everything can be equally important so you have to prioritize your topics, prioritize your sources, and be ruthless in kicking out useless stuff, like Google Alerts. You’re getting a Google alert with 47 things, not good. Pick the good stuff, the good newsletters, the good publications, the good writers, make lists of those, don’t spend too much time looking at things that didn’t happen. For real hardcore information and learning, I think it’s still all about books, not physical books, I do that too but physical books are just so impractical when you’re constantly doing something else, so digital books, I have a queue of about 700 books, and I’ve tried to read four, five, six, sometimes 10 a month. Bookmark all of that stuff. Basically, it’s about bookmarking, organizing, prioritization, focus on what actually needs to be accomplished now. Then it’s really also about digestion time, your contemplation time, so try to take a walk every day for an hour, so you can literally while you’re walking, you’re digesting. That’s really important to clean up. You can’t go 14 hours a day, but looking at high-quality information, so recognizing your limitations. It’s kind of obvious stuff. But in the end, I think one thing that really sets back people is to be afraid of forgetting things or be afraid of not knowing things. Yes, we forget things and sometimes we don’t know things, this is just the way it is. We shouldn’t be anxious about like I have to remember all of that stuff, or I have to know everything. Nobody knows everything, except for maybe Einstein. But it’s like, okay, that’s just the way it is, sometimes you just have to say, I don’t know why, I have no idea what that is, so removing the anxious part. I think a lot of people are under a lot of pressure to know everything, understand everything, especially in our business, and you just can’t. If you do it for 20 years, of course, you have advantages. It’s like money in the bank. When you’re starting out, basically it’s like money in the bank, it’s a compound rate, so it doesn’t make much of a difference how much time you spent in two years, but in 10 years, the curve goes up, and in 20 years, you’re all the way up there. This is why people who’ve been doing futurism for some time usually have all that background knowledge, which is hard to get when you’re 25; if you’ve been doing this for five years. Ross: Absolutely. That’s fantastic. So good. Of the many resources, you have out there, what’s the best place for people to find you? Gerd: I think my website futuristgerd.com, Gerd, like gastrointestinal reflux disease, same thing, but shortened, so futuristgerd.com; thegoodfuturefilm.com, that will be something you will want to look at, and of course, my YouTube channel, which is going crazy right now, because we’re doing this new show, GerdTube; that’s a joke, it really just points to YouTube, so Gerd Leonard on youtube.com. If you want to read what I read, it’s gerdfeed.com, that’s where you can find all of this stuff. Basically, in real-time, as I’m reading it. It’s a Tumbler page, but it’s huge. My new show GERD talks, which are about timely topics, every two weeks. Tonight we have another one on why Facebook should die. You know it’s a short topic, few things to say about that. Ross: Certainly of the moment. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Gerd. That’s been really fantastic conversation. Gerd: Great, thank you, live long and prosper. The post Gerd Leonhard on understanding between the lines, his favorite apps and tools, sharing bookmarks and tags, keynote storylines, and using visual catalogs (Ep19) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“There will never not be a demand for people who know how to communicate. It’s about not just finding the information, but finding out how to share it effectively.” – Madeline Ashby About Madeline Ashby Madeline Ashby is a highly successful science fiction writer and an in-demand freelance consulting futurist specializing in scenario development and science fiction prototypes. Her novels include vN: The First Machine Dynasty and Company Town, which I recently very much enjoyed reading. Her work has appeared in BoingBoing, Slate, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Website: Madeline Ashby LinkedIn: Madeline Ashby Twitter: Madeline Ashby What you will learn Why you should see what’s happening on the fringes (01:41) How to fit horizon scanning into your work (05:21) What is the process of taking ideas to form a vision of what might come to pass (08:20) What is the murder wall style of sharing information  (09:37) Why representing information to yourself should be primarily useful to you (12:49) Why finding connections in information is a skill to be trained and nurtured (16:59) Why there will always be a demand for people who know how to communicate (17:59) How this sensemaking can be applied successfully to fiction writing (19:12) Take notes because we cannot rely on our memory (25:30) Episode resources Miro Jamboard Transcript Ross Dawson: Madeline, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Madeline Ashby: Thank you for having me. Ross: You’re not only a futurist and able to make sense of what’s going on but you also envisage very clearly what’s happening in the future. I would just love to get some sense of how it is you see what’s going on in the world and make sense of it. Where do you start? What are your daily practices? Madeline: There’s far too much doomscrolling, for one. There’s a lot of media consumption from other countries. I work really hard to watch stuff from other places, hear things in other languages, see what’s funny somewhere else, and see what people are consuming elsewhere. One of the things that I always say, especially to students is that one of the good things to do is to see what’s happening at the fringes. Whatever struggle is happening at the fringes will often commonly make its way to the mainstream eventually, and the speed at which that happens has gotten a lot faster. That rate of change has gotten a lot faster, mostly thanks to mass communication technology, that you can know, you can observe what is happening to a very niche group very far away from your own world, and see immediately how it might apply to you or how it might mirror conditions on the ground where you are. That speed has changed, being able to observe that rate of change is a little bit different now. Ross: How do you determine what is the fringe, or from the entire fringe what it is that’s worth paying attention to? Madeline: I always consider you’re a fringe if people are trying to determine or legislate your existence. If you are the subject of law, if you are the subject of having your identity reframed by law, that’s a really good indicator. Ross: The literal societal fringe. Madeline: Yes, then that’s a really good indicator, then that’s a societal fringe issue. We could say that that’s true of a financial fringe or an economic fringe as well. Because of the discourse around what is considered poverty and what is considered wealth, remember that rash of trends pieces about like, are these people middle class or aren’t they? Those things are also determined, and they are also the subject of argument and the subject of legislation. You can move people to and from that fringe in the space of a word. I always see who is the subject of that maneuvering. Ross: So is part of it identifying explicitly these are the fringes that I will look at? Madeline: There are certainly the fringes that I personally am interested in, project by project that’ll change; project by project, I look at different crowds, different dynamics, and different demographics. I look for commonalities between a bunch of different groups some of the time. I’m working on something right now, where there are people being represented from a bunch of different groups, but they have certain common experiences, that the storytelling exercise that I’m involved in, can speak to, or hopefully that it can speak to it. That’s one of the goals of the project. It’s not that I’m focused so much on these tiny little micro-niches, I am concerned with how they are similar or different from each other but I also try to look for common threads of humanity too. Ross: You are the author of many science fiction books and also co-author of the book “How to Future” by Scott Smith, which looks at futurist methodologies. One of the methodologies is “horizon scanning”. How does horizon scanning fit into your daily practice? Is this something you would engage with in client project? What does that look like in terms of the actual scanning? Madeline: There’s daily scanning, I like to be informed, I like to read news, I like to know what’s going on, I like to know what people far cooler than me are doing, I like to know what people different from me are doing. I am an only child and an only child to my core so I have always brought the outside in for myself; that’s a way that I was pre-adapted to the work, I guess. It’s a way that I was habituated to the work. I’m always on the lookout, and I’m always aware of things. When I’m working with a client then there’s a research process and digging into a specific language, or into specific issues, or into specific demographics or something like that, to really dig into what it is that they are interested in, and also looking at how trends happening elsewhere might influence what it is that they’re doing at the time, for example, when will this wave make it over here, like looking at weather patterns or something like that. There’s a research-based, there’s a project-based research phase that happens at the beginning of most projects. Daily, there’s too much practice actually. My problem is that I get too wrapped up in continuing to look. What I wish I did more of was take better notes of what it is that I do see, and if anyone is looking for ways to learn from my experience, what I would say is that you should find a space, whether it’s a spreadsheet, a daily journal, a note-taking app, Miro board, Jamboard, or whatever it is, even just a giant murder wall in your office, a way to document and categorize the signals that you’re seeing. Because what I find happens, and one of the things that I would like to be better at, what I find happens is that it’s really easy to continue considering these signals as individual rather than sorting them into trends if you don’t have a place to put them. We talk a lot in the book about how do you set boundaries around your time? How do you set a boundary around this? How do you stop? And that’s one of the ways that you do stop, that’s one of the ways to pull yourself away is to put it somewhere even if it’s something as simple as a list of bookmarks, or something. Ross: This goes to two of the key phrases that in that book are sensing and sensemaking. It’s obviously to conceive of the future or how that might come to pass, it’s far more than just looking at information, it’s making sense of that. What is that process of taking all of those ideas to make sense of them to form some vision of how things could come to pass? Madeline: Everybody does it a little bit differently because what you’re really asking is, how do humans interpret information? How do humans gather and interpret information? And that is something that philosophers, neurologists, and educators have been working for thousands of years, literally, to determine, like, how do we gather information, and how do we sort it, and how do we make sense of it? On the one hand, we’re talking about a comparatively new discipline within future’s or comparatively over the past 100 years’ language but on the other hand, we’re talking about something that has bedeviled humanity for a very long time. I like to remind people of that, that you are doing this, you are doing it all the time, what you’re now doing is labeling that practice. I do think that how we interpret information, how we take on cognitive load, how we take on information like that is highly individual; different teams will have different mechanisms for doing it so that you can share that information in an effective way. Some people are responsive to the big list, and other people want a big murder wall; I’m a big murder wall person. Ross: Describe that. Madeline: I am the kind of person who will in fact, either in my own mind, or visually, I will like to sort things. I’ll like to sort signals that fit together, I like color-coding, I like finding a way to sort that information in a way that I can share with other people. Because if you can share it with other people, then you’re already beginning that sense-making process. You’re categorizing things as ingredients. Like for me, those just become ingredients for whatever the final project outcome is going to be. You can think about it almost sonically like, okay, which instruments are we playing here? And in what key? And how do we orchestrate those together? What is the total sound that is being produced? I tend to think of it as a way to listen carefully, or a way to sort information such that you can share with other people, or whether it’s your team or client or somebody else, the information that you think is the most salient to the question that is being posed. Ross: Is this using Post-it notes on the wall? Madeline: It’s much tougher to do that now. But whether it’s using Post-it notes on the wall, or doing that digitally, or doing just a spreadsheet or something like that, or just running an ongoing conversation on certain topics, whether that’s on a server, or Slack channels, or what have you. These are ongoing conversations, in a lot of ways. When you are noticing something in a specific field, you’ll keep your eye out for it for a long time. It’s useful to flag that and say, oh, okay, this is part of the ongoing trend here, and set it in a place where you can look at the totality of the story. You’re also charting a story. I’m a narrative-based thinker. Before I did futurist work, I was trained as a historian. That’s actually something that Scott and I have in common is that we were trained to just think historically, and think in context. When I think about scanning, sorting, and sensemaking, I tend to think of it in that way, I think of it almost more as a historian than any other discipline. It’s just that being trained that way informs how I think of things now, because all of this, all of these signals, all of these trends, all of these drivers came out of a context. They came from somewhere; they didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s finding out what that context is, that to me is really important. Ross: There’s a context, and there’s a chronology. Is there some way that you represent that to yourself mentally or using other visual tools? Madeline: I’m terrible at drawing. I have a design degree and can’t draw a straight line. I’m bad at representing those things visually. I will tend to think of them in my own head, I will tend to color-code them or I will think of them in terms of gradations, or gradients of color, I’ll tend to think of them in different kinds of light, I will attach different images to them mentally in terms of whether or not they can be represented in a certain way. That’s no different to assigning them a mood board in your head or giving yourself a visual collage, to talk about the trend. That’s the challenge that you have any time you depict these things in a slide deck, for example, so it’s not too different from that. But it is a challenge. How do you assign something in your head do, how do you assign something and your pattern of thinking is, again, a really interesting issue to explore within the field. How do we think of these things, how do we categorize this, I feel as though it would make a really great Master’s project for somebody, is to ask all the futurists how they do this. Ross: Yes, absolutely. But it’s also saying how you do it and presumably they do it somewhat usefully, somewhat well, because that’s their profession. Madeline: Yes, I feel as though it’s probably different in terms of whether you’re doing this by yourself, or whether you’re doing this with a team, whether or not you’re with that team in person, whether or not you are sharing a shared document, there are certain limitations of software and limitations of the interface. The technology doesn’t yet exist for me to draw, for me to pull the red thread in someone else’s mind, for me to show how I think that two things are connected. That’s actually one of the more interesting challenges within the discipline itself, is when you’re sorting through signals, and you pull something across, and you say, Oh, this is related to that, you’ll know right away if something is clicking, if a project is clicking, or if you have chemistry with the people that you’re working with, on whether or not they can see it, whether or not they also see it. You’ve probably had that moment I know, I’ve had that moment. You know that you’re not communicating clearly when someone has to ask you. It’s not like it’s their fault, or whatever, it’s if I’m not communicating clearly, they won’t necessarily see that. If they aren’t used to the connections that can be made here or the way that I draw them, then they might not see how two wildly disparate things are connected. In pedagogy, we call that associative framing. It’s a thing that I’ve noticed is a real challenge for some people, is, can we use this frame to think of something else? Are these two wildly different stories similar? And how? And do they share a commonality? And what does that commonality say about the world? Or about external pressures? As you’re talking about how do we make sense of this, learning how to frame things in a way that, again, emphasizes their commonality or sees a possible commonality is really important. Ross: Is that something which comes more or less naturally to people, or something that we can nurture? Madeline: I think it is something to be nurtured. I think it can come more naturally but it depends on the discipline. I think it’s a thing that the humanities frankly does better than other disciplines. I think that it’s a thing that I was trained to do, as a historian, as a novelist, as a person who was broadly read; looking for those commonalities, looking for those analogs was the thing that I was trained how to do. It’s the thing that carried over into the work that I do now. But it’s not a thing that other disciplines, at least in my experience, that those are emphasized in the same way, that that associative framing is nurtured. Ross: Yes, that is absolutely vital. Trying to make your own thoughts explicit to the purpose of communicating them helps elucidate them in your own mind in any case. Madeline: There’s a story I’d like to tell about, I went to a Jesuit university in Seattle, and I was part of the honors program there. The honors program there was very small. We did Heraclitus to Hitler in two years, literature, philosophy, and history. We’re in this tiny cohort, and it was like mini-grad school, except we’re undergrads. The thing that we were told at the beginning of the program was, we don’t know what you guys are going to do. Some of you will be PhDs, some of you will leave academia entirely, some of you are going to go on to do wildly different things but what you will know how to do by the end of your career here is how to communicate, and there will never not be a demand for people who know how to communicate. I tell people that story a lot that it’s about not just finding the information, but finding out how to share it effectively. Ross: Part of that is the structure, whether that’s the flow or one of the relationship is what the structure is. That goes to the associations, or the narrative, or the continuity, or what it is that links things. Madeline: Yes, the mental model, the shared mind palace, the way of seeing. Ross: Which takes us to your science fiction. Because that’s precisely what you’re doing; you’re building a vision, a world that people can enter and experience. One of the things is distinct about science fiction from fiction is you are creating a world that people have never experienced before. What is that process? Madeline: I get asked a lot about, what is the difference between doing foresight scenario development, narrative scenario development, and that type of world-building, and pure science fiction world-building, or pure commercial fiction world-building, and one is that in commercial fiction, you can actually take up the trends that interest you without regard to a project brief. You’re writing something for yourself, you’re writing something about purely what you’re interested in, and you can fudge the details a little bit more. Whereas within the scope of a project brief, that’s often very limited. We need the future of X in year Y in demographic Z whereas there’s a lot more room, a lot more space when you’re writing something that’s purely for yourself. But what they have in common is that you need to cultivate a curatorial sensibility, you have to know, in the same way that a filmmaker knows, or a photographer knows, or a curator knows, you have to know how big the frame is, and what fits inside of it, and what you want those focal points to be. Is this a story about a certain technology? Is this a story about a certain trend? And in fact, what is this story about? And what are you trying to say? What are these people going to walk away with when they walk away from this story? And those considerations are the same. Because you only have so many words, and you only have so much time, and you only have much attentional bandwidth from the people who are eventually going to read this. You can’t throw in everything but the kitchen sink. To make your point or to or to show them a world, you have to decide where the camera is going to go and what it’s going to focus on, and those are similar considerations regardless of who you’re writing to, it’s just that one can be very tightly focused and another gives you a bigger broader aspect ratio. Ross: In either case, you are creating a world of content, which must be internally consistent. As you said, you can only show so much of that in so many words, but you are building a world. Madeline: Yes. Ross: Of course if it is based in the future, it’s a projection forward from today; taking various trends or developments, and the way those interact. What is that process of creating the world and making it consistent? Madeline: Having prior experience in history, I tend to look at historical examples. When did something similar like this happen in the past? What happened then? How has this been experienced by others before? And not so that I can exactly replicate that event or exactly replicate that experience, but so that I can get an understanding of how do humans behave under these pressures? What have we seen before? How have we seen people behave under similar pressures? People are still doing this now; with regard to the current pandemic, they’ve looked back at 1918. In 100 years, other humans will look back at what happened in 2020, and then probably back into 1918. I think that it always pays off to look back and say, oh, okay, how do humans react in this scenario? Because humans are the ones who’ve built the world. They’re the ones who make choices about their world, it doesn’t just happen. Those things don’t spring up out of nowhere. The world is this way, because in many ways, people chose it to be this way, or because someone profited from it being this way. There are fundamental drives, in our species that shape our reality. When I’m building something, or imagining how something might turn out, I tend to look at prior examples and think about how that might have changed, or what might cause it to change, or what would have to change in a population, or what would have to change in a group for that to be different. Ross: So in a way, all sensemaking comes from an understanding of humanity? Madeline: I think so. There are obvious things like, what does a rising temperature do to a population of animals? What does a heat dome do to all the shellfish in British Columbia? It kills them; we know that. Humans were involved in that process, undoubtedly, but it’s a one-to-one relationship, we know that that heat is going to kill those animals. There are certain scientific truths and certain laws of physical reality that you take into account. Certainly, very far future hard SF is really good at that, extrapolating what human life would be under certain physical conditions, way far off of our planet. How do we find a way to continue reproducing in space? How do we find a way to live in space without our skeleton stretching out? How do we find a way to live in space without our fingernails falling off? And half of the men developing astigmatism over time? There are certain physical truths that occur. There are certain realities that you have to acknowledge and figure out but that’s the fun part. That’s not the homework, that’s the fun part. That’s the right bent, you have to be bent in the right direction to enjoy that; getting to think creatively about that is one of the pleasures and privileges of both of my jobs. Ross: Absolutely. To round out, do you have any final words of advice for listeners on how to thrive on overload? How to make sense of the wonderful world of information that we live in today? Madeline: Take notes. It’s funny because I’m the third wheel in an MBA course right now, I have two brilliant real instructors, Zan Chandler and Susan LK Gorbet. They are amazing instructors, and I’m just the peanut gallery. But one of the things that we talked about with our students recently was that you won’t remember, you think that you’ll remember, you think that you’re going to remember, but you won’t. When you see these signals, when you see these trends pieces, when you see these stories that trouble you or delight you or a thing that gives you that sense of oh, wait, this is different, this is new, or oh, this is exciting, or I can’t wait to see how this one goes wrong, find a way to document it, find a way to add it to the total corpus of knowledge, find a way to do that, so that you can reach back and look more deeply into the things that fascinated you. Take those notes. Find a place to put those fleeting thoughts. When we talk about doomscrolling, when we talk about social media, when we talk about information overload, one of the reasons that we get attached to stories and don’t know what to do with that attachment, when we get attached to information or attached to images and we find them preying on us later, or we find huge amounts of cognitive load attached to them later, it’s because you haven’t put them somewhere. I’m not saying compartmentalize, that’s not my advice here. My advice is to create boundaries for yourself and find a place to put all of your imaginings, a place to put those suppositions, a place to put those questions, find a place to put your questions. Not so that you can forget them but so that you can remember them later. Document the history of them for yourself. Find a place that’s just for you to put those things. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you much for your time and your insight, Madeline. I really appreciate it. Madeline: Thank you. The post Madeline Ashby on watching the fringes, finding common threads, sensing and sensemaking, and using murder walls (Ep18) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I have all of these systems for blocking social media when I’m working, so it’s not a distraction. Everything that I do is about trying to keep information at bay, and spend less time on the internet.” – Christopher Mims About Christopher Mims Christopher Mims is a technology columnist at Wall Street Journal. Before joining the Journal in 2014 he worked as a science and technology journalist and editor for a variety of august publications including Quartz, Technology Review, Wired, and Scientific American. He is the author of Arriving Today, which unveils the fascinating story of how products arrive at to our doors through the global supply chain. Column on The Wall Street Journal: Christopher Mims Twitter: Christopher Mims LinkedIn: Christopher Mims Medium: Christopher Mims What you will learn Why finding new and useful information is like language immersion (01:32) How Google News can be better than monitoring social media (05:07) How to vet or find deeper  information (09:18) How to take notes in a simple and efficient way  (10:53) What are the benefits of listening to the knowledgeable outsider (14:37) How to avoid false balance by seeking differing views (16:32) Why working with collaborators is important (18:15) Why athletic thinking is a good analogy for information synthesis (21:54) Why we have to exercise self-control in our world of infinitely available information (24:58) Episode resources Language Immersion Google News Duolingo Card Catalog reMarkable 2 Tablet Gingko App Substack Ernest Hemingway Pocket Transcript Ross Dawson: Christopher, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Christopher Mims: It’s a delight to be here. Thank you for having me. Ross: Christopher, you describe what you do or part of what you do is searching for needles in haystacks and exploring all sorts of wonderful information to get there. Tell me what do you do? How do you explore this wonderful world of media? Christopher: I do it in a lot of different ways, and it keeps evolving. I think the governing principle for me is I’m searching for valuable new information that is true, useful, helps me build a worldview, and look a little bit around the corner to what’s next. Fortunately, I am not in the business of prediction. I’m not a futurist. I am not a venture capitalist. I don’t have to really see that far ahead. As a journalist and a technology columnist, I’m really just trying to see what is next; what is the very next thing and get to that five minutes, or a week, or six months before somebody else. Or if somebody else has already gotten to it, maybe I can explain it a little more clearly to our audience, or explain it in a different way to make it more accessible to a wider range of people. That’s a pretty doable thing, ultimately, and making it happen is just a lot of process which has happened for me because I write a weekly tech column. It is very routine, in good ways. In that, every week, I am tackling a new topic and researching it pretty systematically. That has given me a lot of chance to just practice that process. It’s a bit like language immersion. For anybody who has learned a foreign language, you really steep yourself in it. Part of what I’m doing as a journalist, but specifically as a columnist, is what I have long called hypothesis-driven journalism, which is that hopefully, I can learn enough about a topic that I can say, Hey, I wonder if somebody is doing like, X, or Y. It seems like if people are doing A, B, and C, they might next try D, E, or F. The second-order consequence of that might be this other thing. Then I might just go and look for that. I sometimes feel that comes a bit from my scientific training. Science is what I did before I was a journalist. I have an undergraduate degree in neuroscience. I spent a couple of years in the lab, and it was like getting a master’s degree. I mean, I certainly did that; an equivalent amount of bench science. I’ve published papers on some pretty esoteric subjects in invertebrate neuroscience. That was good practice for being in an environment with other really smart people who are just constantly trying to poke holes in your ideas. But during the generative phase, anything goes like, huh, maybe these insects are detecting electrical fields around them directly with their nervous systems. We were testing a hypothesis at one point with aquatic invertebrates, it turned out not to be true; it would have been pretty freaking cool if it was true. That’s what I’m doing every week. I’ll just step into a topic and be like, I wonder if the coming wave of electric trucks is going to convince a bunch of people who otherwise wouldn’t be environmentalists to “Go Green”; What’s the research on that? That ended up being a very fruitful article involving a bunch of behavioral economists. As Elon Musk has taught us if you make the green choice, the exciting choice, people will adopt it, and then they’ll adopt other ideologies along the way. Ross: I’d like to unpack that because there’s a lot in there. I think there are a number of pieces that will feed on themselves at some point. Do you articulate these hypotheses to yourself? Do you have a list of these ideas? Christopher: Yes, definitely. I have a couple of files. One is things that are really on deck that I’m pitching to my editor next, and other things I’m just exploring and just gathering string on. There are certain tools that I use that help with that. I think a really underappreciated tool if you’re really trying to just learn more and more so by immersion about a given topic is, of all things, Google News. It’s actually a better filter for me than social media. I try to just dip into social media occasionally, but not really get my news from it because there’s a lot of perverse incentives in social media that lead to a lot of nonsense and wasted time, as we all know. Funny enough, Google News, does two things that help me a lot, the Google News app, or site, or whatever. One is, it has pretty decent AI, which does learn my interest. It is definitely watching what I’m clicking on, and opening, and reading, so it’s going to feed me more of that. Also, it has a pretty good for grouping news items by topics. Sometimes I’ll be reading about something that I’m interested in, like carbon capture, or whatever, and it’s pulling a bunch of news articles that are related to that even if they’re not using the same keyword, so it’s pretty sophisticated in that way. The other thing that I noticed recently that it does, which is a bit unexpected, is if your accounts are all linked, if you’re just logged into Google everywhere, and you’re using the Chrome browser, Google knows what tabs you’re opening in Chrome, and it will then show me news stories on that topic later, in Google News. That’s also how you learn a language on Duolingo, for example, is that you get exposed to something and then a week later, it exposes to you again, because there’s a certain half-life of your memory for stuff like that. In a funny way, these two different characteristics of the Google News app, one, would tend to push me toward being inside of a filter bubble, because in theory, they always feed me the same stuff or more of the stuff that I’m interested in already. But because I’m constantly just poking around researching other new topics, that is a different flow of information into my main newsreader. That helps me a lot. Then obviously, a great deal of what I’m learning just comes from talking to people. It’s incredible how having a really engaged, exciting, earnest conversation with another human being is this incredibly swift filter for refining your own ideas, and finding out what’s meaningful in somebody’s field. I have this incredible privilege as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, that if I email somebody, they’re like, yep, we’ll get our CEO on the phone in two days, or next week, or whatever. I get to talk to people who are sometimes the most knowledgeable people in a field, and they’re ready to boil it down for me very quickly. That’s invaluable. That’s just a privilege of where I am as a journalist. Ross: One of the points around Google News, or any AI, or any algorithmic news filter is that as long as you are diverse in your interests, it keeps being diverse for you in what it shows you. Christopher: Yes, that’s absolutely key. We’re all different in that way, but one thing that I found interesting recently is most people when they get past a certain age are apparently, I didn’t know this because I’m the opposite, are just listening to pretty much the same music over and over again, from some earlier period in their life. I’ve never been that person. I’ve always been this voracious consumer of new artists and new genres. I think part of the reason that I’m a journalist is that I get bored easily, and I get restless, and I just want to move on to a new topic. Ross: That’s interesting. It’s the same for me. One of the good ways to measure personality is how recent is the music you listen to? Christopher: Maybe it is, maybe it’s just a measure of novelty seeking, which is, of course, a pretty stable personality trait across someone’s life. Ross: Yes. Let’s go back to the sources. Let’s say you’ve got a list of whole things that you’re interested in and you want to learn some more. Where do you go for information? Where do you find beyond the people that you can speak to, which is obviously wonderful, or any other immediate sources? Christopher: Yes, as any conscientious reader these days are journalists. I have my mental list of trusted sources. It’s amazing how easy it is to just pop a term into Google, and it spits out a bunch of really great articles on that subject. I know which writers I trust, and which publications I trust, so that can be an infinite variety of sources. It could be an article in The Economist, but it could also be a thread on Reddit or Hacker News, or something like that. Sometimes when a piece trends on Hacker News, the comments there can be quite interesting, because it’s a self-selecting community. It’s not like the comments section on a YouTube video or something like that. Obviously, there is still a ton of useful conversation on Twitter, between experts; not when something goes super-viral, and all the bots and randos pile on, but it’s incredible how somebody can be talking about very technical subjects there. Other engineers or the kind of people I would want to talk to, start to weigh in; so that information, it feels like it’s everywhere, as long as you know what your trusted sources should be. Ross: How do you take notes? Or how do you thread the ideas together? Do you use any note taking apps or structures, or just docs, or is it in your head? Christopher: I’ve played with a lot of different things. I certainly had to play with more elaborate ones when I was putting together my book. At the end of the day, I’ve just discovered that the simplest is the best. I’ll just open up a new doc, a new Google Doc, or whatever, and just start dropping links and notes in there. That’s fine, the simplicity works for me. I’m not the kind of person who has a lot of patience for managing a ton of card catalog type organization; organization that I have to think about or manage. I’ve used those branching idea tree-type services and apps and stuff. But eventually I just end up wanting to dump it all in one place, then later I can search it or scan it very quickly with my eyes. For that thing, I try to keep it as simple as possible. Occasionally, I will take notes, not pen to paper, but I’ll use a reMarkable 2 tablet or some other type of tablet because I still find that writing things down is a helpful way to think about them. Ross: You mentioned your book, just out, it’s called Arriving Today, which delves into the delights and marvels of the global supply chain, which is a pretty big, deep, and hairy topic. That’s maybe a great case study in how you do your research. How did you learn what you needed to learn to write that? Christopher: Any project like that, it’s always impossible until it’s done. It’s really just about breaking it into small pieces. One of the things that’s nice about the book is, once you have a structure in mind, you can break it into chapters. That’s a manageable size for me, because I spent my life writing long columns and feature articles, and stuff, and I’m so practiced at that, that I can hold the entire structure of a piece that’s 2000-4000 words just in my head as I’m working on it. Breaking it into chapters helped. Then because I traced the path of an object through the global supply chain across the world, each one of those chapters naturally became an episode in that journey. There are chapters on transoceanic shipping, and chapters on automated warehouses of the type that Amazon runs, and long-haul trucking, and all the rest. It really was just about breaking it down into its constituent pieces. That said, when I was in the earliest stages of it, I did use this thing called Gingko. It’s like some lone program that maintains this cloud-based thing where you can basically create index cards worth of links and information, and then just nest them endlessly in a giant tree, which is searchable. That did help me in the earliest days when I was just immersing myself, and reading so much, and being like okay, well, here’s an interesting fact about trucking, alright, I’ll put under that branch of the tree; here’s an interesting fact about ocean-going vessels, I’ll put that into that branch of the tree; but if I had to do it all over again, I don’t know, maybe I would have just dumped that all into one giant doc, with sections for each subject. Ross: In a way, that’s still using that hypothesis-driven in the sense of, this is the theme of the chapter and then trying to find the things which will flesh that out, or find the detail, or to create the frame for it. Christopher: One way that I think about it as a journalist is what are the types of experts that I need to talk to, to understand this top to bottom. One is you’re looking for that knowledgeable outsider, that analyst whose job it is to look at something dispassionately, in a classic, consumer tech article, that might be somebody from Gartner, IDC, who’s going to talk to you about here’s why sales of laptops were up or down last year, or something like that. Having been in academia, I really like to find academics, because it’s incredible when you find that person who has devoted their entire life to researching a particular subject, whether that’s long haul trucking or the fissuring of labor markets in a way that makes them more hostile to unionization. Those are both two types of experts, who really shaped their respective chapters in my book. Then I’m going to go talk to the company leader types, the CEOs, the project leads who are on the ground doing it every day, the CTOs who have to build and maintain the IT and the robotics, sometimes the physical infrastructure that makes things work, etc. Then if I can, I’m also going to go talk to the people who are just really doing it in the real world. They might be hourly workers who are functioning within some type of system. That gives me that top to bottom. I don’t know, maybe it’s almost anthropological. It’s almost like a form of ethnography in a way, but that’s how I get my topic. Ross: Getting the diverse perspectives or different eyes on the same thing, hopefully, they’re all complementary. In terms of your own synthesis of making sense, what happens when there are differing views on the same topic? How do you resolve that? Christopher: Part of that is that I’m deliberately seeking people who have different views on a subject. I’m also really wary of false balance, which is something that journalism has had a problem with in politics, in the past, and coverage of climate change. People forget, but 10-15 years ago, if you were going to quote somebody talking about the perils of climate change, in the New York Times, typically, you would also quote somebody else who’s like, no, it’s nothing. It is just a liberal conspiracy. That’s a pretty tragic example of false balance; you don’t have to quote an anti-vaxxer in the same paragraph that you quote Anthony Fauci, talking about the importance of wearing masks. I’m looking for those places where intelligent and informed people can disagree, and seeking out those different viewpoints. Again, luckily, because I’m not in the business of predicting, I’m not in the business of investing, my whole job is to represent that spectrum of opinion because I don’t necessarily have to come down on one side or another of a debate, I can just describe its contours. Ross: You’re in a sense, not just feeding your own insight, but your job is to help others to form their own views or opinions or frame on a topic. Christopher: Yes, 100%. I view my job as being an educator, so I’ve got to start educating myself and then hopefully take people along with me on that journey, and by that mechanism, educate them as well. Ross: Looping back to the very beginning when you were talking about the needles in the haystack. The scanning; you’re scanning and you’re seeing lots of things all the time. In terms of that sensing of what it is that matters, that is useful, that is interesting or not interesting, or is worth following, or throw it up, is this all just framed by your hypotheses or ideas you’re searching for? Is there anything which you can introspect in how you perceive what is worth looking more at or not? Christopher: That’s entirely at the subconscious level. I’ve learned over many years that I have to let my personal preferences guide me because otherwise, I’m just not going to be able to sustain the level of interest required to really educate myself about a topic. The only time that’s not true is when I get assigned some topic by an editor. Ironically, perhaps, unsurprisingly, sometimes those are the pieces where I learned the most, or maybe there’s the most interesting result. Because an editor will be like, what’s going on with this thing? The metaverse, or whatever, and here I am rolling my eyes, trying to avoid the topic because I think it’s marketing nonsense. But just being forced to dig into it sometimes, I come away thinking: “Wow, I’m really grateful that happened.” This is why I work in a news organization, instead of being one of these solo journalists who just support themselves with Substack, or whatever. I think that raises a really important point, which is that I’m just a very strong believer in the songwriting duo mode of creation, which is whether I’m a writer, working with an editor, or imagine John and Paul, writing songs for the Beatles, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his interaction with his editor. Many people don’t know this but The Great Gatsby was a completely different book. He basically rewrote it in the margins of that original book, after a dialogue with his editor. The great American novel was written in the margins of a much worse novel, because of that creative collaboration. A lot of what I do, or what I try to do is a meeting of minds and is really bouncing ideas off of other people, whether that’s in interviews, or in other contexts, and relying on them because there’s that hive mind that happens interpersonally or on the Internet, which is just irreplaceable. It’s integral to how humans function and the success of our species, in a way that we don’t often acknowledge, we are truly hive-minds almost like the ants, termites, and other eusocial insects, like bees, I think we all think of ourselves as individualist, especially in America; but it’s kind of nonsense. We’re a giant hive organism. Ross: Yes, and more that we tap the value of collaborative thinking, the better outcomes we get to. Christopher: For sure, up to a limit, and people have studied that. This was so-called wisdom of crowds. Say what you will about markets, it’s always “find the right price for an asset”; but that’s one thing. As we all experience if a group of collaborators gets above a certain size, its value breaks down. So small groups. I think Jeff Bezos called it the two-pizza team or whatever, no teams larger than can be fed by two takeout pizzas are a key to innovating in thinking in that way. Ross: Around the frame of synthesis and pulling it all together, obviously, that’s a mental faculty, where when you’re exposed to a lot of things to pull out, the gestalt is how it comes together. Is that just part of the process for you? Are there any ways in which you facilitate or nurture that state of mind to be able to pull all the pieces together and synthesize them into a broader view of your topic? Christopher: I think anybody who has to do this work eventually notices their patterns of mental acuity. It’s worth thinking of yourself as, it’s going to sound absurd, my eyes are going to roll back in my head, but you’re like a mental athlete in a way. But it’s true. The brain is a muscle, consumes 20 to 30% of all of our calories. There’s a lot going on there, and you have to respect it. You have to know that when you’re doing this synthesis, if you’re doing it after the right preparation, when you finally have enough information to really get it all down on paper, or describe it to somebody else, you’re doing it at the proper time of day, you’ve rested, you’ve gotten some exercise, and had a little coffee, you can do more in two hours than you could in two weeks of working in some other sub-optimal way. What is it? I think people have researched this and for really intense knowledge work, you really only get four to six hours of it a day. Maybe you can push that, but you’re going to pay for it at other times. Like anybody, I’ve learned that mind-body connection is incredibly important, and if I want to do this work well and consistently, I’ve got to treat my body and my brain as a machine. It’s up to me to maintain it. Part of that also is my training as a neuroscientist. I think I have a very mechanistic view of the brain and the mind, which is just the brain. Ross: Creating a part of it, then creating conditions where your mind’s ready to engage, to dive deep, and to pull the pieces together. Christopher: Right, but also, as Steve Jobs said, “Real artists ship”, I’m not waiting around for inspiration. I’m sitting down every damn day and just doing the work. I always think of the tour of Hemingway’s house, which is a great pilgrimage for any writer. They take you through his house, and they show you the attached studio where he would write. Even though Hemingway was a severe alcoholic, and had all of these untold relationship dramas in his life, because also he was bipolar and not diagnosed, and not medicated, he was a guy who woke up at 6 am every morning, went to his office, and wrote for six hours. Then he drank, and fished, and womanized, and made all kinds of unfortunate life decisions, which is how he wrote all those novels. It’s like bricklaying, or anything else. It’s a craft. Even mental work is a trade, I would say. Ross: Pulling this together, Is there anything that we haven’t covered? What would be any advice you would offer to people to thrive on overload, to make sense of information? Either distilling what we’ve discussed or any other points, what else people can learn from you about how they create value from information? Christopher: I think that you have to keep in mind the information environment in which we evolved, which was a relatively low information environment for most of human history. Even after the printing press, books are expensive and rare. I think that we have evolved to seek out gossip, which has tremendous value, and seek out new information, for a curious person, which is most people. But now we live in a time when the internet gives us infinite access to that. It’s way too much. I think the term “infobesity” applies here. Humans evolved in an environment where most of the time, we were just trying to not starve. We evolved very intense craving for foods that are probably not for good for us ultimately, and will cause all kinds of metabolic disorders, so we have to exercise some self-control in our world of infinitely available calories. In the same way, we have to exercise that self-control in our world of infinitely available information and the truth is, for everything that I’ve just said about, oh, here’s how I find new ideas and everything, the number one way that I find those needles in haystacks is I say, No, as often and as clearly as I can, to new sources of stimulation, additional sources of information, and more articles that I could or might want to read. I have all of these systems for blocking social media when I’m working, so it’s not a distraction. Sending every article that I find interesting straight to the article saving service Pocket so that I can read it later when I have the time; if I have the time. Avoiding lots of social media. I’m purposely bad at email because the faster you respond to people, the more correspondence you’re going to have with them. Everything that I do is about actually trying to keep information at bay, and spend less time on the internet, because we live in an era of infinitely available information and it is seeking us out. It’s being pushed to our phones in the forms of alerts. I think that this environment is so different from the one in which we evolved to seek out information that the key to navigating is to honestly try to avoid it as much as possible. Ross: Yes, absolutely. That’s the starting point to be able to find what we want is to get rid of everything, which doesn’t serve us. Christopher: Yes, 100%. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Christopher. That’s been really valuable. Christopher: Yes, it’s fun to talk about it. I appreciate that you’re so curious about this topic. Ross: Thanks. The post Christopher Mims on seeing what’s next, filtering tools, valuable conversations, and tapping expertise (Ep17) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Technology is not just the devices we use, but it’s how we do things. It’s so much more than just what’s being built, put in boxes, and sold to us. It is all of these deeply inherent aspects of how we do things as a species.” – Michell Zappa About Michel Zappa Michell Zappa is a technology futurist, information designer and founder of Envisioning, a technology foresight institute. His work aims to illustrate the implications of accelerating change and facilitate a higher level of awareness about our relationship to technology. He is a Singularity University expert in Emerging Technology & Human Behavior and is responsible for the technology thinking module at THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam. Website: envisioning.io Facebook: Michell Zappa LinkedIn: Michell Zappa What you will learn How to keep at the edge of future technology (01:24) Who are some authors to read on human relationships with technology (06:13) Where is technological innovation actually happening (09:17) What is a good knowledge management methodology when working with a team (13:15) Is a new advance going to set the direction of technology? (17:05) Why looking out for bottlenecks is a good filter for information (20:42) How to pull pieces of information to form a big picture (26:01) Why build for your audience (30:20) What is the process to then take all this data, insight, perspective, and lay that out on a page? (35:06) Why be wary of taxonomies (37:17) How to keep across extraordinary technological changes (39:46) Episode resources Star Trek Next Generation Kurt Weill Kevin Kelly The Verge IEEE MIT Tech Review Wired Martin Heidegger The Real World of Technology by Urusula Franklin The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly Amish Luddite The Entrepreneurial State by Marianna Mazzucato DARPA Things – Mac / iOS AR – Augmented Reality German Corporation for International Collaboration Episode images The Evolution of the Michell Zappa’s Envisioning Infographic Transcript Ross Dawson: Michell, wonderful to be talking to you. Michel Zappa: Well, thanks, Ross for having me. Ross: As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been looking at the edge of technology, and the edge of the future, and keeping across all sorts of change, how do you do it? What’s the starting point for you? Michell: Well, I got an early start by being interested in this particular intersection between imagination, the future, and technology by spending a lot of time watching Star Trek The Next Generation as a kid. That coupled with internet forums where they would discuss how the actual engines and everything in the series worked, just tuned my brain and my interest into figuring out that, hey, perhaps new technology is possible, and perhaps those new technologies will shape the future in unexpected ways, and perhaps by writing science fiction, we can anticipate part of how that will unfold. That was always part of my very personal interest. Professionally, I ended up doing things adjacent to this, but never directly related to it until about a decade ago, I decided to drop everything and focus on technology futures, which is how those first couple of infographics came about, and they were just this attempt at, I guess, distilling what I saw going on both in the short term in terms of which are the fields of technology that are being worked on right now but as well as coupling that with some sort of longer-term thinking. People like Kurt Weill and Kevin Kelly, who have a particular view on how the future might unfold, given these technologies, I tried coupling their long term views, which highly inspired me with a short term view of what’s actually going on now and turning that into these digestible, overviewable infographics with a finger on the pulse of what I saw going on in technology, and how that could unfold in the near future. I hope that answered your question. Ross: Yes. For those who haven’t seen Michel’s work, there will be links in the show notes to some of his wonderful infographics. Before we dig into the infographics, part of this is just keeping across change, what’s your daily routine? What sources do you go to? What do you look for? How do you assess whether something is interesting or not? What’s that process of being able to just scan for, look for, uncover, or bookmark information? Michell: That’s a great question. What works for me is a mix between the immediate gadget news and the Twitter view of what’s happening in technology. I feel that’s a valuable way of understanding how the ecosystem is shaping up. In other words, who are being invested in, which gadgets are coming out, which features are being put out there by consumer technology companies, that is a big aspect of what I keep track of. Things like The Verge, IEEE, Spectrum, MIT Tech review, Wired, I guess all of these have a good approximation or sort of an up-to-date view of what’s happening mostly on the consumer side, which gives you a good understanding into what’s happening on the industrial or even public-facing side of technological development. But that needs to be coupled with this sort of higher-level understanding of what technology is. We don’t have to go all the way back to Heidegger but it helps to have a broader picture. That technology is not just the devices we use, but it’s how we do things. How we interface with nature is technology. It’s so much more than just what’s being built, put in boxes, and sold to us, it is all of these deeply inherent aspects of how we do things as a species. All of these are technological, and having that view… and several authors do a great job explaining that, much better than I ever could write here, but having that sort of big picture view, coupled with a close understanding to what people are actually using, that has always been my mix. I feel there are many academics who have a much better understanding of the big picture than I ever could, yet, they might not be that close to which companies are being invested in, which markets are shaping up, and I think that interplay is key to our approach, or at least my personal approach. Ross: You talked about this framing of how we think about technology, or the human’s relationship with technology, who are the authors? Who would you point to? What can we pull out from their framing of that? Michell: Immediately, what comes to mind is Ursula Franklin and “The Real World of Technology”, and someone like Kevin Kelly, who talks about it in “The Inevitable” and “What Technology Wants”. What I took away from these two books, for example, is this view that technology is almost an autonomous system. It is built by us, it is consumed by us, it is designed by us in every way. But in effect, it has its own direction, it has its own agency, and we cannot attribute decisions to it. But still, it unfolds in a very predictable way. Kevin Kelley sums it up in terms of it becomes more complex, it becomes more affordable, it becomes faster, it has these certainties in the way that it unfolds. What I think these authors do a good job with is putting the devices and the gadgets into the context of our lived experience. Someone else who says it very well, Langdon Winner talks about technological somnambulism; technological somnambulism is this misconception that we can somehow put the technology down, or rather we can pick a technology up and then we can put it back down again, and we will remain unchanged, that is somnambulism, that is a fallacy, that is not true because the technology in knowing that it exists, let alone having used it has already shaped us, it has already changed us. We’re often sleepwalking when we use technologies because we don’t truly appreciate how much it is actually affecting us. Amish do a great job to sum this up, the Luddite approach to technology; of course, it meant something else when they came about, but the way we look at it today, which is taking a few steps back with regards to new technology, and what the Amish and a few other very localized cultures have been able to do is collectively before accepting technology into your society, they will extensively evaluate it, they will weigh the pros and cons, and they will consider the implementation that is best for that particular use case. The way they approach having phones, at least when I read about it was having a communal phone in the village as opposed to everyone having a smartphone or even a mobile phone or even a phone phone in their house or pocket. I think that sort of measured approach is something that’s sorely missing. Ross: For example, When you see news of some technological advance, you’re thinking about it in terms of this life as it were, of the technology, how that might shape us as humans, or how we might respond to it? What are the things which you are thinking about when you identify some interesting or meaningful technological touchpoint? Michell: There are at least three perspectives through which we can look at any technology, fourth if we include academia; But the three ones that I want to talk about are the public sector, the private sector, and consumers because any technology will affect those four areas. Academia, in terms of technology, is applied science, it happens, largely speaking in universities and R&D Labs. Actual technological innovation arguably doesn’t happen so much in the private sector, although it’s applied to the private sector, which leads to consumer choices. From that perspective, from what’s being purchased, what’s being used, which SaaS companies are thriving, and which gadget makers are doing well this quarter. From the perspective of the private sector and consumers, it’s important to keep track of, but it’s the least interesting of where actual innovation happens. Actual innovation happens in the public sector, and it’s governments; they have the longitudinal benefit, they stand to win the most from a long-term approach to technology. So often, we just lose track of how technology actually happens. Mariana Mazzucato in “The Entrepreneurial State” talks about if you break down something like the smartphone into its core components, the GPS, the internet, the touchscreen, etc. eight out of 10 of those were made by the public sector, specifically DARPA, and the US military had a disproportionate role in the features set of smartphones, for example. But the general principle is true everywhere, where the public sector oftentimes carries all the risk of investing in new technologies, whereas the private sector gets all the upside and all the benefits when a technology actually thrives. Again, numerous examples of this, and this is different on a per-country basis, it’s difficult to generalize around, she talks about it mostly around the US, which is fair, because that’s where most technological development happens, at least from my perspective, or that which I can see and read. Having this three-part or four-part view of okay, so technology affects the consumers very differently than they do companies, than they do to the public sector, I think just having that pronged approach to be able to look at them differently and see how they engage with one another, which is to say, look outside corporate innovation for where the actual invention will happen. Ross: It sounds like part of this is being able to assess both the genesis of and also the impact of technologies. Let’s come back to day-by-day. You’ve come across, you’ve encountered in your studies or reading something which is interesting, what do you do with that? Do you make a note of that? Do you put it in a database? Do you assess that on any scale? How do you then take this significant news about technology development and incorporate that into your thinking? Michell: There are a few ways to go about that. On a personal level, I’ve tried every knowledge management tool out there. There are a few that I keep coming back to, which work because they’re ubiquitous and easy to feed things into. I guess that’s part of the scope of the program, so on a personal note, I use Things extensively as what I would call my personal operating system. Things is mostly a Mac and iOS app and it does a wonderful job managing tasks and task-oriented knowledge very easily and in a quick manner. What happens after Things is where Things get more interesting because if there’s something that I’m looking at which I would consider a technology, then that quickly falls into a workstream that we’ve employed at envisioning, an internal way of looking at incoming links and assessing whether there are new technologies that should be tracked and if they should be tracked, then how do we track them? There’s an intermediary step here, where I share this particular link with the research team. Then we have our methodology or approach to determining whether this is a technology, if it is a technology, then which technologies does it depend on? Is it an application of an underlying technology or is it something more? Or is it an enabling technology that will give rise to other applications? There are a few ways that we break it down into a taxonomy of technologies. Then there’s this concrete component where we track or add this technology to our database. Our database is just comprised of a web interface and the process, the process itself determines what is and what isn’t, what goes in and what doesn’t go in, what type of metadata we should add, etc., that’s the process. Then the actual tool is a web-based database that we built for ourselves, which is used to publish most of our work nowadays. What we have is an index of about 1500 different technologies. Some of them are enabling technologies, others are applications. What they have in common is they’re all being tracked, measured, and assessed over time. We’ll track things like their technology readiness level, or TRL. It’s a score from one to nine, which will tell you how mature an individual technology is, that’s part of the assessment we do when things go into the database. Another valuable point to bring up is we try assessing these technologies from a few different perspectives as often as possible. In another research project that we’re working on, we have this ongoing research around technologies for sustainable development, together with the German Corporation for International Collaboration of the government, and what we do with them is we look at the set of technologies around sustainable development, but the emphasis is on measuring them. We both describe them as we do another project, we will also measure that. We talk about to which degree could this technology cause a gender imbalance? In other words, is it hindering? Or is it fostering gender neutrality? We assess that through a series of sub-questions. We do the same thing for other indicators. At the end, what we’re trying to achieve with this is to create a qualitative picture of what’s happening in tech, but also a quantitative measure of it. Ross: To take an example, I presume you’re tracking the development of augmented reality glasses. Let’s say there’s a technological advance, or a new product, or something which pushes out where we are in the field, or points the directions on who might win in that space, how do you then incorporate that into your thinking about directions? Michell: One way to look at it is in terms of the inevitabilities. To go back a little bit to Kevin Kelly’s idea of technology is already happening, and we can’t really control it, there’s a degree where AR is an inevitability, it’s been discussed so extensively. It’s part of our sight, gaze to such a degree, that it’s really difficult to imagine it going away. But a way you measure it or the way you keep track of it, one way is to look at the milestones around the technology. Whenever Apple releases their glasses will be a milestone, the same way that when Google Glass came about a decade ago, despite not being AR, that too, was a milestone. What Facebook released a couple of days ago, arguably is one of those milestones with the robot integration, although that too is far from being AR. That’s just Facebook being creepy. But it’s moving in the general direction of how do you miniaturize batteries, camera, tech, screen display technology, all of that is happening, and all of that is being worked on by numerous startups and big companies alike because they strongly suspect that that will be the next mobile. The same way mobile and then smartphones became the de facto way of interfacing with the web, possibly AR will be the next one. It’s self-fulfilling in some respect and we keep getting these milestones of it. Ross: You pointed to miniaturization there, does that mean that you specifically look at miniaturization because that might feed into these kinds of consumer applications? Michell: Yes, absolutely. Technologies are fundamentally digital technology at least, we’re not talking biotech, we’re not talking nanotech. But if we talk sort of digital technologies, and consumer devices, and electronics, if we sort of contain that scope, then what you’ll realize is most technologies are more similar than they are different. Most technologies will have a power system, be it the battery pack or because they’re plugged into a wall, most technologies will have an input and an output display, will have an LCD, computer will have ports, every technology has those basic components. The point I’m trying to make is on each one of those components front, there are miniaturization efforts happening, and there’s also replacement happening. In other words, the glasses need a power system, whether that power system is wirelessly driven because we have wireless power, which isn’t really here yet, or whether you use a battery. If you use a battery, then which battery technology it uses? Lithium-ion, or is it graphene powered? Those sub choices, it’s where things get really interesting. That’s where we see miniaturization and other longitudinal trends happening. In other words, if you’re designing an AR system, the bottlenecks or the constraints will be known fairly early in the process. It’s going to be latency, it’s going to be wait, it’s going to be durability, etc. These are known upfront. Then what you spend decades and decades doing is optimizing for those constraints. Ross: You’re then thinking in terms of bottlenecks, you’re identifying what the bottlenecks are, and what are the things that might transcend them, that’s something you’re scanning for, or looking for, is it? Michell: That’s something we’re increasingly doing, yes. What we’ve done historically, is we’ve been able to identify new technological applications. We will scout these by looking at science fiction, by looking at reports, even trends, we scout this broadly to look at which are the new applications or use cases for the technologies that we see on the horizon. What we’re adding to that mix is this systematic view of these technological applications and especially isolating what’s hindering their development right now so we can call them bottlenecks, or we can call them milestones, depending on your perspective, because before you reach it, it’s a bottleneck but after you’ve passed it, it became a milestone. We’re looking at these indicators, ideally, over time, as one of the functions of looking at emerging technology as a whole. In other words, anticipating a future scenario, or anticipating a future application is fairly easy. I’m not saying sci-fi authors do a poor job, they do an amazing job and they’re able to do that even without a scientific backing. They’re imaginative and they can figure out or anticipate how we might use technologies in the future. But then it’s the engineer’s job, so to speak, to figure out how to achieve that and how to build it. That’s where the bottlenecks with the milestones come into the picture. That’s part of what we’re adding to our research approach is very much the ability to, okay, so between where I am now and where I want to end up, what’s hindering me? What’s stopping? You can treat it differently because one thing is how are you hindered by physics, by science, or by the economy at large. Right now, microprocessors are unavailable, because of supply chain shortages, you’re out of control, no card manufacturer controls that part of the supply chain, therefore, they’re out of luck. That’s one perspective on the bottleneck. Another perspective of the bottleneck is sort of intern. We could purchase this company, or we could purchase this particular technology, or we could license it, etc., that would be a different type of bottleneck. Getting too ahead of myself, I think that’s part of how we’re trying to break down the turning technological futures into reality aspect. Ross: Does this mean that in a way, rather than passively seeing information come in, you’re proactively looking for things that will fulfill certain criteria as addressing bottlenecks or meeting potential milestones on technology journeys that you’ve mapped out? Michell: This might bump into foundation territory, where you’re anticipating and predicting. We took a step away from prediction early on in the company’s history, so to speak, and decided to focus on what’s actually there, so how ready is something right now as opposed to when might we see it. In terms of your question, that’s a likely outcome as in once we start looking at the bottlenecks, and once we start having a better grasp of, let’s call it the underlying issues that haven’t been addressed yet, or that haven’t been figured out yet, or the solutions we haven’t found yet, then once that’s part of the methodology and the research approach, then arguably, we’ll start looking for ways to address them because more often than not, large swaths of the industry are facing the same issue. Again, going back to the microprocessors today, and the supply chain issue, for everything from cars to smart fridges, everyone’s stuck, because they don’t have computers to put into their headrests, literally. They’re having to re-engineer vehicles, and of course, every other IoT device out there to consider having less processors now that they’re not as ubiquitous as we thought. Looking at bottlenecks is a way to better understand the dependencies and the interconnectedness of these different developments. Ross: Soon we’ll get to hear your process for creating your wonderful infographics, but first of all, just coming back to sense-making. We talked about this a little bit earlier, in terms of seeing that macro picture. We have many signals, whether those just come in, or we’re looking for them, and we’re trying to get some sense of it, how is it that you in your own mind or in terms of laying that out in whatever form, pull together the pieces into something which is this bigger perspective on whatever the domain is that you’re looking at? Michell: The short answer would be because I keep doing it. There’s no way to do it completely. Every time that we’ve attempted to document what I call technological ecosystem, every attempt to build a database, or to build a technology graph, every step that I’ve taken at this problem over at least the last decade, arguably longer than that, every attempt has been building towards the next attempt. In other words, I’m not trying to replicate Wikipedia; Wikipedia probably has a comprehensive view of “all technologies” and it’s not navigable in terms of you cannot isolate just innovation and invention, within the scope of Wikipedia; you will encounter people, places, fantasy realms, etc. Whereas what we’ve been trying to scope out, has always been tightly defined as technology, and then how you define technology, of course, things get tricky once again. What has worked so far is that we keep doing it or that I keep doing it. There’s a fine line between me and the company. But the point is, personally, that’s always been a strong driver and a strong interest of making sense of the big picture. I’m heavily biased in terms of I grew up on a certain set of technologies, I grew up with opening and closing and rebuilding my personal computer, replacing the CPU from 386 to 486, replacing the hard disk drive, I grew up with that framework, I grew up programming HTML, that’s how I made my first book, my understanding of technology is directed in terms of certain branches. I know nothing of biotech, I know nothing of materials, I know nothing of chemistry, whereas you need PhDs to even start scratching the surface of what’s emerging, or what’s new, or what’s cutting edge in those spaces. What I’ve been trying to make, though, despite those biases, that I’ve been trying to achieve is this big picture of how they all interconnect, whether it’s because of their dependencies. If you were to restart again, with a wheel, and fire, would you end up where we are now? To do that sort of thought exercise, or to look at those relationships over time, I’m trying to bring that approach… let’s put it differently, I’m trying to build a map. Right now, parts of the map are known, and usually, you know your bit of the map really well but everything else lies in shadows. If you are a front-end developer, you will probably know very little about biotechnology. There’s no reason why you should have spent any time in your formative years learning about biotech, or materials, or energy technology for that matter just because you work in tech, so to speak. What we’re trying to do is to build that map, because there is no boundary between HTML, which is hypertext technology, there’s no boundary between that and material sciences, they’re just disconnected by a couple of steps on a graph. Whether you can finalize that or actually define those boundaries remains to be seen, but what’s been working is we just haven’t stopped trying. Ross: That does take us to the infographics, not the whole map but these elements of it. I hope all my readers will have either already seen or will see some of your infographics but whether we’re going back from the early ones or to what you’re doing now, what is the process? How do you start? What is the way in which you build one of your visualizations of a technology space or a space? Michell: The leading question is always who is this for? What worked with infographics of 2011-2012, when there was much more optimism and much less development on some of these fronts, what works there is that the big picture was still felt fairly manageable, it felt as if it was bounded. There was not a ton of things happening outside of those technologies, so to speak, that was the impression. Of course, looking back a decade later, I realize how wrong I was and how many things we’re missing on that map. Things like crypto, things like drones, and so many others were simply not part of the scope when I was looking at it during the research in 2010, to the launch in 2011. That’s where the biggest learnings are, it is to see what was actually missing. Being right isn’t half as interesting as being wrong in a few terms but we can zoom into that as well. But going back to your question, instead of how to go about building a complete overview or big picture perspective, who it’s for matters a lot. Those particular representations or infographics were for a general audience who’s interested in technology at large, enthusiastic about it, but might not know what lies beyond their particular fields. To that effect, they struck a nerve, and they found an audience for that. Where we’ve, of course, been pivoting towards is to zoom into different fields, industries, sectors, parts of the economy. That is for a very different audience. That’s for someone who needs to pick between two technological solutions or even two pathways of investing on should we do solid-state batteries or should we try figuring out; the specifics of it is where, of course, things get really interesting, but they’re very different audiences. Going back to your question once again, once you know, who your audience is, and once you’ve decided who you’re designing for, the next phase is always then what’s the available data? Are we looking at this from a perspective of giving the audience a better view of what’s going to be likely 10, 20, 30 years from now? That will be one intersection of the technologies where you’re looking at low levels of readiness, and high levels of speculation. That will, of course, result in a very, very different view than if you’re looking at a case what’s available for my supply chain next month? I don’t think we’d be the right people to ask for that latter question but we’ll often find ourselves halfway between those extremes. There are organizations who are great at identifying what you should do right now; but if you take that horizon one into horizon two, and three, what we’ve been trying to do, and the way we present our infographics is all about showing what’s possible, showing what’s next, showing what’s further down the horizon. Sometimes those decisions will affect people who have already left the organization by the time it happens, which is this perennial challenge of ours. Because the actual effect of the thing we’re doing now happens much further down the road. It’s a challenge to bring that back into the present and justify that participation. Ross: Is this part of timelines and dependencies? Michell: Absolutely. We’re figuring out the best way to track that. The dependencies is one way to look at the bottleneck approach or seeing, okay, so if we invest in this particular set of technologies, where are we likely to end up? That dependency approach is part of how clients actually use the research once it’s in. The time timeline approach, I think that’s trickier. We track things like technology readiness level over time. Yet, it’s such a slow-moving target, that it borders on not being that useful. We’re figuring out what the best approach to actually predicting progress is, and tracking readiness over time is one of those indicators. Ross: There are designs; you are a designer, I suppose, that makes it easier for you, but what is the process to then take all this data, insight, perspective, and lay that out on a page? Michell: Part of the challenge is always defining the boundaries. Similar to knowing who the audience is, the other side of that challenge is to find the boundaries of what’s useful. That becomes almost an editorial challenge, where determining, say we’re looking at the future of water treatment, so we’re looking at technologies that are likely to have a positive effect on how we filter, distribute, and manage water. Once you start zooming in on that, it becomes very important to understand what the boundaries of the research are. I think therein lies the challenge, because technologies, oftentimes jump from one category to the next, they’ll jump from one industry to another industry, with no respect for which companies are working in that space. That’s not how technology operates. The point I’m trying to make is going back through the water example, there are probably adjacencies, there are probably technologies that are next to the ones that we’re looking at right now, which might be potential suitors to address that underlying issue of filtering water, distributing water, etc. Knowing where to draw the boundary becomes the key challenge in any one of these exercises, both for how to scope the research as well as how to present it. Because once we’re working with said company who wants to look into water for treatment, making the case for like, Oh, check out this weird new material that’s being used to soak up oils but it might be useful to filtering water, making that connection is an editorial challenge, it’s a research challenge, sometimes it’s a relationship challenge, where you have to convince the stakeholder on the other side to actually have a look at that because it could be useful. Going back to your design question, defining the boundaries of what you’re looking at is key. Ross: So boundaries and adjacencies; and the boundaries, I suppose, it comes back to this taxonomy, or a structure? Michell: It does. At the same time, I’m wary of taxonomies. I’m not an ontological expert at all, this will be very superficial, but my understanding of taxonomy is that they’re always going to be applied afterward. As in nature, it doesn’t adhere to any taxonomies. There are no boundaries in nature, there’s no physics, there’s no chemistry, there’s no biology in nature, there’s just nature, and nature natures, that’s how the universe happens. Every time we define a boundary, it’s reductive, but it’s also useful but I’m increasingly wary of boundaries. In one of these experiments that we’ve been looking at, I think I referred to it earlier, the technology graph is this approach where we’re trying to look at the relationship between “all technologies”. The first thing that we throw out the window was the areas, the domains, or the fields, whatever you want to call it because they are applied afterward. When a technology is being built, it depends on other technologies. To have the carburetor, you first need to invent gasoline, then you need to invent motor, then the carburetor, then the actual automobile, all these dependencies do not respect fields. The carburetor doesn’t care that we would call it mobility 100 years later, and it’s not a mobility technology, per se. Going back to the taxonomy question, we are very much trying to find definitive definitions, finite definitions to these, whether they’re enabling technologies which means they give rise to several others, or whether they’re applications which is sort of the end of the process. Once you have an application, you don’t really do anything else, technologically with that. We are trying to define that, and at the same time, it might be an effort that is impossible, it remains to be tested. Ross: Yes, it’s part of that framework. Wrapping up, you’re living in this space and keeping across the edge of technological change, do you have any advice, generalized advice, around how to be able to keep across extraordinary change, and to help make sense of that? Michell: There are a few ways to answer that question. There are truths that have been here for longer than we have. That’s one way to soothe the anxiety of a future shot. In other words, if we feel that the world is speeding up, and most people I talked to feel that way, I’ve conducted surveys on this and I know that 80% of people I talked to will feel as if the world is speeding up, and those 20% percent are very interesting in their own right. But going back to your question, there are truths, there are facts, there are certainties, there are aspects of reality that have been here longer than we have. For some people, religion occupies that space. Because some religions do a wonderful job explaining the big picture in a way that puts us into perspective, and in a way that we do not feel as if we are solely responsible for making the whole thing work, which is a little bit of how the postmodern condition… In so many ways, we feel very responsible for the state of affairs, and that’s true, we are responsible for the climate emergency and what have you, and there are sort of longer truths that are also true, that we can fall back too which doesn’t have to be through religion, that’s just one pathway, it’s not my pathway but I think it’s a very, very valid pathway for so many people, and other ways to learn about the longer truths of how and why we’re here, that helps soothe future shock, because the new will keep happening, that’s not going to stop, the exponentials will keep applying the amount of things we can get away with online and things that are happening online, and that’s not going to slow down. It hasn’t been slowing down, and the only way to slow that down is to step out of it. To simply not be on “TikTok”. I think having that longer perspective really helps. A system that has always worked for me, it’s just making notes for myself. Everyone has their own note-taking method. Some people journal in the morning; some people prefer paper over digital. I have my own preference, and I think just acting in that space, just practicing note-taking, brings coherence to the challenge of our daily life, so I would highly recommend that. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your insights and time, Michel, it has been really valuable, really enjoyed it. Michell: Thank you so much Ross for the invitation, and hope to see more of you soon. The post Michell Zappa on how technology evolves, scouting what’s emerging, assessing technologies, and designing useful future infographics (Ep16) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Because there are so many people that I like, respect and trust in my network, the key is to filter that down to the relationships that are most informed, people that you trust for the right information.” – Gary Swart About Gary Swart Gary Swart, General Partner of leading venture capital firm Polaris Partners, focusing on investing in technology and healthcare companies. Prior to joining Polaris, he was CEO of oDesk, now Upwork, the world’s largest online work marketplace. He regularly appears in major media such as CNBC, NPR, Fox, and Washington Post to discuss marketplaces, the freelance economy, and the future of work. Website: Polaris Partners LinkedIn: Gary Swart Twitter: Gary Swart Facebook: Gary Swart What you will learn Why prioritisation on an area of expertise is most important (02:46) What are the important aspects of prioritisation (04:23) How creating an information routine helps prioritisation (07:01) Why reaching out with a favour keep you top of mind (09:32) What is deal, delegate, or delete (11:53) How to structure and frame information (15:09) How frameworks will filter opportunities you should take or avoid (17:39) How to consume information while doing other things to achieve work-life balance (19:53) What is the important difference between an operator and a venture capitalist (24:43) How to avoid decision fatigue (28:38) The benefits of a digital detox (31:00) Episode Resources ODesk Upwork Peloton New York Times Washington Post Wall Street Journal San Franciso Chronicle Inc. Magazine Fortune Magazine Kara Swisher Tim Ferris Amy Schulman Pfizer Darren Carroll Eli Lilly Amir Nashat Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Alexandria Cantley Harvard University Isaac Ciechanover Kindle ebook reader Transcript Ross Dawson: Gary, it’s awesome to have you on Thriving on Overload. Gary Swart: Ross, it’s so nice to be here. Nice to see you again. Ross: Gary, you’ve been a CEO of a large company, you’re now a venture capitalist, you have information all over the place so you have to make sense in your roles. How do you do it? Gary: Ross, not only do I have information coming from all sources, but it’s getting harder and harder. Especially in a COVID world, you’re online, you’re always on your phone or your PC, it’s just getting harder and harder. But one of the things that I realized is that the answer is in your question. I used to be a CEO of a company, and now I’m a venture capitalist, when I was looking at my next job, I decided that I wanted to build more balance into my career. As a CEO, it’s so hard. My priorities were work, family, health, and fitness. I had little time outside those three. I found that I was trying to build more things into health and fitness, which I now redefine as balance. I would say first and foremost, it was designing a career around my prioritization of what was important to me, and balance is now more important than ever, in my work life. Ross: There’s overload in terms of quality of work, but also in terms of the amount of information. Arguably, if you’re a VC, you have lots of companies that you have responsibilities for, and many more that you’re passing to see whether they make the cut. Surely, there’s an immense amount for you to be keeping across, not to mention just seeing what’s happening in the environment. Gary: Absolutely. Probably most important is to prioritize, and filter yet again. I remember when I was switching from an operator into the venture job, somebody said to me, in your first year of the venture, you see a hundred things, you’re going to want to do 50 of them, and by your fifth year in the venture, you’re going to see a hundred things, you don’t want to do any of them. It’s so true. Somebody told me early on was to prioritize, come up with your area of expertise, and don’t get too distracted by everything. I was coming out of the future of work, a marketplace business, having run oDesk for nine years, now Upwork. I started by saying, I’m a marketplace guy in the future of work and my first deal was in hybrid cloud management. It’s so easy to get distracted by a shiny object. Fortunately, that turned out to be a good investment, that company was acquired by Cisco. But now I’ve learned to filter and to pick a specialty in the niche, it gets much narrower on what your hill actually is, one, it helps you just stay more organized but two, it helps you to say no to things a lot sooner. Ross: Let’s dig into that prioritization. You’re saying part of the prioritization is saying, this is what I know, this is what I’m going to stick to and I’m not going to be looking outside of it, is that right? Gary: Yes, it is. What happens is, things may still be appealing, and you may take a meeting, but your chances of investing in it get narrower and narrower when you have a focus. I say don’t ignore a yellow light, the light is either red or green, the problem is when the light is yellow, and you still proceed forward. One of those times, you’re going to blow through a red light and get caught so it’s just better to stop at red lights earlier and not waste time. Ross: Are there any other aspects to the prioritization in terms of values, the time it will take, geography, or any other filters? Gary: Early on, again, along the lines of looking at everything, I remember, I was looking at a deal that was based in Minneapolis. I remember one of my partners saying Really? You want to go to Minneapolis, like once a month for a board meeting, there’s not enough in the Bay Area? I ended up passing on that deal and it turned out to be a very good deal. I said no, because of geography. I regretted that, but now post-COVID, it’s hard to get back on a plane. I have to go to a board meeting in Boston in a few weeks. On one hand, I’m looking forward to going to Boston, on the other hand, I’m saying oh, my gosh, it’s been nice to not have to get to the airport, fly cross country, get out to Burlington, Massachusetts, from Boston and go through the rigmarole just to sit in the boardroom. There is something around geography but I also think you can miss out on some great deals. The key is trying to organize around what’s most important to you. I always have said impact, growth and development, financial reward, and balance, on top of working with great people in something that you feel really passionate about and that you love. If it’s a great person, and it’s something you love, and the company has a huge opportunity for impact, and you’re going to learn a lot, then maybe your balance suffers a little bit, and it means getting on a plane, but trying to keep the prioritization around great people, impact, growth and development, financial reward, balance, and something that you care about, I think is important. Ross: Before you even just look at any company, you have to get a sense of what’s changing in the world; when you say future, it means that it’s happening, it’s changing, it’s moving fast. Let’s just get back to the basics in terms of routine? Do you have an information routine? Do you wake up in the morning, look at particular sources? What are your sources of information? What are your inputs? How do you make a sense of what’s going on? Gary: I think that’s something really important. You can have information overload just from email, so what I get inbound is unsolicited. I have to say I have never done a deal or done anything from unsolicited emails. First and foremost is who is sending you a message, who’s reaching out to you, who’s the universe of people that you trust, who would you call to ask about something important that hit your desk, probably one of the best things you can do is limit the number of sources that you trust for information. Let’s say that that’s 20 people, 20 people would be a lot. Every once in a while, maybe 21 enters onto your radar, and maybe number 17 falls off the list but keeping that universe tight, and recognizing who’s important in that universe, and then keeping in contact with those people, and staying top of mind, I think that is a really important technique. My universe tends to get too big, and then all of a sudden, you hear from somebody that you haven’t spoken to in two years, you say, oh, my gosh, I used to love that person and we did this great thing together, and I definitely should meet them for a coffee and hear what they have to say, so I tend to get distracted because, I don’t want to say my network is so big, but because there are so many people that I like, respect and trust in my network, but the key is trying to filter that down to the relationships that are most informed people that you trust for the right information. That’s a good technique. You didn’t ask this, but you get to the next step where you like something, who do you reach out to for that second opinion? If you’re going to ask around, who do you trust as the expert for information in different areas, I think is really important. Ross: Let’s say you have got a core group of trusted people who you know know and understand what’s going on, do you just set up conversations? How do you reach out to them? Obviously, there’s a value exchange, I’m sure they’re tapping your insights at the same time as you’re tapping theirs, how do you use them as sources of information and insight? Gary: I think an important thing is to do the job before you get the job. What I prefer to do is figure out how can I add value to that group., maybe you’re on a board with somebody, maybe you find a deal that’s not right for you, but maybe right for a person on that list, and you’re making that connection; by doing these things, you stay top of mind. I say do the job before you get the job. I’m not reaching out to Ross, for a favor, I’m reaching out to Ross with a favor. It’s really important. I can give you a quick anecdote. I had breakfast with somebody that I would consider on that list, or at least they used to be on the list, I would say I’d probably fallen out of touch with this person, but it was a seed investor that I trusted a lot and always respected, and we had breakfast. I said this is the sweet spot for me and here are the deals that I like, and about a month later, I met this company, and unfortunately, I met them too late. They accepted a term sheet two days after I met him for the first time. It turns out that this person I had brunch with a month earlier was on the board of that company. I called him and said, Hey, we just had brunch, I told you my sweet spot, this company is in that sweet spot. He said you know what, I just forgot, he goes, you would be perfect for this company, it just slipped my mind, and they raised so fast, they just started last week. It wasn’t top of mind a month earlier but here we are three weeks later, and I was just too late, so you have to stay top of mind, you’ve got to be in the river if you will. Ross: Right. In terms of internet-based, media-based, or other sources, do you have a particular routine, the particular sources that you go to or not? Gary: It’s so funny, Ross. I would say, during the election, I spent way too much time on Twitter consuming news that wasn’t important or, in some cases, accurate. I got totally pulled in and I realized that I was getting pulled into this vortex, which is maybe the curse and the beauty of a platform like Twitter. I realized that that was not the best source of information. Ross: It can be fun. Gary: Oh, it’s fun. It was amazing. I got consumed in probably both the positive and a negative way. I just got pulled way too in. But for us, Polaris now does a lot at the intersection of healthcare and technology. I’m trying to come up to speed on the healthcare side, it is coming mostly from the tech side. Among a lot of the distribution lists there, where they’re talking about deals being funded, and things important in that world, I would say that I’ve concentrated my efforts more around healthcare than the tech side since I’m probably more familiar with the tech side. I rely on my partners. Some of our partners are physicians by training, so they’re sending around interesting white papers, or things that are relevant to areas that we’re looking at, things like telemedicine, or remote patient monitoring, or health care services, or health IT, anything around that, trying to get smart about the future with regards to healthcare and technology, really at the intersection. We’ll ask around. I’ll try and organize materials. If I get something where it’s interesting, but not important, I might park it for later. But I’m very much a disciple of a zero inbox, deal with it, delegate it, or delete it. I find that if I table something, rarely do I get back to it. It’s almost like it must not have been that important if I tabled it. I try and deal with it, delegate it, or delete it. Ross: When you’ve got let’s say, for example, these white papers, information around the healthcare and technology, do you take notes in any form, do you just soak that in, do you build some kind of structures or frameworks for thinking about the space? Do you identify any gaps that you are trying to fill? Gary: We, as a firm, build the structure around the areas of interest. I personally will try and put it into a bucket, like, where would this fit in this framework? Like remote patient monitoring or telemedicine or healthcare services or health IT. Then what specifically, is this a data play, is this an infrastructure play, is this mental health, or a specific disease? I’ll try and figure out where does it fit in that framework, and then try and prioritize it. Say, okay, how important is this? For example, a few months ago, we invested in a mental health company, and then I was looking at everything around mental health, and trying to get smart about the technology plays, the biometrics, the wearables, Stella, the Pure Platform, so we went deep on that and the beauty is we have associates at Polaris, who are good at research. We ended up with a 20-page memo that summarized the whole landscape. I was able to delegate a lot of that to come up with a summary of the whole thing without having to dive into each piece of information individually. Ross: Is that framework just internal, proprietary, visible, or shared with any people outside the firm? Gary: That’s proprietary, although I share it with people who are close to us, who may be on the sourcing side, or experts in the field, or people who are at seed stage firms, where we typically don’t compete in order to help filter or help guide opportunities to us. Ross: Right. That framework then becomes a way of being able to understand where things fit within a landscape and set some of the priorities which you see whether they’re relevant to you or not. Gary: Exactly. If you think about it, a two-by-two framework of the level of interest, how interested are we on the x-axis? And how qualified is the opportunity on the Y? Things can be really interesting, just not qualified. I typically don’t do seed-stage deals, we may but we typically don’t. That means that they’re beyond the seed stage, they have some revenue. Then, where did it come from? Who sourced the opportunity? And is it a first-time founder? I often say people PowerPoint and Excel, are they, exceptional people? Are they telling a good story? Do they have some Excel to back it up? And so there’s a certain level of qualification, where it may be interesting, but not qualified. If you trust, you put a filter on the front you trust where that information comes from, then right off the bat, you have other people filtering for you. Ross: Right. I suppose that there are two ways. One is that you need to tell them the frame, in a way if you’re delegating the research, you need to tell them what you’re looking for and what the frame is. That’s part of almost the synthesis or the higher-level thinking and then there’s still the application of that, or making sense, or the big picture, higher-order thinking which comes from that. Gary: Yes. Some things may be qualified but not that interesting because they fit-out of an area of focus, or which may move over to the right, we may become interested if it’s so qualified, or something may not be qualified today because it’s too early, but something that we like, we can add some value, stay close, and maybe interesting later. Ross: Is there anything you do in terms of managing your schedule to block out time in particular for searching for information or thinking about that, or deep dives, or getting into a synthesis frame of mind to see the higher bigger picture, or just scanning? Gary: Probably not enough, I will say this. I did say that balance was more important to me and along those lines, I like to exercise. What I’ll do is I’ll save some information for when I’m on the peloton. I find that I can have the music and the instructor on the peloton on low. I actually enjoy consuming material while I’m getting a little bit of exercise, so on the bike is not a bad time to do that, stationary bike, not a road bike. I live in the Palo Alto area but we also have a house in Santa Cruz, which is about an hour away, so the drive back and forth across the hill, that’s two hours a day where I can either one, have a conference call or two, consume content, so I find that that’s a great way to get through a lot of material, and that’s listening not actually reading. On the bike, it’s mostly reading not listening. Ross: How fast do you listen to your audio? Gary: 1.5x. Ross: There is such a thing as too fast. Gary: Yes. Here’s the interesting thing. I actually read at 0.75x. Sometimes I have to reread things over. Listening is preferred for me in a lot of cases. Ross: But you do choose to read when you’re on the bike? Gary: Yes. To your question about diving deeper, and really looking at a landscape and trying to get smart, one of the things that I found is, that’s probably not my strength, and so leveraging others to help do that. If somebody helps organize it, I’m fine consuming it, but the actual going and organizing, it’s probably not my strong suit, so leveraging others to do that. In a lot of cases, there are experts, you can subscribe to services even. Fortunately, we have resources in our firm that can help with that. As I mentioned earlier around that mental health memo, that was spectacular, hiring somebody who’s really good at doing all the research, and creating that landscape was fantastic. Ross: There are particular information sources; do you use aggregators? Do you go to major media publications, to industry journals, to anything which you find as consistent sources of information? Gary: It’s all of the above. As far as the major media publications, I subscribe to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, because I live in the Bay Area. I still like that periodicals, like Inc. Magazine and Fortune and the like, I like consuming those on weekends in the backyard. I find there’s a lot of fluff, but I also enjoy some of the articles here and there. I still like the print version. For all the others, online is fine. I start my day with the New York Times digest, to me, it’s almost like world news. I’ll start with the New York Times, I’ll go to the Wall Street Journal. New York Times is general, their digest is a little bit of politics, a little bit of COVID, a little bit of late-night humor, what happened on the late night last night, I like to enjoy that as a high level. The Wall Street Journal’s financial, the Washington Post is political, so just to get through those, that can be half an hour on the peloton, 45 minutes on the peloton, just to get through the world news before I dive into industry-specific or, venture-specific stuff. I still like TechCrunch, I still like Kara Swisher, I’ll still listen to her podcast, we were talking about Tim Ferriss earlier, so listening to founder stories or interviews, I feel like I learned a lot there as well. Ross: So this comes back to you’re very experienced, paid your dues, you’re the VC now, how do you feel that that has come together in terms of the breadth of your understanding? Or is this simply by accretion, where just over time, you’re building experience? Are there any ways that you facilitate that wisdom over time? Ross: The interesting thing, Ross, is one of my good friends says the experience is what you get when you don’t get all the other things you want. I’m older now. I’ve had a long career. I feel like I’ve had a lot of different experiences, successful startups, failed startups, I started at a little tiny company that through a series of mergers and acquisitions, and going public, and more acquisitions, and getting acquired, was ultimately acquired by IBM. I went from employee number 25 to employee number 125,000. You just can’t replicate that experience. I feel like I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons through this journey. I love sharing my stories. The wisdom, if you want to define it as wisdom, a lot of it was mistakes, it was the experience that came from parts of the journey that maybe weren’t enjoyable or successful even, but that I enjoy talking about. I’ll spend a lot of time chatting with entrepreneurs, speaking at various business schools, there’s a couple of case studies on oDesk, our strategy, and why we took the strategy, and even about the oDesk-Enlace merger, why we chose to merge, and I’ll still speak as the protagonist at different business schools on that case, and I enjoy that. For me, it’s part of honing and thinking about the experiences, and what did I actually learn? But maybe, to your question, that doesn’t make you a great investor. It may make you a decent operator but that doesn’t make you a great venture capitalist. Venture capital is about making money for your limited partners. It’s not about the experience. There may be people on the players’ team that are better investors but what I like about the venture job, especially with our firm is that you feel like you’re part of a team. My strength as an operator, maybe somebody else picked the investment, but now I can help that CEO to become or be a better CEO whether it’s through coaching, counseling, or stories about some of my experiences. Because I have so many battle scars in this area, my operational experience makes me a valuable member of our team with varied skill sets. As I mentioned, the other interesting thing is that we’re investing at the intersection of healthcare and technology. I mostly come from the technology side. But, my partner, Amy Schulmer ran consumer products and was General Counsel at Pfizer, Darren Carroll ran Eli Lilly, Amir Nashat is a Ph.D. scientist at MIT, and Alexandria Cantley came out of Harvard, and Isaac Ciechanover is a physician by training. We’ve got this varied skill set on our bench and can bring lots of different resources to bear in a healthcare technology opportunity. Ross: Fantastic. Any final thoughts or advice? Let’s say there’s someone who’s an aspiring VC or investor, do you have any advice around this idea of thriving on overload, of making sense of what’s by its nature, too much information, to be able to make better decisions? Gary: Yes, too much information for sure. Number one is, I would say, limit the information. How do you do that? You filter it, you define and prioritize the sources that you trust, and focus there. We talked about deal with, delegate, or delete. I would say avoid decision fatigue, like too many inputs. I struggled with this as a CEO. You have enough information, but you want more information. I’ll give you an example of this, we redid our house a few years ago, and I remember looking at two doorknobs, do you want this one or that one and saying, I like this one better, and that one is good enough, my wife would say, we need to look at more doorknobs, and I’m like, we have enough, we don’t want more doorknobs, I’ll be like, okay, so three, we’ll pick A, B, or C. It’s avoiding decision fatigue; too many inputs is not great. Then as we talked about, how do you organize the material in a way that makes sense for you, whether it be through frameworks or the like, and then I would say, there’s one other thing that you can do, and you asked this, and I didn’t give this as an answer. You said you take time for yourself to actually do the deep dive and to think about and strategize about the future of work and what specifically, and the like; there, a really valuable thing to do is just unplug. Too many inputs or too many distractions, there’s got to be flow time where you shut this off, and you shut that off and you say, I’m just going to do this. I don’t know if you picked up on this, but I’m a multi-tasker. I’m consuming while I’m on the bike. Sometimes that can be valuable, other times not so much. Multitasking can be good but also taking the time to unplug and think about it. If you don’t mind, I know this is running on, but just one quick story around that. My wife had a milestone birthday a few years ago and she said, we’re going away, we went to Hawaii and she said, I would like a digital detox vacation, so no devices. I said I prefer a Kindle as opposed to a hardcover book. She said, Nope, no Kindle because you can get your email. I like the Apple Watch, she was like, no Apple Watch. You can still get messages. She said, for my birthday, I would like digital detox and she packed his suitcase full of hardcover books. She did the research and had a whole suitcase filled with books. We have four kids and she brought everybody into the room and said, Okay, pick a book. I read three books in six days in Hawaii, and it was fantastic. It was so great. Now, you could have your phone in the room when you weren’t in public, but nothing at the table, nothing on the beach, nothing when everybody was together. I have to say it was really good. It was so good that on a subsequent vacation, my kid said, how about digital detox? Just a point about unplugging and taking time to not over-consume. Ross: Absolutely. It’s not a complete cure, but it can certainly help balance out. Thank you so much for your time and your insight, Gary. It’s been a fantastic conversation. Gary: Thanks, Ross. Sorry for my information overload. I’m so passionate about it. I probably tried to pack too much information into this conversation. Ross: Not at all. Thanks. Gary: Awesome. Thanks, Ross. The post Gary Swart on achieving balance, prioritization factors, filtering by relationships, and using frameworks (Ep15) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I find it much more useful to pick a certain collection of trusted sources that have a demonstrated history of adding value around a given topic and subscribing to those.” – Marshall Kirkpatrick About Marshall Kirkpatrick Marshall Kirkpatrick was the first writer hired by TechCrunch and helped drive its early growth through the quality of his work, then moved to become Co-Editor of ReadWriteWeb, then one of the defining publications on the Internet economy. He left to found Little Bird, which uses network analysis to discover top influencers, experts, and insights. Little Bird was acquired in 2016. Marshall continues his work to improve the information ecosystem and develop better information systems. Website: Marshall Kirkpatrick LinkedIn: Marshall Kirkpatrick Twitter: Marshall Kirkpatrick Facebook: Marshall Kirkpatrick Instagram: Marshall Kirkpatrick What you will learn Why source selection is essential in working with information (02:02) Why source size depends on the topic (04:01) Marshall’s guide to advanced Twitter search (09:31) How to maximise the benefits of a news aggregator (12:30) How to create a news article when you find a subject with high engagement (17:11) How to store and catalogue content you want to consume (20:12) Marshall’s method for connecting which he calls Triangle Thinking (26:41) How to read a book for maximum synthesis (30:15) How to create and use STEEP analysis (32:10) Why it is increasingly important to search for and listen to people on the margins of political power (38:38) Episode Resources Anki Flashcard App Symphonic Thinking Doc Searls Steve Gillmor Walt Whitman ReadWriteWeb Richard MacManus PostRank Delicious Magpie RSS Feedly Techmeme Memeorandum Metaweb Pocket If This Then That (IFTT) Bruce McTague Roam App April Dunford Tom Cheesewright Daniel Pink How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler HyperWrite STEEP Analysis Incasting John Hagel Damon Centola McKinsey Gartner Deloitte Forrester Accenture Transcript Ross Dawson: Marshall, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Ross, thank you so much for having me on the show. What a great opportunity for you and me to meet, and to compare notes. I can’t wait to listen to all the episodes. Ross: They are coming soon. Marshall, you have always thrived on information as a journalist, at one point as a tech journalist, so you got to keep on top of stuff there. You’ve built a very interesting startup. A lot of other guys you’ve been across, and all sorts of change. What’s the essence of that? How do you do that? Marshall: The essence of it, I believe, is that I focus on a few fundamental steps. The first is source selection. I am careful and deliberate about building out a library of sources on a topic that I want to follow. Then I set up an interface for myself, that makes it easy for me to capture both, the most important pieces of information coming from those sources and a serendipitous mix of other information coming from those sources. Then finally, I try to process the information that I get through tools like spaced repetition flashcards, and linked notes taking, a database, paper and pen, symphonic thinking, and drawing of connections between various things that I’ve read over the years. That combination of source selection, interface creation, and post-processing for synthesis has been the fundamental story of how I have worked with information over the years. Ross: Yes, a lot more people should learn to do it like you, I’d say. Marshall: Thanks. I hope that this show can help. I want to share some of the practices that I have developed through trial and error over the years. I’d like to tell people about those practices, tools, and strategies, so that some of them may be useful to some people, and/or they may just make people feel freer to experiment themselves, and come up with methods that work well for them. Ross: Okay, let’s dig into it. So source selection, is this explicit? Do you have a certain number of sources that you’re around? How many sources are there? And how does that evolve? How do you develop that list and evolve it? Marshall: It really depends on the topic. I’d say that the most important step for me in source selection was just deciding to focus on that. I was inspired in large part by something that Doc Searls said, almost 20 years ago, when talking about using an RSS reader, and I believe, Doc Searls and Steve Gillmor were discussing keyword search versus source subscription, and Doc said, If I listened to everything that was published, that contained certain keywords that were of interest to me, it would just be really noisy, a very mixed quality. He said I find it to be much more useful to pick a certain collection of trusted sources that have a demonstrated history of adding value around a given topic and subscribing to those. Now Steve took a different perspective. Steve Gillmor back in the day was so set on the serendipity that he refused to even share links to things with people, he’d say, go Google for it, go find it yourself because he knew that as you searched around for something, you were liable to come across all kinds of other magical unforeseen insights, as you finally made your way to your destination. I do think that that combination is really delightful but I think that the source selection reminds me of something that I read, Walt Whitman once said about writing poetry in iambic pentameter; he said, there is a special beauty to creating art within constraints; so having a finite set of sources I monitor, it might be 10 people. If I’m building a custom search engine, for example, to search in the archival content of an organization, these days, I limit that to 10 sources, largely because Google Custom Search now limits to only 10 sources that it’ll index, but that’s fine. There are ways to work around that. I usually don’t bother, because 10 canonical sources on a topic are great. But when I was covering various industries, as a journalist, or various sectors of the industry, I would go out and build a collection of 300 sources on, say, big data, or geolocation, or mobile, whatever the trend was. When I am watching climate change, for example, I’ve got a collection of 1000 people and organizations who are specialists in climate, that I monitor. Different topics and different circumstances warrant different sizes of the source list. Ross: So your sources are individuals more than media entities? Marshall: Not necessarily, no. I really like a mix of both. I’d say that there’s a different flavor to the sources that you get. Say in a Twitter list, you’ll get a good mix, but perhaps a preponderance of individuals. There’s a certain tone to the conversation, there are lots of replies. It’s easy to sort tweets by engagement. I can say, for example, search inside this Twitter list of 1000, climate experts, individuals, and organizations, but largely individuals for anything containing the words indigenous land rights, that has more than 20 favorites, and sort by recency, and I can find that content, then click and open those tweets and see the dialogue that has occurred around them in replies. That is one flavor of research. But if I am using an RSS folder in an OPML file, a collection of RSS feeds, then perhaps I’m monitoring climate or other organizations, maybe innovation organizations, or management consulting organizations, and reading just the official posts that have come out of that organization’s feed reader. Not many individuals these days are able to blog as consistently as you do, Ross. The fact that your RSS feed just keeps on bringing the hits is amazing. But RSS is largely dominated by organizations these days. Not all the content that gets published over an RSS feed gets tweeted about, so there’s a different tone and a different type of update that can be found in those sources. Ross: How do you search within the way you were describing a moment ago? What tool do you use for that? Marshall: Twitter. I just use a little-known but freely available advanced search protocol in the Twitter interface. Some of your listeners may or may not be familiar with the standard search engine protocol of site:domain space keyword to search, not the web at large as they go into Google and say. For example, while I was on a run here before this podcast, I searched site: Ross Dawson.com space post-capitalism, because I had seen you had used that phrase, and I wanted to see what you had written. I was about three kilometers into my jog, so I had to do it with my thumb on my phone and my phone was shaking all around, but it worked out well enough so that I was able to pull up your article about capital market efficiency and post finance reporting, and it was really intriguing. Similarly, you can use that same search protocol or protocol like it on Twitter to search just inside of a specific Twitter list. A Twitter list is a feature that makes it easy for people to collect a bounded set of topical sources, and that set can be queried, just like a single website can be queried, or a group of websites can be queried using Google Custom Search or another custom search engine. When searching Twitter, the protocol is list: then there’s a number in the list URL. This changed about a year ago, but these days, you view the list, look up at the number in the URL of the list, search inside of that, so list:number space keyword. Then it will bring you back all of the tweets just inside of that specific list of people. You can say, show me what my collection of climate people have said about a given topic. Now show me what my favorite futurists have said about a given topic. If you’ve got a Twitter list of my favorite people, search inside of those people’s tweets alone, and that closely constrained context really changes the search experience. Ross: Yes, that’s really powerful, this idea of search within as in, don’t search the universe, but choose your own curated sources and then search within that. Marshall: It’s so funny, it’s a simple thing but I think there’s something counterintuitive or unfamiliar with the idea, it’s not terribly complicated, but it’s not widely done. It’s even a little bit challenging to explain sometimes. When I worked as a journalist, I put all of these things together, for example, and a little bit more, and the central hub of our research. At ReadWriteWeb, when I was the editor there, or co-editor rather, with founder Richard MacManus, we had a dashboard, where we took the 300 top sources in big data, the 300 top sources in geolocation, we had 12 different topics we were monitoring, we went out and through link analysis and using free off the shelf tools, built these collections of 300. Then we ran those 300, each of their RSS feeds, we ran through a startup called PostRank, that would score each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10 by the relative number vis a vis. relative to other items in the same feed, it would score them by the number of comments, shares on social, bookmarks, Delicious, and add it. Then you could say give me an RSS feed of just the 9.0s and above from Ross’s blog, for example. Then I might take 300 other futurists and say give me the 9.0s, the relative breakout hits from all those sources, and I take all of those RSS feeds, we splice them together and Yahoo! Pipes to make one RSS feed of the big breakout hits in the given sector, then we ran them through an open-source tool called Magpie RSS, that was really simple, just PHP display of our items in an RSS feed, so we could have the 10 most recent breakout hits in a given sector, open up the dashboard, view all those, and whenever we saw something that among deep subject matter experts had spiked, and their audience, we’d say, Hmm, would that be of interest to a general-purpose audience? If so, let’s grab it and consider writing about it. When we see that, then we go into… hope you don’t mind if I tell you the parts two and three of the process? Ross: I was just going to get to one question. We have dumb aggregators as in just things that pull RSS feeds, but also algorithmic aggregators. I’m just wondering if you use any of the algorithmic aggregators? Marshall: These days, the closest I do for that, I do use Feedly’s today tab, where they will serve us the most read content in a given folder in your collection. I’ve got an Art folder, for example, in my Feedly account, and when I go and I click that, it’ll show me presumably the URLs that not everyone has the same art collection, or art feed collection, as I do, but the URLs have been clicked through in other people’s subscriptions lesson. Those URLs that have been clicked through the most, up here, up at the top, and then down below that are just a raw river of news in reverse chronological order. I have built and used wherever possible two sides of the coin, where I say I want the top news from these sources, and I want the latest news from these sources. I’m going to try to scan as much as I can at the top, and I’m just going to dip my head into the latest because it’s much more high volume and we’ll see what comes at it. Ross: Great. Marshall: What about you? Can you recommend an algorithmic feed reader? Ross: Techmeme and Memeorandum are part of my daily use. Marshall: Me too. Are we counting those? For goodness sakes? Back when I was working as a tech journalist, I would check Techmeme 10 times a day, it’s probably down to two or three times these days, and Memeorandum, I’ll check a good five to 10 times a day. Ross: Yes, whereas your Google News or Apple news are far less interesting. Anyway, so back to the process. So you’ve got your feeds… Marshall: So something has broken out among subject matter experts that’s got a relatively high engagement among their audiences, and we take a look at it, and we say, Oh, we want to write about that. Then, step two is that we built a system, where we scraped the Twitter bios of everyone who followed anyone on our staff. We made a simple little search engine where you could search for keywords in people’s bios who were following anyone on our staff. For example, we had a semantic web widget in our dashboard, because that was just the rage 10-12 years ago, and we saw that Google acquired this company called Metaweb, and we said, Oh, that’s a general interest story right there, so we searched inside of our Twitter follower network for the word Semantic Web, we had them ranked by a number of followers, we saw who on staff they were following, so I was able to jump into our Slack predecessor into a Skype chat room and say, Hey, Sarah, would you DM this lady, she follows you, and tell her we need urgent expert comment on this news. We’d fire off three, four, or five of those requests, and people would say, Oh, my goodness, you thought of me to ask for input on this. I followed you two years ago, or three years ago, and of all people, you thought of me? Sometimes we’d tell them that we have a system, but most of the time, it’s a Yep, we thought of you, we thought you’d be the perfect person to ask for comment. Then, as we waited for those comments to come back, we would also go over to our custom search engine, where we had indexed the archives of all of those top 300 blogs that we were monitoring for breakout hits, so we could search for whatever Semantic Web experts said about Metaweb in the past? Then we were able to say, well in the industry, Metaweb has a reputation for this, that, and the other thing; and people would say, you just happen to have read that blog post 18 months ago and have recall of it now to be able to link to it in your new coverage. Before you know it within, usually our goal was to be in less than 30 minutes, we get a blog post up that covered the news before our competitors that had multiple real-time expert feedback in it, and cited multiple archival pieces of research from subject matter experts, and that was how we competed with other tech publications. It was awesome. It was really fun. Ross: Yes, that creates value, obviously, for the people reading the articles but in a way, whether you’re sharing or not, this is processed to be able to get some real insight. The next phase is the pulling and storing, or cataloging, or linking? What’s that process? Marshall: Yes, these days, I consume this content and process it through a couple of different methods. I take in a lot of content through my ears. I really love Pocket on my iPhone and its text-to-speech capabilities. I’ve got an If This Then That applet set up to say anytime I like a tweet that has a link in it, send that link to Pocket. Then I can go for a jog, or do my dishes, or clean my bathroom, or do whatever mundane activities, the jogging is not mundane, it’s beautiful, but having just all of the articles that I’ve bookmarked read as a playlist. I also got a good PDF text-to-speech app that works fairly well. There are lots of them out there. I’ll go and I’ll do that, then I’ll either stop or after I finish running. I also have the other If This Then That, there are a few select sources where I take the whole RSS feed, and just pipe it straight into Pocket. There’s a short number of people whose content is just so remarkable, lately, Bruce McTague, calls himself the gentleman thief of business ideas, writes these long really thought-provoking blog posts, and every one of them goes straight into my phone, and then straight into my ears, and straight into my brain. Then I’ll stop, and I’ll take note of things that caught my interest, and I’ll put them into Roam Research. For more than a year now, I’ve been using Roam Research. I like that pretty well. I do all my note-taking in Roam, but reading notes, in particular, I tag as reading, and then once every one to four weeks, depending on when I’m able to take the time on the weekend, I’ll go in, I’ll load up all of the things that I’ve tagged reading, many of which are from paper books, but some of which are from digital as well, and listening, and I will put them into Anki Spaced Repetition mobile flashcard app. Then each morning, I’ll spend between five and 15 minutes, reviewing flashcards of the things that I have read. Then they’ll come back up when I’m working with someone, I’ll say, oh this reminds me of, and I’ll either have it recall, or I’ll just remember that it’s there, and then I’ll go search in Roam, or in Anki, to be able to pull up an original quote, to sites. Ross: For the flashcards, you’re accepting a phrase, or a quote, or a fact? Marshall: Yep, whatever I want to try to remember. If I open up my Anki flashcard app right now, for example, I read “most products are exceptional only”, now I have to identify what’s on the flip side of that flashcard. On the other side, what it’s going to say is most products are exceptional only when seen within their very best frame of reference, said April Dunford, in her book, Obviously Awesome. Let’s see if I got it right. Flip it over, when we understand them within their best frame of reference, April Dunford. I got it. Now I’m going to hit the green button, and it says, this is a new one to you, so we’re going to show it to you again in 10 minutes. But if you’ve got it wrong, we would have shown it to you later in one minute, so that’s good. Then I get another one that says Tom Cheesewright from Book of the Future, once said curation is my shorthand term for the dual skills of discovery and qualification. That was a hard one, I didn’t really get it, so I’m going to self-report and now it’s going to show me that one a little bit earlier, so those are the kinds of things that I have. Ross: So the idea is these are things which you use in conversation or that are just feeding your views or ideas? Marshall: A lot of them, yes. Some of them say things like if you do X, and the flipside says your life will fall apart, then I’ll be, that’s right, I don’t want to do that again. There are certainly some life lessons learned as well as things I’ve read. Ross: In terms of getting connections have you found Roam research useful for drawing together connections between ideas or do you use other tools or other frames of mind? Marshall: Roam is pretty good. I don’t use it as thoroughly as some people do for that. I have a random plugin there that I really like that, at the top of each day’s notes, will randomly print three of my previous notes tagged either reading, best practices, or lessons learned. Often, I connect those, but probably my favorite method for connections is something I came up with myself. It’s a method that I call Triangle Thinking and the way that I do it is I make a list of three different things. They can be related or unrelated, or random, but they’re usually things that I’m working on or thinking about, inspired by Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, where he says if your work is in routine cognitive labor, you’re in trouble because computers are going to eat your lunch, but there are non-routine cognitive and emotional social labor, especially human, that’s where the future lies in terms of future work, and in particular, what he calls symphonic thinking, or the ability to draw connections between seemingly disconnected ideas or entities is a key skill for the future. When I read that, I said, alright, I’m going to take three things, I’m going to put them on a piece of paper, I’m going to draw connections, I’m going to label them A, B, and C, and I’m going to ask, standing from the vantage point of A, what would A have to offer B? And then I’d flip it around and say, Now, if I was looking from the vantage point of B, what would B offer A? And then B to C, and C to A, so I’d write out six unidirectional connecting thoughts between things. Without fail, at least one and usually two or three of them, I’ll look at afterward and say, Now, that is a keeper. That’s a good one right there. I hadn’t thought of that, and I’d like it, I’m going to use it. Sometimes I’ll bring in a wildcard as well, and add that on and say, Now, what does that thought mean for climate change? Or what does that thought mean for innovation? That idea generation practice is something that I try to do almost every day. Ross: That’s fantastic. Have you written about this? Marshall: I have not, no. My buddy Bill Johnston has been telling me I should for a while. Ross: You should. I’ll add my voice to that. Marshall: Thanks. Awesome. Ross: I think that’s really insightful. I actually haven’t read A Whole New Mind, so I think, synthesis is a foundation of the way I think about the world. I love that frame, symphonic. Marshall: Symphonic thinking, I think other people refer to similar things with the phrase associative creativity. Ross: Yes. I think that’s just a layer below. Association is one thing. The synthesis is the overarching thing when you’re bringing it all together. So associative is one, that’s the foundation for creativity and innovation, but the symphony or the synthesis is bringing that all together into a whole, so that’s a higher order. Marshall: Yes, I like that a lot. It’s going to be my 45th birthday tomorrow. I think it was… Ross: Happy birthday. Marshall: Yes, thanks. I’m celebrating all month long. I can’t remember what birthday it was a while ago but a few years ago, I bought myself a copy of Mortimer Adler’s book called How to read a book. I really like the way that he talks about, you take something you’re reading, and there are a few basic questions that are good to ask about it. Like, what is it saying? What’s its argument? Do you believe that argument? Do you think that it’s credible? What are the constituent parts inside of the thing? How are they woven together? When I take the time to be mindful about it and deliberately think about it, that can also be super helpful. But there are so many different possibilities. I feel like there are opportunities to find new ways to relate to synthesis. I feel like we’re just starting to scratch the surface of it. A couple of new things that I’ve started doing recently are using AI, specifically, GPT-3 based startup called HyperWrite to finish sentences and paragraphs based on a piece of information, or to help direct where I should go and search. I’ll start typing a couple of sentences and then say go, and it will use open AI’s corpus of the Internet to come up with the next logical sentences, based on things that I have no domain knowledge of, but that will then help direct where I should go and look, and what terms I should search for, and what some arguments might be to consider. That I really enjoy. Ross: That’s very interesting. You’re a practitioner of future thinking and foresight would love to hear about how do you look for, find, make sense of, and make value from information. Marshall: That too, I feel like I’m just beginning to scratch the surface of. I realized a few weeks, months ago that I have this big collection of custom search engines. For example, I’ve got the 10 best sources on artificial intelligence, the 10 best sources on climate change, the 10 best sources on indigenous matters, all on my homepage on Marshallk.com. I’ve made them publicly available to anyone else. I go back to that myself. It’s my little mini-library of dynamic reference books. It’s essentially like the Encyclopedia of English language Chinese news coverage in that custom search engine. I realized a few weeks ago, I had never created a STEEP, or PESTEL, or added collection of custom searches, and now I have. Ross: Define those for the listeners. Marshall: That is common foresight model that says when we look at a thing, and anticipate its prospective futures, let’s look at it from a number of different vantage points in terms of how social change might impact or be impacted by this thing, technological change, economic, environmental, and political, and sometimes people include legal, or other ways of doing things, so I just built a collection of custom search engines for myself on each of those different facets of the STEEP analysis. When I’m doing research on, say, travel and hospitality, I did some research on it the other day, I went and searched for some relevant keywords inside of the archives, looked with a focus on recent but not exclusively at all, articles from the top 10 websites covering culture and anthropology. Then I searched for travel and hospitality in the top 10 technology websites, everything from TechCrunch to MIT Technology Review. There’s so much content being published every day, all we can take is just a little tiny spoon to pull up a spoonful from the giant cauldron of soup that’s out there. But a precisely shaped and considered spoon perhaps can come up with some real gold, some real nuggets. That’s one way, is through custom search engines focused on STEEP in particular. PwC did a STEEP analysis on the future of the insurance industry 10 years ago, my favorite STEEP analysis I’ve ever seen. Because they did probably a Delphi model, where they went out and interviewed a whole bunch of subject matter experts about a series of questions, then obfuscated their identities and language use, then re-shared with everyone what their peers had said in response to the question and said, So what do you think about this? And did three rounds of obfuscated but expert-driven discussions about various topics that they then used to populate a STEEP model on what the insurance industry might look like in 2020. They did this in 2010, but they did it not just in one column, social, technological, environmental, economic, and political but they did it as a continuum, where they said if things trend conservative, if they trend very conservative, here’s what it’ll look like in terms of social; moderately conservative, just straight up, no change; moderately progressive, very progressive. It was just a really rich map of prospective futures. I have done a lightweight reproduction of some of that in some analysis that I’ve done recently. Ross: Fantastic. Marshall: Then I love incasting. It’s simplest thing Wendy Schultz calls the little black dress of foresight, real simple tool, where you take a prospective future scenario, and you ask yourself if the world ends up looking like this, what’s a big win that hits the front page of this thing called a newspaper that we used to have, answer that question then, what’s newly prohibited or illegal? And a negative consequence of that future scenario? And then finally, how do you get to work each day in that world? What does just the practical utility around this matter look like? Oftentimes, I’ll go and say, Okay, I’m going to build a set of domain experts that have an extensive published history, on websites or Twitter, and then I will search for keywords to surface content that they have written related to this topic that I’m researching. Then I’ll categorize some of the things that I’ve found into that model and say, Oh, this one looks like one that could inform a big win, Oh, that sounds like a problem, that would help me illustrate a newly prohibited activity, or how I would get to work each day, so combine that information, gathering the foresight models in that way. Ross: Just to round out, is there anything else other than what we’ve talked about that you think would be a particularly valuable insight, or perspective, or practice that you have? Marshall: I think that, that one of the often missing elements to these kinds of analyses, and one that I strive to add more and more in my work is a matter of source selection, but in particular with political power in mind. John Hagel talks about how the value creation is increasingly occurring on the margins of power inside of an organization, where frontline workers are solving real-time novel problems, and the insights generated from that work is really one of the best sources of new value, so listening to and empowering those people on the margins of power is essential. Damon Centola says that innovation occurs in a Goldilocks zone best, where you are not so close to the center of power that you’ll be crushed by the immune system of the network, so you want to be out closer to the margins, but not so far outside of the margins, where you don’t have access to the flow of resources for the ability, for your innovative ideas to get traction. Of course, every organization is just a fractal of the universe in general. When I do this analysis, I increasingly try to look for people who are on the margins of traditional political power in a wildly unjust world. I’ll search inside of the tweets of women futurists or women in tech, or I’ve got a Black Twitter, people of color, influencers on Twitter, or indigenous organizations, Custom Search engine, so I don’t want to just search inside of management consulting firms, they produce incredible stuff, the content that McKinsey, and Gartner, and Deloitte, and Forrester, and Accenture publish is just amazing, but I don’t want to live in a world that is entirely defined by those kinds of organizations. There are ways to build tools to make sure to look for perspectives from sources outside of the traditional power structures who have been marginalized. That power dynamic is changing dramatically these days. If you are not paying attention to, learning from, and flowing some resources towards people who have been unjustly marginalized, and are increasingly empowered, moving towards the center in a period of disruption, then you’re going to be caught flat-footed and not feel really great about yourself. There are incredibly awesome opportunities coming from newly empowered traditionally marginalized populations who are publishing their thoughts and their work. We can stop and listen to those. We can set up tools to listen, and there’s a lot of innovation and inspiration out there, so I want to encourage folks to do that as well. Ross: That’s a fantastic point. It’s so important for so many reasons. If you just look at the middle the core, then you’re missing a lot of what’s important and you sometimes just need to take some deliberate frames, all right, this is what’s excluded voices. Marshall: Practically and ethically, I think, it’s essential. Ross: Fantastic, thank you so much for your time and your insight, Marshall. It has been really valuable. Marshall: Thank you for including me, Ross. I can’t wait to listen to the rest of the episodes and just learn from you in this. I really feel like we’re in a period of such dramatic information overload that dealing with that, both in terms of consumption and publishing effectively, and getting a hold of people through dignified, diligent, shirtsleeve tugging, is such a new set of skills. I think it’s a service to all of us that you’re doing here to interview folks so we can all learn from each other. Ross: Thank you. It was great talking to you, Marshall. Marshall: You too, Ross. The post Marshall Kirkpatrick on source selection, connecting ideas, diverse thinking, and enabling serendipity (Ep14) appeared first on Humans + AI.