Humans + AI

“There are a number of people whom I respect and follow online because they are out-of-the-box thinkers. They might come up with something that I hadn’t encountered before. Then I pay attention because they are a trusted relationship.” – Annalie Killian About Annalie Killian Annalie Killian’s mission in life is to catalyze the magic of human ingenuity to make the world, and especially corporate life, a better place. She is currently VP of Strategy and Partnerships for Omnicom’s leading cultural intelligence agency Sparks & Honey, the founder of AMPlify innovation festival at the financial services giant AMP, and a Fellow of Aspen Institute’s First Movers program. LinkedIn: Annalie Killian Facebook: Annalie Killian Twitter: Annalie Killian Instagram: Annalie Killian What you will learn If you’re curious and find lots of information, how do you deal with it? (02:15) Why relationships can be a way to filter information (03:41) How to find patterns in information (05:27) Ways of capturing information patterns (08:15) What is the process of pulling together information strands to see what is important? (11:03) How to build your network within an information frame (13:39) How much difference to expect between experts within a domain (17:20) How to bring diverse opinions to form something holistic (20:04) What are low filters? (24:50) Use filters to surface, define, and explore what is most interesting (27:57) Episode Resources   EdgeDweller Box Dropbox Readit ENTP Personality Social Chemistry by Marissa King Transcript Ross Dawson: Annalie, it’s wonderful to have you on the Thriving on Overload podcast. Annalie Killian: Hi Ross, nice to see you again. Ross: Annalie, you have been at the edge of the future in many ways for a long time now. How do you do it? What’s the heart of your ability to keep across change or where things are going? Annalie: I think it all starts with curiosity; Curiosity is a characteristic that I have in spades. It’s almost inevitable that I’m always seeking the edge because I’m curious. Sometimes this curiosity has a nemesis, which is that you end up with information overload. Ross: If you’re curious, and you find lots of information, there’s too much of it. How do you deal with that? How do you get value from that profusion? Annalie: There is this complex answer to that. One is I think that some information is okay to discard but having consumed it, and processed it, when you encounter similar scenarios, the insight is that you can recognize a pattern. It’s probably at the point where I start to recognize a pattern that I start to pay attention to see, should I be capturing some of it, should I be saving some of it? That part of the curiosity is really about an open funnel. Then there is a process of recognition of patterns, which then would for me, indicate time to track this. That’s one way in terms of just serendipitous learning. The other one is that I do a lot of my work around relationships. People to me are the way to scale lots and lots of information. Because I can’t hold it all; but if I have a network that holds much of it, and I can get to them, then it helps with the process of curation and just-in-time delivery. That is very useful. For people, I have not found an ideal solution. We know that LinkedIn is supposedly the business network where we store our valued relationships but I found that the platform has actually become weaker over time rather than stronger. They used to have a feature that they eliminated a few years ago, where you could annotate a contact, that’s disappeared. I think that LinkedIn has a very one-dimensional view of how people use the platform. Perhaps, it’s part of the architectural problems but I do think that there is an opportunity for a premiumization product. I already have a premium account that doesn’t offer me these features but I would love more features in LinkedIn in terms of being able to categorize, filter, annotate my contacts. Ross: I’d like to just go back a little earlier in our conversation and then come back to that. Talking about seeing the patterns, recognizing the patterns, is that just something that emerges? Are there any ways in which you actively try to piece together what you’re seeing to build patents? Is it just this recognition that this is something you need to follow? Is there anything that supports you in being able to see that there is a pattern? Annalie: There are two ways to answer that. One is at a personal level and the other one is professional. Professionally, I now work with a firm that tracks cultural trends. We have developed a professional platform and algorithms, etc., for capturing millions and millions of signals. Then using this to tag specific events, so you can search it, filter it, etc. That is a wonderful professional solution. At a personal level, prior to all of this, when I was working at this edge of innovation, through the lens of how it would affect and impact a particular business, I was working in financial services. For me, there was sometimes the recognition that EdgeDweller started talking about something. Once again, I talk about your network being the filter. There are a number of people there whom I respect and follow online because they are out-of-the-box thinkers. They might come up with something that I hadn’t encountered before. Then I pay attention because they are a trusted relationship. Or I might see something, think it’s curious and interesting, and then look for who else is paying attention to this? When I see that it’s being picked up by others, then I know, okay, I’m onto something. Ross: So the description then of the network is filter? Annalie: Yes. Ross: You’ve been able to surface and to be able to say, well, if multiple people are looking at that, then that’s worth looking at? Annalie: I think so. Trends are shaped in culture and culture is the sum total of everybody’s behavior in particular systems. The behavior then is an indicator that something is a thing. Ross: You mentioned earlier about when you see a pattern, you might save or capture it; Have you had any long-standing ways in which you take notes, save things, or build relationships between what you’re capturing? Annalie: Oh God, I wish; possibly given the gray hairs, there are a number of platforms that I’ve used over time that have come and gone. With that, my links and my bookmarks have gone. The longevity of platforms and consistency in those platforms is a problem. I’ve mentioned to you that sometimes these platforms are developed by young developers or people that don’t necessarily think in 30-40 year time frames; many of us are going to live longer than 100 years. At the outset of architecting a solution are people thinking about how this information may be valuable over 100 years and more. That’s part of the challenge with the storage of information. At the moment, my only best solution at the moment is that I use Box, and I use my own taxonomy. I have used other versions of a cloud storage solution. In the past, I used Dropbox. Dropbox then went and changed some of its design. It has become so clunky and unusable that I don’t even use that anymore. I’ve used Readit. There was a platform before, which I can’t remember, which was really good at just sending a link and then tagging it based on your own taxonomy, but that died. I don’t tend to use bookmarks in my browser all that much because I find it very difficult to retrieve and make sense of it. If I don’t know what I’m looking for, I can’t really find it. So coming up with the taxonomy that works for me, and it helps so much that I mirror the taxonomy in my professional organization now to have a common language, and then I can find things. I just have an enormous Box account at the moment. Ross: So you discern, you see things emerge, you notice them, you might save them, how do you go through that process of making meaning from it? The sense-making, the meaning, or pulling together the strands into seeing what is really important? Annalie: Sometimes my collection is just a collection of random information, in the sense that until I have a purpose to put against that information, like a question, I don’t necessarily go and comb through it to find meaning and sense for every single thing that I save; because I’m not in the process of writing, marketing, blogs, etc., that’s not what I do. If I did, that would be something that I might do in the moment. I tend to save things that I think may come down the track at some future time when the mainstream has caught up. Then I have the ability to quickly put things together and produce an answer because I have already seen the writing on the wall and gathered a sufficient number of resources to paint a picture; or to find a go-to person or three, that is mostly how I’m used to at the moment, is to find the go-to people. But in order to know who those go-to people are, I need to understand the domain, so I do both. I save the signals, and I save the go-to people, and the EdgeDwellers, and the innovators in the same realm. So yes, it’s basically purpose-driven. It depends on what the question is, who’s asking the question, and what the purpose is. Ross: You are famed for your incredible network. Tell us about how you build your network with this information frame. This idea, as you said, I’ve been able to see these are the people that would understand a particular domain or having been able to build enough understanding of the domain to identify those people, to build a conversation, or build the relationships, how does that happen for you? Annalie: Very consciously; Because that’s how I make a living these days, I pay a lot of attention to the voices at the edge. Now I am a lot more purposeful around digging a bit deeper because we are so primed through our standard operating environment that there is always a white male figure of authority that surfaces first. Because I’m a woman, I try very hard to say if there is a man doing this, there’s got to be a woman doing this, and to find those voices, so then I have at least a number of different people that I can source. Increasingly now because diversity, equity, and inclusion is such an important dimension of the work that we do, I am very deliberate about finding persons of color, persons with various elements of diversity, to add to the particular domain that I am looking at. It’s so interesting, Ross, that when you are deliberate and conscious to find these voices, you can find them. They are there. Ross: Absolutely. Annalie: I know you started a list of female futurists many years ago. I applaud you for that. For me today, one of the things I find very frustrating about correcting this imbalance in terms of what leadership looks like is is that when it comes to people of color, everybody has somebody that is the diversity and inclusion consultant, but I’m looking for who are the AI ethics experts that are people of color? Who are the lifestyle consultants? Who are the people at the edge of neuroscience? Who are the people at the edge of medicine? They are there, we just have to do a little bit more to find them. Ross: When you speak to people who will look different, or think different, or have all of these different diverse factors, how different do you find that their views are? Obviously, in a social domain, or some kind of scientific domain, it would be different, but how do you bring out that richness? Or how much difference is there? How do you bring that together? Annalie: Personally, I think that the differences are really profound in terms of how people view the world because our worldview is shaped by our experiences. The more diverse experts you can bring to a problem, the more it’s exponential. The different perspectives that you’re going to get, it’s really exponential. It’s often that these different one or two elements of a conversation can completely switch the direction in which the solution is going. We’ve all worked in innovation, and we know this. The context within which these conversations happen is also really important because they have to be received equally by the parties that you are trying to influence. In a professional context, the work that we do around interviewing experts is done by experts, strategists, and analysts. In many cases, the points of view are anonymized so that they’re not attributed to a particular person. It’s attributed to a panel of experts and in some cases, they are attributed to individuals. In many of those instances, it’s really important to show the diversity of opinions that have gone into a piece of research. Our most recent report on the equity diversion or effect, interviewed people from many walks of life and there it was really important to demonstrate attribution; but I am a fan of diversity every single time. Ross: When we were chatting before, you talked about synthesis, the bringing together. If you have diversity, it’s the point that is not there is a choice, it is how do you bring together all of those diverse opinions to possibly form something which is more holistic? Is there a frame? Is there a way of thinking? How do you engage in that process of synthesis? Annalie: Yes, of course, there is, because everything is filtered through the ears of those on the receiving ends and their life experiences, their prejudices, etc., but I think it helps when you have an independent system that you’re working with. Professionally, in my firm at sparks & honey, we work with quantifying culture through data. We do a lot of this quantification upfront. Then we do the interviews for depth, calibration, and nuance because that’s what expertise adds. I think that the combination of these two systems together helps to ensure a really good and robust output; because the synthesis is not just determined by one or two individuals, it’s actually validated against an independent set of data-driven signals. I hope that answers the question. Ross: More broadly, I think that is a lot of what you’re engaged with; because you have so diverse experience and exposure to things, a lot of your role is that one of synthesis, so not just in these studies but more generally, do you feel that over time, you are drawing more of a synthesis of the perspectives, the experiences, the technology, and the ideas that you are coming across? Annalie: Yes, I guess. I think this is a question about longevity, kind of thing. The longer you are on earth, and the more you’re exposed to lots and lots of information, the richer your own database is. I’m capable at the age of nearly 60 now to have a long view of 40 plus professional years of working to be able to draw on for synthesis. Now, some people might call that the Achilles heel of experience, because you might make everything fit through your own experience. There is a very solid argument in certain quarters that experience can be the enemy of innovation. I don’t know how true that is, I certainly think that you need both, fresh eyes as well as experienced eyes, and when you bring those together, you probably have a better outcome. I personally feel that I am at my most valuable to any business at this stage of my life and I will be more valuable in five years from now. Every year that goes by, I get more valuable because of lived experience. You just have more data to draw on. If you apply conscious critical thinking to this wealth of data that you can draw on, I think it does make you very valuable. Ross: That means there are more connections to make between ideas, experience, and people? Annalie: Yes, obviously being quite open-minded about things is an important element to that but I think it comes with the territory of people that are just naturally very curious. They are sponges-like, absorb a lot of information, and have low filters. Ross: What do you mean by low filters? Annalie: What I mean by low filters is that you are less judgmental and can accept things at face value sometimes. Maybe it’s this thing of being an ENTP. You’re open to possibilities, not just probabilities. Ross: I think that’s an interesting counterpoint. When you say experience, there are some people to whom much experience means that they start to get more fixed world view. Annalie: Yes. Ross: I believe there’s no reason that more experience necessarily makes you closed-minded rather than open-minded, and I suppose that’s the key. What are the key differences you observe as people grow older? Annalie: I don’t think it’s just the thing of growing older. I think that closed-mindedness can exist at any age, it just calcifies. Ross: Yes, that’s the point. Some people maintain their open-mindedness or even increase it over time while others don’t. Annalie: Exactly. That’s not really a factor of age, it’s really a factor of personality type. Ross: Yes, maintaining that. That’s where a wealth of experience with open-mindedness becomes more valuable whereas perhaps the wealth of experience with not being… Annalie: Not being curious, it’s not a good combination. What is interesting, though, is, now this is completely anecdotal, but I think that there is something really interesting that happens with women after they have finished with being primary caregivers, and the burden of primary caregiving is no longer there, and what I’ve personally encountered is that women become much more curious professionally at a certain age and continue to flourish. I found that very, very interesting. Ross: Perhaps rounding out and thinking about your real focus as a person with an extraordinary network, and a person who looks to diverse people for finding ideas, what would be your advice to others who are using that network filter, in terms of being able to surface, define, and to explore what is most interesting? Annalie: I will share with you something that might be valuable for your listeners. It is a book that I’ve recently read, that encapsulated certain insights around friendship, networks, etc. It’s called Social Chemistry. It’s written by Marissa King. She’s a professor of psychology at Yale. It was fascinating for me to read this book because the book gives you a language around something that you intuitively know. It gives you a framework. What I found very interesting about this book was the three kinds of network people. There are those who just collect lots of names, but their relationships are very shallow. Then there are those that have a very narrow circle, but very deep. Then there’s the kind of the group in the middle, which is like a blend of both. I think I’m the person in the middle that is a blend of both. What’s interesting for me is that the people with a very big Rolodex just of names, they’re the ones who come into an event and just collect everybody’s business cards, but they don’t really stop and make a connection. There’s really nothing there, there’s no relationship. For me, the most valuable thing that I’ve learned in terms of building relationships is that you’re better off spending a lot of time with a single person at an event and really getting to understand that person, and making a deep connection. Then I follow that up by seeing how I could be valuable to them. How can I share something that they will value? How can I connect them to an opportunity? If there’s somebody that I know they should meet, that would make either life more fun, or advance their business agenda, or something like that? For me, all relationships, and the network starts with a mentality of giving, rather than taking. Never be a taker, be a giver. When you’re a giver, it’s also given without expectation. It’s not like, oh, I’ve given you something now you owe me. It’s literally just an attitude of generosity for the sake of it. I find that the more you give love to the universe, the more the universe gives love back to you in a multitude of different ways. There is this super connection between human goodwill, our humanity and the information. When you bring these two things together, you get real value. I don’t know that computers and algorithms are going to get there very soon. Ross: Indeed. Thank you so much for your time and your insight, Annalie, it’s been a delight. Annalie: Thank you so much, Ross. Have a wonderful day. The post Annalie Killian on serendipitous learning, the network as filter, finding voices at the edge, and value from deep connections (Ep13) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I would say purpose, oriented towards a really clear, focused filter to decide what to take in and what not to take in is how I’ve managed overload.” – Robin Athey About Robin Athey Robin Athey gave up her high powered corporate career including nine-years as Research Director at Deloitte to found Integral Growth where she guides founders and leaders to manage transformational change and trust their inner wisdom in fast-moving, complex, high growth environments. Website: Integral Growth LinkedIn: Robin Athey Twitter: Robin Athey Medium: Robin Athey Facebook: Robin Athey What you will learn How purpose can help you thrive on overload (01:19) What to expect on your journey to purpose? (04:38) A simple tool or framework to finding purpose (09:01) Finding your purpose does not require radical change (12:23) What are examples of a pathway and keys to finding purpose (13:14) Why simplifying is crucial to avoiding the pain of overload (16:27) Why and how to set limits to distractions (18:24) Start your day eating the frog (21:31) What is the maximum number of big project at any given time (22:46) Why we needs frames and boundaries for sensemaking (25:04) How truly wanting protects you from the constant assault of information (30:08) Episode Resources Are You My Mother? Eat Your Frogs First Mark Twain – American writer and humourist Transcript Ross Dawson: Robin, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Robin Athey: Ross, thank you. Ross: When we think about overload, and how it is we can thrive off of it, what comes to you first, when you think about that, Robin? Robin: I’m laughing because when you say the word overload, I have these flashbacks, actually, to the beginning of the internet. I don’t know if you remember, but the dawning of what was happening, and the impact it was going to have. Ross: I do. Robin: Everyone was just like flying around, talking about overload. Then all of a sudden, I remember that dread of feeling it. It was interesting. I was just reflecting on this and preparing for our interview, it had me really reflecting on how do we actually thrive? And what is that? I feel like I’ve learned to thrive, and there have been so many different dimensions of that happening. Ross: I think one of those is purpose. Robin: One of those for sure is purpose; I would say purpose and having a really clear filter to decide what to take in and what not to take in. But it had to be really focused or oriented towards how I’ve managed overload, even with my body, what I can possibly digest? I was having memories of the early days when not only was the internet happening, but you and I were connected in some similar circles around the early to mid-2000s. I was involved in so many different councils, and there were so many ideas flying around, and the Internet was propelling a lot of those around knowledge management, and how do we handle all of this. With sitting in those councils, I remember at one point feeling like, wow, this is intellectual cocaine, I can get so addicted to this. At the time, I lived life largely from my head, taking in all of that information, it was intoxicating. I actually didn’t know how to digest it. At the time, I was practicing yoga and meditating, and all of that, but I was living life so much from my head that I felt myself ping-ponging through all the days, from one idea to the next, and the next. But not in a way that was really coherent, and not in a way that I could really make sense of a lot of it, and the impact that I wanted it to have, I really wasn’t clear at all, how it was going to channel through me as a human being who wanted to have an impact in the world. I was largely a broker; I could think of myself as a dealer of this intellectual cocaine but I was constantly connecting ideas, people with people, and ideas with ideas, and really spurring on the life, the addiction to ideas and information. Ross: That only resonates a lot with me, where I also live in my head a lot. Now, part of the way I bring myself back to the body is by trying to get in the ocean every day. But just as that balance because otherwise, you’re quite entirely in the head and the ideas. I believe that purpose and forms, as you say, the filtering, and how it is you balance yourself, tell me about that journey to purpose. How has that happened for you, just for starters? Robin: The journey to purpose I would say is, it’s largely one of really listening to my instincts and trusting deeper instincts. If I track back, Ross, to when that journey even started, I think it probably started when I was a kid. I look back at some of the things where I feel very aligned with purpose today is stuff that was planted in me as a kid, and whether that was nature or nurture, I don’t know. It’s beyond my paygrade. But what I’m really clear about though, is that the instincts were there when I was a kid, and then there were certain points along my path that helped. I’ll highlight as dark nights of the soul, which started early for me, probably in my early 30s. As a leader, actually, as a senior leader in an organization, I remember encountering my second dark night of the soul. The first actually happened when I was about 25 where I went through a passage that had me really consider the path that I was on and led me into some pretty dark places where I had to go in and look at patterns, things that were happening for me that felt very much out of alignment with something that wanted to come through me, and I didn’t have any words for that, at the time, I only knew what I didn’t want. What I didn’t want was some of the stuff that I was engaged in. I’ll give you an example. When I was 33, I was a senior leader at a very high-profile organization, at the time, a very well-known brand. I was a VP jetting around the world and handling production and stuff like that. I was miserable. I had the car, and the office, and all of that; the fancy office and five-story townhouse filled with mahogany, everything. I had arrived in an Italian suit, in the best shoes, and bags, and all of that; very glamorous, very high flying, jetting off to Italy and South America. Anyway, I really hit this point where I was just really unhappy. It was one of these points learning that Oh, all these entrapments, the fancy car, and all of that are what I’m supposed to want, right? At 33, I’m at this place where most people try to get to, all the way through their 50s. I was lucky to have an experience early to realize that, Oh, my identity is not really this car that I spent forever buying because I couldn’t decide what color was the best color for me to render. It was a really early introduction for me to some of my egoic fixations, and I would say it’s a point because it led me on to, Okay, I don’t want to be doing what I’m doing, what do I want to be doing? And what am I naturally good at? And I would say that that’s a journey that’s haunted me most of my life twisting in my britches about who am I? Who do I want to be? And looking everywhere, and trying so many different things, and jetting around the world. There’s this kid’s book, I don’t know if you have ever heard of it, it’s called, “Are You My Mother”? In it, there’s a little bird that makes its way out of its nest while its mother is off getting food, and it makes its way out of the nest, and it doesn’t know who its mother is, so it goes to ask the chicken, and the dog, and the cat, and the cow, are you my mother? And it was kind of like that. With purpose, I try all these different things. It’s like, are you my purpose? Are you my purpose? And then I came to understand, purpose is not a what, it’s not a thing. It’s more for me like an essence. It’s a way of living in life and being in a relationship with life. Ross: Are there any tools or frameworks that you’ve found useful on that path? Robin: Tools or frameworks for finding purpose? Ross: Yes. Robin: Yes, I’ve experimented with a lot of them. I actually guide people on purpose journeys to these days, because it was so much a part of my life for so long, and it continues to be. Sometimes clients will call me and they’ll think they want to go on a purpose journey, and then they realize maybe that’s too big. The one very simple thing that I oriented them towards is just the inquiry. How can I best serve in the world is an example of that. How can I best serve? And just to be in that inquiry alone, I found it to be very powerful. Then there are all sorts of things that supplement that. For me, meditation, dance, being able to receive, to listen to signals of life, so I navigate. There are definitely things that you can do in journeys like going out there and going on soul quests, and nature, and things like that, things that I’ve done that have been hugely helpful, things that you can do to speed up a journey to get really clear about one’s purpose. But for me, it’s definitely it’s not a what. It’s not like, Oh, I meant to be an architect, that’s my purpose in the world. But it has a quality of service when I get to the essence that helps me to navigate information overload. It’s more of an essence. It’s how I’m in a relationship with life. How do I live my life and how do I navigate the world in a relationship with myself, with others? And for me, I’ve learned that there are these certain qualities that when I show up in the world with those certain qualities, things just start happening. I can often struggle or strive, try really, really hard, and when that happens, it’s hard to feel in alignment with purpose. When I rest and allow… the best word that I can come up with is graciousness. It’s not relaxing into life and letting life happen to me, but more engaging, and let’s see if this makes sense, as I just tap into it right now, when I come into a place of purpose in my relationship, and I’m pretty clear what I care about in the world. I’m super like that’s my North Star. I’m pretty clear how I best serve. When I orient towards that, I feel coherence in my body, and then I just keep coming back to that over and over again. The tools that have helped me to get there have been all about being very intentional, that this is something that really matters for me. Ross: Are there any stories from other people, public or otherwise, that you think illustrate this? Robin: I’m laughing because recently on a podcast, I actually brought up the case of a client, and then I wondered if I should really do that. Let me use it, I’ll use a composite example. I’ll say as a headline to this, that often when people come to me to go on purpose journeys that they think they need to make some radical change in their life. Often, they’ll find out that they’re exactly in the right place; It’s really a matter of changing how they are in a relationship with what they’re doing. I’ve noticed that as a theme, over and over again, and people have made some pretty big changes, gone back for PhDs, or left their work to reorient with their network in a new way. For me, it involved months in ashrams, long stints in India and Brazil, and all these different places. But I want to say that it doesn’t require that. Give me a little bit more of a prompt here in terms of a curiosity you have. Ross: I suppose the finding, so it is this process of finding. As you say that’s obviously very unique, because we are all unique, and our purposes are unique, and how we find it is unique. But I suppose it’s around the path. To your point, I believe that the path is the answer in a way, as if you’ve arrived somewhere, or you have a purpose. But what are the examples of a pathway, which could be useful to others who are on that path of looking for purpose? Robin: I’ll share with you that some of the key things that for me have been most powerful and important are having some way, first of all, of getting quiet inside, is the best way to say it. This may sound a little abstract. I found that my moments of insight about my purpose were not things that I made happen, they weren’t insights that I made happen, they arrived, that’s the best way I can describe it. They came as these spontaneous insights, that were not about me thinking about something, but they happen when I was very, very quiet inside. Then all of a sudden, I would receive an insight about something. I’ve had a daily meditation practice for 25 years. That’s helped a lot to get quiet. Meditation, some contemplative practice, key; Patience, key; Inquiry, key; Curiosity, key. Then there are morning practices, I think, those are really useful. When I guide people in purpose journeys, we establish some morning practice that, I would say, opens this field of curiosity. Curiosity is so key on this. If I go out and try to make my purpose happen, it’s as if it can’t find me, but curiosity and going lightly. Working with the body is really important. When I received these insights, sometimes I felt my arms buzz, it had that sensation, it’s like something in me, tingles even, I’ve had those kinds of downloads or whatever you want to call them, where everything in my body is lighting up and saying that. To do that, I would say any somatic practice or body-based practice, not just going out for a jog, plugged into the news or something like that, or music. I guess jogging is okay, but practices that really loosen the body up, dance, yoga, can be useful. A lot of people, I think who are very aligned with a sense of purpose practice, Qigong, or Taichi, or something like that. We set up some morning practice, and then do things that allow life to be simpler. It’s interesting, we’re talking about information overload; I think so much of being able to get clear about one’s purpose in life really has to do with simplifying one’s practice, one’s day, and avoiding information overload. Whenever the brain encounters uncertainty, it registers it as physical pain, not knowing one’s path can trigger a lot of uncertainty for people, so they might go out and consume everything they possibly can. I’m not sure that’s the way because when we consume information, I’m not sure that we have those spontaneous insights that just naturally come, we might, but there’s something about relaxing, working hard, and relaxing. The last thing I’ll just share for now is I’m remembering apparently the story of Einstein receiving the relativity theory is just that, he’s sitting on a hill, and his eyes are gazing off, and he hears this clock chime, and he’s looking across, as I understand he’s on a hill and overlooking a town, there’s this deep relaxation that’s happened. I’ve heard of inventions being born in bathtubs, and so on, and then boom, something comes in. It’s like that. Ross: Which takes us to the filtering part, as in one of the choices you make. From the sense of purpose or its essence, or whatever it may be, what’s the process then of using that to filter to say, this is something that I will spend time with, this is something I won’t spend time with, this is important, this is not important, how do you take that into your daily routine? Because that’s reality, information comes to you daily, through your day. Robin: Comes to me daily, and it is a daily practice. Like most people, I can so easily go down my purpose. Nemesis is that the right word is Yahoo News. For whatever reason, I had a Yahoo account from the early days. Learning about Britney Spears isn’t necessarily aligned with my purpose, but I can get trapped here. I set limits. If I’m going to go into that sinkhole, 10 minutes, and then I’ve got to be back. Ross: Do you use a timer, or how do you know that your time’s up? Robin: I watch my clock, I’ll set, by 3:30, I’m going to be back. I have found, to be honest with you, that what I do is something that I care about so much that I actually don’t lose myself for long periods of time. When I didn’t know what I wanted to do, when it wasn’t as easy for me to digest life as it was showing up, it would be a lot more alluring to numb myself out, go internet surfing. Mind you, some magical things have happened in those periods of time where I felt a little lost and didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Sometimes I would discover things on the internet in particular, I met a group of social entrepreneurs years ago that I’m still with, just surfing one day, and following curiosity, and Huh, what’s that about? And then going through a portal and realizing, Oh my God, there’s this cool group of people I didn’t know about. I’m still part of that community today. I allow some time for wandering because otherwise, I get rebellious. I’m insatiably curious, but I do care about what I’m doing enough that it’s what I want to come back to over and over again. My fascination with the Free Britney Movement, or whatever it happens to be, I’m just throwing that out, it has a natural lifespan, I guess, it just doesn’t last that long because it’s not as interesting as what I love. I want to come back. I do have boundaries. I think morning routines matter a lot. I start the day, I don’t know if you know this saying, eating the frog, doing that thing, apparently, it comes from Mark Twain. Ross: Vaguely… Robin: If you start the day eating a frog, then it’s something like you’re guaranteed not to have anything worse happen that day. I start the day eating the frog, like doing the thing that I know I need to do, that’s going to have the biggest return. Right now for me, that’s writing. I’m working on a book. I’m eating the frog in the morning, first thing. Starting the day that way, and then knowing when I get tired, and at the end of the day, that’s the day where I can most easily stray into something else because my will is not as great. Really focus in the morning. There are rituals that I have every morning, and that help me to stay focused. Then it’s just coming back again and again to the thing that I love, and mind you the thing that I love has so many dimensions to it, so I can easily get lost in that. Having very clear projects, I orient my days around client projects that are things that I really care about, that I want to deliver on, that set boundaries, writing, really constructing, and having no more than four to five big projects at any given time, I max it out. I constantly stretch myself but really organizing… Ross: Only four or five. Robin: Only four or five, exactly. I swear I could live 11 parallel lives at once, and I’d love to have 8, 9, 10. Calendar blocking for me is huge. Calendar blocking and making sure… I go through a lot of planning. I have a pretty clear sense of where I want to be in three years, how I want to be living, and it’s quite a different picture than how I’m living today. I want to be bringing leaders out into the land and doing much more nature-based work than I am right now, and living in a place actually where we can bring people and that’s very different than how I’m orienting right now, where I live right now. That is like a North Star. Then I have a three-year vision, and I have a vision beyond that. But that three-year vision just keeps me honest. I back that up to one year plan, the nine months plan. I am a little bit rebellious, I rebel if my goals get too strict, but I have very clear intentions. Then calendar block, every week religiously on Sundays, I sit down and decide how am I best going to spend this week, and I make sure as I go because I block out my calendar about two to three months in advance, for the most part, I’m pretty clear about where I’m going to be going with clients. I just make sure that every day is balanced. I don’t get into six or seven hours of nonstop calls, which you could do. Ross: The schedule then keeps you on track? Robin: Keeps me honest. Yes. Ross: Are there any practices for sensemaking? In whatever field which you’re delving into, or writing a book, that’s a lot of focus, and you’ve got some organizing themes there, there’s a lot to digest, so do you have any practices or approaches for how it is you make sense or what I describe as the synthesis of all these elements? Robin: I’ll come back to this metaphor of a North Star because it’s one that’s used so often. It’s in for a reason. For me, it’s really powerful. With this particular book that I’m writing, I want to have a certain impact. There are some questions that I’m asking with a book, that are really important for me. Just to fill in on the nature of the book, the working title for the book is Slow Leadership. My proposition is that to navigate the complexity and the uncertainty of the world that we’re in, which is a thing I love, is understanding, exploring how to do that. To navigate complexity and uncertainty as leaders, we really need to learn to slow down. Most leaders I know, know how to go fast. Few leaders I work with know how to slow down, as well. The impact that I want to have is for leaders to question some of the sacred cows of… it’s my little provocateur, it comes out of Wall Street, bigger, bigger, we’ve got to go bigger, bigger, of venture capitalists, faster, faster, faster, runway, runway, in the Silicon Valley, go fast enough to break things. I want to question some of that because I think there’s an appropriate aspect of that, fast enough to break things is really to fail, to supposedly safe to fail experiments. But there’s this urgency in this theme of action that’s become so prevalent, not just in the private sector, but also in social justice and other sectors, the climate that I work with. The urgency has set people into a blind action, a lot of leaders. I want to be able to tell stories of what happens when you go too fast, as people look in the rearview mirror, as leaders look in the rearview mirror, I want to be able to tell those stories, I want to talk about the neurobiology of what happens to our decision making when we go fast. I want to talk about how proper decision-making, and complexity and uncertainty, are so different than when you’re in a predictable world. Most leaders are still approaching complex adaptive situations as if they were predictable. They are very different beasts. These are not just problems that you’re to solve. They invite a lot of perspective-taking, and they invite a lot of inquiry and pausing. This is my North Star. I know the impact that I want to have. I know the question that I’m wanting to ask, and then I do my best to just stay on that path, open to possible pivots. Mind you, all of those things that I just mentioned, unleash lots. They unleash neurophysiology and trauma in the body, and egoic fixations, and patterns, and blind spots, and gear conditioning as human beings, and our nature as social beings that can’t survive alone, where there are good reasons that we listen to Wall Street and everyone else to feel social acceptance, and so on. It unleashes a lot. I think structuring, getting clear about what the structure is going to be for this, I would say, this is true, whether this is a book, or it’s a project that I’m working on, really deciding what the bones of that are going to be early on, is really important. What am I going to speak to? What am I not going to speak to? If it’s a project for a client doing team stuff with a client, where are they at? What am I going to speak to? What am I not going to speak to? Ross: So creating a frame? Robin: Creating a frame. Ross: Yes, we need the frames. Otherwise, we don’t know where the boundaries are. Robin: Yes. Ross: To round out, we’ve delved very much into purpose and the quest, which transcends a lot of this idea of overload. But beyond anything, which we’ve covered, are there any final thoughts, or ideas, or recommendations for those listening on? How to be well, and to prosper while we are assaulted by information on all sides? Robin: The thing to me that probably goes most core is wanting to be well, wanting to prosper, wanting to have a clearer sense of purpose, that very desire, something turns on in just truly wanting to be well, truly wanting to prosper, which is not for me about wealth and making life more complex, necessarily, but having everything that I need for me to serve in the world. That’s what puts wind in my sails. It’s just wanting that. Ross: And finding how to do it? Robin: And then finding out how to do it, how to have support. I think they’re better around purpose. There are some practices for me that are more effective than others, but just wanting it alone, and then experimenting, and going out, and seeing what happens. Patience, for me, is a quality that’s so important in this domain, just patience, it’s not overnight that these things necessarily change, it’s easy to fall back in old habits, and just having the patience to get up the next day, and try again, and show up over and over again, it’s very powerful. Ross: Yes, takes you to wonderful places. Robin: Indeed. Like into the water, swimming every day. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insight, Robin. We found that really powerful, so thank you. Robin: Thank you, Ross. The post Robin Athey on intellectual cocaine, the journey to purpose, slow leadership, and finding your North Star (Ep12) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I try to understand temporal patterns. I’m looking for things that are repetitive that I’ve missed. If things aren’t repetitive, I try to find out their dependencies that actually create relationships. If it’s truly ad-hoc, I want to know why are these things completely random?” – Ray Wang About Ray Wang R “Ray” Wang is the founder and chairman of the highly regarded tech analyst firm Constellation Research. He is the author of Disrupting Digital Business and most recently Everybody Wants To Rule The World on the future of business.  Since 2003, Ray has delivered thousands of live and virtual keynotes at almost every major tech conference, including Salesforce’s Dreamforce, Adobe Summit, IBM, Mobile World Congress, CES, TedX, and sessions at Davos for various clients.  Ray’s the co-host of the prominent enterprise tech and leadership webcast DisrupTV and frequently appears in major media such as The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg and many others. Website: raywang.org Blog: Ray Wang LinkedIn: Ray Wang Twitter: Ray Wang Webcast: DisrupTV Books Everybody Wants To Rule The World Disrupting Digital Business What you will learn What is the vital difference between push and pull channels (02:55) Where to find emerging data value chains (05:38) What is the commonwealth of self-interest (06:58) Why you have to get good at finding patterns (07:50) What are the different kinds of relationships to look for (09:29) What is the process from your understanding to communicating so people who think differently would also understand (11:14) Why you need metaphor and analogies to convey emotion, imagination and passion (14:32) What are three important information trends to keep your eye on (20:22) How to assess the validity of a data source (23:42) What to do when the signal doesn’t fit the model (24:33) Episode Resources Post-it Notes SWOT Analysis LISTSERV Dion Hinchcliffe Transcript Ross Dawson: Ray, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Ray Wang: Ross, it’s been way too long, I have not had a chance to get down to Australia. I’d love to, but thanks for having me here. Ross: You are a prime example of someone who thrives on an enormous amount of information, making sense of, amongst many other things, the edge of enterprise tech and where everything is all going. How do you keep on top of massive information? Ray: You know what it is? It’s constant streams of information. We are constantly looking for data points, but what we’ve gotten really good at is building ontologies, building filters, building ways of framing, and I think that has helped to be able to handle that type of information overload. Every piece of information that comes to me has a purpose, has a time, has a level of urgency. I categorize everything that way when it comes in. If I get an email and it says, Hey, let’s catch up later this weekend; I’ll probably look at that three days later from now. But if it’s something that’s an urgent deal, like, Let’s go? that’s something I’ll take on right away. If I’m reading something about a futuristic trend that’s happening, like space transportation, I’ll follow it away, saying, Hey, this is going to be related to this other research I’m looking at. It’s constant filing, constant curation, and a constantly sensitive understanding of time and urgency. Ross: So much to dig into what you’ve said already, but part of it is the distinction between the Push and the Pull. As you get a whole bunch of stuff, which is pushed to you, and you got to set up your filters to be able to assess that. The other is the Pull; you’ll go out and find the things which haven’t landed in your inbox. When we start with the Push, how do you filter things which come into you? You’ve said, you’ve got various ways of assessing those as they come in? Is that all in your email? Or through social filters? What are your incoming channels? Ray: It’s crazy. There are many channels, Ross. Email is still primary for me; the social networks, whether you’re on Twitter, or whether you’re on LinkedIn, are big feeder sources as well. Then it’s all the private chat groups I’m in right now. I’m in a lot of private chat groups, whether they’re on Signal, WeChat, even on private social networks that are going on. I think it’s those signals that are actually proliferating more than anything else, the public social networks are definitely dying, the private networks are actually growing, and it’s much higher quality information. That’s coming from the Push side. The Pull side is a little bit different. I think the Pull side is if you know what you’re asking for, you know what to curate. It’s so easy to be able to set up the meetings or set up the conversations, but what you’re missing is that level of serendipity, which you used to get, when you could move around, bumped into someone at a conference, bumped into someone on the way to a conference, have that conversation after someone had spoken, that I’m missing, and that’s been a big piece for the last 18 months, that has hampered my ability to get the signals faster. Ross: In those private channels, how do you get into the right groups? What are the things you’re finding there that you’re not finding in other places? Ray: Honestly, I think it’s authenticity, like honest conversations, the ability to go deeper with someone about something, the level of context around a problem, understanding where an exception is occurring, I think I get a lot more fidelity out of those private conversations, or the social networks that are more aligned. They might be affinity based on places you’ve worked, they might be roles or job titles, they might be a topic that people are interested in, they might even be geographic, but I think those are playing a much bigger role than they were about five years ago. Ross: So not so much on the public social networks anymore? Ray: There are signals there, but it’s so noisy that sometimes it’s not worth the time. Ross: Coming back to the Pull, how do you go out and find what’s relevant in that sea of information every day? Ray: For me, I spend a lot of time talking about business transformation, looking at where the trends are headed, looking at technologies, and understanding policy. For that Pull, it’s really your network. The bigger your network, the more likely you can find someone within that network or at least a couple of degrees of separation. Pull for me, let’s say we were talking about a topic like Hey, what’s going to happen with space transportation, space tourism, or let’s figure out what’s happening with the future of transit like autonomous vehicles, I could probably reach out to about 40, 50 people to have that conversation with. I’d set up a meeting; I’d say, Hey, let’s catch up, what are you seeing? What’s going on? Ideally, what would happen is we’d all be part of some similar type of private networks, where someone would just ping and you get a conversation or return back, like the old Listservs. That’s actually what it’s like in these private networks today. People just add you to a network or they add you to a group. For example, we just had a healthcare summit, we had 40 top CIOs participating, we just set up a Discord server. That’s as simple as that, and you’re done. Ross: In this case, it’s knowing who is the right person to reach out to, and they’re the ones that’d be able to point you to the right sources, be able to make sense of that. Of course, this is based on some reciprocity. There’s some reason why they’ll agree to take your call. This is part of that building those people networks. Ray: Commonwealth of self-interest is popping up there somewhere. Ross: Describe what do you mean by that? Ray: It’s in everyone’s best interest. In case you have a question, or you want to know something, or whether it’s a job hunt, or whether it’s a tip, or whether something’s coming your way, there’s enough self-interest for you to be wanting to be part of one of those groups. The value exchange is there. Ross: Yes. People are building these networks of reciprocity. Ray: Exactly. Ross: Latent reciprocity in any case. Ray: You’re paying it forward at some point. Ross: Yes, totally. One of the things you said just at the outset was around ontologies and framing. When I build my visual frameworks, a lot of what I’m trying to do is to build some structure. How do you go about that? What’s the process for being able to either build these frameworks or how do you apply that when you’re seeing new information? Ray: For me, it’s always been visual. I’ve got posted pads everywhere. It’s really about finding patterns. Is it groupings that are the same? Is it groupings that are different? Is it groupings that have a specific context? I just do that mentally. Then when you lay things out to see how they fit, that’s where you start applying other types of models on top; for example, what are the political, environmental, technological, and societal implications? Is there a legislative angle to it? What’s the economic impact? What’s the cost-benefit analysis? All these frameworks just start popping in over time. Let’s run a SWOT analysis. Every one of those techniques that people use gets filtered and applied until you find a pattern or you find no pattern, which is many times the case, like, Oh, there’s no pattern. We see more of that than we see patterns but we got to get good at finding patterns as well. Ross: Do you literally just jot things down on Post-it notes, go to whiteboards and move them around? Ray: Whiteboard, Post-it notes, sometimes it’s just like doodling, drawing entity diagrams, all those things help. Ross: In terms of building some of these structures what are the types of relationships you might have? Hierarchical, or causal, or time relationship? What are the different types of relationships that you look for, or you tend to see? Ray: I tend to try to understand temporal patterns. I think that’s important. What I’m really looking for are the things that are repetitive, that I’ve missed. If things aren’t repetitive, I try to find out their dependencies that actually create relationships again. If it’s truly ad-hoc, I want to know why they’re ad-hoc, why are these things completely random? That’s one line of reasoning. Also, the other way I look at things is I try to understand an automation angle, as I’m looking at stuff. When do you fully intelligently automate something? Do you have enough capability to do that? Or are you still trying to learn? Like when do you augment a machine with a human, and find all the false positives, false negatives, try to figure out why people break rules? Why are protocols broken? Why are there exceptions? And then when can you actually augment the human with the machine to give them more insights and information, so they can actually work faster? Or when I’m in a situation where it has to be human touch, you can’t automate that, human’s got to be in charge. That’s the other way, sometimes I look at some of these angles, to understand the impact. If it’s fully automated, that means it’s digitized, it can scale, which is going to operate very differently. If there’s a human involved in this, then we actually have to treat things a little bit differently because not everything’s being modeled, plus humans are random, they don’t follow rules, they do whatever they like. Do you get the idea? We’re not predictable. Those create another nuance that you should be looking at. Ross: You’re building frameworks in your own mind, or your Whiteboard, or a visual framework, this is your understanding, the idea is particularly for you, but your organization is communicating that to others, and they’re trying to get some sense of this distillation, or the relationships, or the framework, which you’re creating. What’s that process of taking it from that understanding in your mind through to communicating in ways which not just somebody who thinks as you will get, but also people who may think differently would also get? Ray: The rule that I always use is if you can explain it to a third-grader, you’re in good shape. That simplicity, the relationships, the ability to understand the causal impacts, if you can communicate it to a third-grade level, you’re usually doing fine. The trick is communicating at a third-grade level and communicating at multiple levels, that’s the art if you’re talking in multiple levels at the same time, and that requires a lot of work. You basically have to understand how your subtle intonations or anything implied carries through the context of that conversation about what it means. You really have to understand that you’re communicating at multiple levels and not creating confusion. That’s an art. That takes a lot of time to actually figure out how to do it. Ross: You use visuals in your presentations, your books, your research, and so on. How much do you send to that on a visual framework? Ray: One of my colleagues does that awesomely, Dion Hinchcliffe. If you remember Dion, his visuals are amazing. I’ve learned not to do visuals because I’m not at that level of trying to distill something highly complicated into a picture, but what I do try to do is simplify and break down examples so that people can relate to them, and not use industry-specific examples, use something a little bit more generic, so everybody can see how it applies to their industry. Mostly because if you get down to industry-specific examples, what typically happens is people who are experts in their industry will tell you well, that can’t possibly happen that way. That’s why I simplify things. For example, people like to talk about, let’s take a complicated conversation about journeys and APIs and micro-services, I’ll boil it down to a peanut butter jelly sandwich. I’ll explain, hey this one software vendor’s APIs and microservices look like a simple peanut butter jelly sandwich; here’s a piece of bread, here’s another piece of bread, I spread peanut butter on one, I put jelly on the other, put them together and cut in half; but this other company’s APIs and micro-services are a little bit more complicated and a little bit deeper, you get the bread, you find out if it’s gluten-free, if it’s organically certified, you decide whether you want to toast the bread, how much do you toast it? Is that organic peanut butter? Is that non-organic peanut butter? How thick do you want to paste it on? And suddenly people get the idea. You can understand the difference between simple models and complex models, and trying to put them all together, you get that conversation. Ross: Using metaphors essentially? Ray: Using metaphors, using storytelling, but none of that had anything to do with a technical conversation. Ross: To what degree do you use metaphors in terms of your own understanding? It is one of those interesting points where arguably there is a bit of a debate around first principles; thinking, coming down, and saying, Okay, you’re just pulling down things that are elemental pieces. There are dangers and values of metaphors in terms of being able to pull out analogies, and being able to find useful things; but of course, no metaphor is perfect, and they can be misleading as well. To what degree in your own understanding do you look for or find metaphors and how do you see structures to how things are working? Ray: The thing is, you have to reason from first principles, that doesn’t go away. Everybody knows that if you’re really trying to win an argument, that’s a very logical approach but to capture the emotion of the argument, to capture the imagination, and the passion, that’s where the analogies come into play. That’s balancing the art and the science. The science is first principles, here’s what it is, here’s a logical reason, here’s how we get there, the analogy and the storytelling behind is the passion, the emotion, and getting people excited about having them relate at a human level. I think the best communicators actually do both. Ross: Do you structure your day in terms of your information or habits? How do you interact with information? Ray: I get about five hours of sleep, so there’s a little natural advantage here. I need about five hours to function, six hours to be at peak performance, and four, I could probably getaway for a couple of days. I start my day, and I literally scan all my input sites, whether it’s my Twitter feeds, or my news sites, I just scan information in the morning. The first thing I do in the morning is I see what the heck is going on, at least get a baseline, look at stock charts, look at what’s happening in different trend lines, whatever reports are coming out, and I leave business TV on, just to have that too in the background, just to get a grounding. I scan the day and then start that way. Ross: Do you take any notes while you’re doing that? Ray: No, I don’t take any notes. I’m scanning for broad trends just to get a feel. If it’s really important stuff like work deliverables that have to be done, that require time, some things you can just do in context, switch super-fast, that’s not an issue. But when you really have to take the time to deeply think, like if you’re writing a book, or if you’re trying to take a complex idea, if you’re trying to get a work deliverable out, you got to block time for yourself. For me, that’s like blocking a couple of hours to actually think, to actually get through something, to actually get work done. That’s a little bit different. Other than that, if you’re on calls, and they’re not video calls, you can get a lot of work done. There are a lot of manual tasks, email tracking, things you can do in multi-task. I know people don’t believe in multi-tasking but it works for me. The only thing that doesn’t work in multi-task is when you’re stuck on a zoom call, you have to look at people, the video just kills you, you’re single-threaded for a while, and you’re very unproductive. Ross: Do you have times when you’re pulling together like the synthesis process? Okay, you’re doing the scanning, you’re making sense of things; is that all just in your focus blocks? Is that when you’re distilling and making sense of things, or the other times when you are spending time to read an article or a book, or when you’re not aware of a problem? Ray: Some problems just can’t be solved right away. They require some depth, they require a little bit of perspective, they require seeing other things happen, and they’re constantly in the background. For those types of deep thinking that you’re trying to do, or you’re trying to build a brand new model, those take months; that’s not something you would do in a day or in a week, they take months to get to that level of substance. But if you’re trying to crank out a consulting deliverable, or help a client with the project, then you can probably do it in a couple of days. Ross: With the long-term thing, do you spend a slice of time on it every day or every little while just to be able to see the way you’re thinking about it? Ray: In the post-COVID world, yes, because everything is scheduled, nothing is serendipitous, you have no free time to yourself. Before COVID, it would be a flight, you just get on a flight, Sydney to LA, Sydney to New York, Sydney to San Francisco. You get on the plane, you eat something, you check some emails, you watch a movie, you come back, you think about something, that was thinking time, that was personal time, travel was amazing because it gave me my own personal time, I lost all that just like you. You lose the time to actually bump into things, some random things might occur. These days, it’s all forced. I got to block three hours to go think, that’s not fun. It doesn’t work like that. But if I’m traveling, and I happen to bump into something, or I happen to be thinking of an idea, I’ve got my own time, now I can actually do something with it. I think everybody works differently but for me, that travel time, that transit time, was my thinking time. Ross: Coming back to thinking around what’s relevant and what’s not relevant, you’re very broad-ranging in what you cover, and it seems to be getting broader over time as well. Do you set some kind of a frame for what you perceive, like, this is relevant to my consulting, to my company, to books you may be thinking about; the nature of you can’t keep across everything so doesn’t, how do you set those filters or that frame? Ray: I think probably three things that are important. The first one is that we focus on the business impact; it has to have a business impact. Whatever I look for, I’m just trying to understand, is that a new business model? Is that technology going to change this? Is that a marketplace move? Is that something that will change the balance of power in an area? I always look at the business impact. The second thing that I look for is, is that a new technology trend? There are Uber trends, macro-trends, micro-trends, all the way down. You’re trying to gauge if a technology will change what happens in the marketplace. The third one’s a little bit different. I spend a lot of time looking at capital flows, and trying to understand where the money is being bet, where are you betting? Why I look at capital flows is because it’s a good indication of not only psychology but also people’s perception of where markets are heading. Those three things pretty much drive everything, so business, technology, and capital flows. Ross: Right, so anything which relates to that. Do you have any focus industries? Or do you tend to think everything fits in the world of business, and it all is relevant? Ray: I used to look at industries, but the challenge of looking at industries today, as you’ll probably know, in the way that I’ve written recently, it’s about these data value chains that are converging. For example, communications, media, entertainment, and telecom to me are really the same industry, whether you’re selling a video game, or enterprise software, or a movie, or music, or a phone plan, it’s all the same to me. I don’t say that lightly, because it’s the interaction between the content, which is those media types, the distribution channels that are actually happening, what’s happening from the technology platforms, and then, of course, the customer networks, those interactions allowing this digital monetization to occur, whether it’s ads, or goods, or subscriptions, or memberships, or search, they’re all working in the same way. We see data value chains emerging, so that’s why I don’t really look at industries in the traditional sense. Retail, manufacturing, distribution, we see that convergence already. Hospitality, healthcare, and retail are converging. You see those kinds of things happen. I start to look at where data value chains are playing a role, just like you look at capital flows, I want to understand who takes the upstream, and the downstream implications of that data, and what do those insights create, and how do those insights create new monetization models or risk mitigation models. Ross: Yes, absolutely. It’s a long time since we’re seeing the convergence of industries, but in a way that provides a frame for the information; if you’re looking for these data flows, and particularly the ones which relate across industries, that’s where that is a signal that it is relevant and interesting. Ray: You do this all the time, I do this all the time, we’re trying to extract signal from the noise, and that’s been the challenge. The world has gotten noisy, you just got to get better at figuring out which data sources are more valid and which data sources are more trusted? There’s a little bit of having to do that as well. Ross: Tell me about that. How do you assess the validity of data sources? Ray: It’s completely temporal. Over time, what’s the track record of the source? What’s the track record of that information and insight? Has it been tampered? Has it been altered since you’ve last seen it? We’re dealing in a world of deep fakes; we’ve got to be very careful. Ross: One of the interesting things about signals is what’s surprising. What do you do when you see something that surprises you? What’s actually you’re going to say, Oh, that doesn’t fit model? This is something that is a counterexample. How do you deal with that? Ray: There’s the logical aspect of it, and then there’s the reality. I’m going to take a very controversial example, just to make a point; it might get me in trouble, but let’s take the issue of police deaths of unarmed individuals. In the US at one point in time, there might have been 42 of those in the year of 2019, maybe 2020; and of those, five of them were African American, 35 of them were Hispanic or White. Who would have thought that one incident like that would trigger a massive set of riots, and chaos in the United States throughout the summer, with massive amounts of property damage, massive amounts of social unrest, all happening at once? That doesn’t make any logical sense. If you were just to look at the numbers, it is like, oh, people should be more upset about violence in cities where thousands of people are being killed, thousands of people are not getting their justice, and people don’t feel safe, they should be angry about that, that’s the logical conclusion. But then the emotional piece kicks in, one video can change the way people view things, use that as the analogy versus your first principles argument. What I’ve learned over the last 24 months is that humans are not very good at making logical rational decisions in their heads. They don’t understand how to assess a proportional response, the level of risk, and probabilities. They let analogies, emotions, and imagery take over their logical minds. If you understand that, then you understand the art of these trends that are happening because the data is going to say one thing, like, who would care about 40 people who are unarmed and shot versus tens of thousands of people in the cities being killed every day. That would be more important in an issue. I think that’s an important lesson to be learned. When we’re talking about COVID-19, one would say this is crazy. If you look at the numbers, and if you look at what’s going on, you would think that the rational response would be to give every country the manufacturing capacity to have vaccines and get that done all at once, so that there wouldn’t be variants. Because the numbers say that the variants are operating at a thousand times the vaccine production, you’d want to solve that as an emotional issue; but here we are, 18 months later, and we’ve got countries like the US, where we’re wasting vaccines and talking about third boosters, and the other countries, which are barely getting their first set of vaccines. That’s not logical. It doesn’t make any sense. You see these things happen. You’re just like, Okay, I guess humans aren’t very logical. Ross: It continues to be a surprise, I suppose. Ray: It’s not going to surprise, but you get it, right? You’re just like, how can we be this? Would you trust the machine to then make that decision is the next logical conversation point. The answer is like, I don’t know, we still want a human in charge. Ross: It is also around then being able to say, Okay, what are the signals? Part of it is saying, Okay, you can’t analyze this rationally, you can’t have a logical structure here to this, but what are the senses or the structures in being able to assess particularly those group, or social, or emotional responses, which are still very much shaping our world? Ray: This goes back to your point. This is really about framing. Our ability to actually frame these conversations is important. Give people the context so that they can get to the right decisions. Ross: In summary, for anyone who is looking to thrive on massive amounts of information we live in today, what’s the advice you would give? Ray: I think what you have to figure out is the purpose of why you want to even get there. What are you trying to do with that type of information? There is a lot of noise. For example, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at gaming, I love it, it’s a fun spot, but that’s not for me. Gaming and e-sports, that’s not an area I typically go deep and cover. You have to figure out why you’re actually looking at that information and those information sets. Then you also have to figure out what information is useful to you. It’s easy to get overloaded. It’s massively easy to get overload if you’re not processing very rapidly, or if the data is not in a way that allows you to minimize context switching. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. It has been some really deep insights into what you do. You’re obviously right on the edge of making sense of lots of information. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful day. Ray: Thanks a lot, Ross. Thanks for having me here. The post R “Ray” Wang on constant curation, learning from private networks, finding temporal patterns, and seeing the impact of trends (Ep11) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“We need to go outside of our personal comfort zones in all kinds of ways politically, socially, culturally, to have a better understanding of the information ecosystem that we’re engaged in. “ – Dan Gillmor About Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor has been a media pioneer for decades. He is currently a professor at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. His latest project is News Co/Lab an experimental lab aimed at collaboration to improve the information ecosystem. He is the author of several excellent books including the highly influential We The Media. He has an online course hosted by edX called Overcoming Information Overload.  Website: dangillmor.com Blog: Dan Gillmor LinkedIn: Dan Gillmor Twitter: @dangillmor Facebook: Dan Gillmor Book Series We The People Mediactive What you will learn Why getting better information starts with upgrading yourself (03:09) Why we should look for sources of information outside our comfort zone (05:27) How deploying the best current tactics and tools help to deal with the overflow (08:02) What repetition tells you about a story (10:35) Why you should not depend on a single technology (14:09) How to use categories of worth (17:03) Why pay attention to articles that elicit a response from you (20:30) Why information overload is still more pros than cons (23:14) Retain healthy scepticism, not cynicism (27:19) Help the people you care about understand things that are difficult (30:31) Episode Resources Overcoming Information Overload edX Course News Co/Lab Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication Kabul, Afghanistan BBC The New York Times The Guardian The Wall Street Journal The Washington Post Pinboard QAnon Transcript Ross Dawson: Dan, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Dan Gillmor: Thanks for having me. Ross: So information overload is a special topic of yours, as you’ve taught it amongst other things. Dan: Yeah it’s something I’ve been looking at for quite a long time. It stems from recognizing that media is democratized, the technology is democratized, so that it’s in everyone’s hands, that everyone can participate in public conversations, as well as private ones, and one result of that is a massive amount of information, and we have to sort it out. Ross: Absolutely. We can look at it as a systemic problem, as in, there are certain things which we could, and maybe should, do to address it in terms of a systemic problem, but ultimately it comes down to us as individuals, we have to deal with the reality of this profusion of information, correct, incorrect, spurious and relevant. Dan: Yes, we do. We need to get the help of players in the ecosystem that are powerful, and that could help us a great deal. Ross: Just for a moment on that, who are the players? And what can we do? Dan: My philosophy on all this is that we need better information, no doubt about that. When I think of that, I think, in part, in the journalistic sphere, that we need a lot better journalism than we have, and trustworthy sources of information. That’s a supply-side question. While we do need to upgrade supply, what you’re getting at is that we need to upgrade demand. I believe, and my work has been focused on upgrading demand at scale, which is to say, we need to improve us, we need to upgrade ourselves. Scale requires help from major institutions in our societies, starting with the education that is at all levels, continuing on to media, which brings scale to information; journalism, entertainment should be playing a role, advertising, public relations, and others should be part of the bringing upgraded demand scale. Then finally, the institutions that pretty much define scale in the modern world, the technology, media companies, which need to do a lot more than they have been doing to help us be better ourselves as individuals and in our communities. Ross: Absolutely agreed. I do want to get to what you do, personally, as an exemplar of this. You mentioned education. I think education is, of course, lifelong. This is not just throughout our formal schooling, and it has always befuddled me why they never teach us to deal with information since that’s basically most of what we do through our lives. What would you say, at any level of education are the things that we need to be learning to be better at using the information that we have. Dan: I think it falls in two areas. One is principles, which really don’t change much, things of basic common sense, but which we need to restate periodically, so we’re clear. One is that we need to be skeptical of everything, but not equally skeptical. Use judgment to find things that we have reason to trust more than not. I think it’s a mistake to trust anything 100%, but there are many things I trust implicitly, and I trust them, even more, when they make mistakes, because they correct them, and tell me they made mistakes. Then we need to ask questions, which people don’t do very often, which they should do. No, we can’t expect people to go re-report the BBC report from Kabul, Afghanistan, but we can, especially when it’s locally based, ask our own questions and get good answers, or at least useful ones. We need to go outside of our personal comfort zones in all kinds of ways politically, socially, culturally, to have a better understanding of the ecosystem that we’re engaged in. Then we need to understand how media work, not just technically, but how media are used to persuade, and in fact, manipulate. All of those are basic principles. Then there are tactics, which do change because the tools change, the technologies change. We need to deploy the best current tactics and tools to help deal with this overflow, and the fact that so much of what we encounter is either mistaken, not out of any malign intent, or disinformation, misinformation, out of definitely malign intent. Ross: To illustrate that can we get a sense of your practices and what you do? Do you have any information routine? Do you go to particular sources at particular times of the day? How do you define your purpose and what you’re looking to get from information? Do you have some kind of structure for how you take on the information around you? Dan: I don’t think I have a connect the dots and paint in the numbers routine. It’s important for anyone listening to this to recognize that I live in this world of information. I’m not typical. I’m constantly swimming in this ocean. Most people have a life, and they don’t have time to do the stuff that I do. I have to separate the fact that I’m part of this and engaged in it in a very deep way, from what I think other people do and have time to do. But having said that, I can answer your question in several ways. First, is that I have a bunch of news websites that I visit every day because I think there’s value in a curated collection of information from editors, whom I think are more likely to have a good sense of the world than not. Again, I emphasize that they don’t get it right all the time. I am in constant despair, in fact, over the bad journalism I see. However, I still go to those places, New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC, and a number of others, to just get a sense of what the top editors in journalism think at the moment. I have a bunch of Twitter lists that I’ve collected of people who are experts in specific areas, and whom I trust to flag stuff that I’m going to be interested in, just by nature of who they are, what they do, so I can scan that. I often see a lot of repetition and that’s a good hint that something’s important if I see the same thing flagged three or four times. I go from a macro level to the very micro level of the Facebook group for my small town in Northern California; it’s the only thing around where resembling news happens about that place. It’s moderated very well by somebody who has basically banned national politics unless there’s a direct connection to that town, which is the best thing you can imagine because people who really would not agree, and, in fact, would get very angry with each other on he who cannot be named. Yet we work together quite well as a community on things that we know are important to us as a community. There are many things in between. The work I do I’m very careful to follow journals, people, lots of keyword searches in Google News and other news sites, and things like that. But I don’t have a routine. I’m just a promiscuous browser of everything I can find. Ross: There’s structure. There are some things that you go to for your sources. In terms of pulling all this into your mental models, or ways of thinking, or frames, or so on, do you take notes? Do you build any models? Is this all just inside your mind? Is it how you are thinking about things? Dan: I use what amounts to a bookmark collector where I will park things that I want to come back to, or that I want to use. I have different buckets where things are, like, Oh, here’s something that might be a reading for my students, or here’s something I’m going to want to perhaps post a note about on Twitter, here is something I might want to do a blog post about, that sort of thing. I think without that, it would be even more random than it is, and it’s still fairly random by any truly organized person standards. Ross: What bookmarking tool do you use? Dan: I’ve even forgotten the name of it. I’ve been using it for so long. Ross: It doesn’t matter. There are a few around. Dan: I’ll have to find it. Oh, hang on, it’s Pinboard. Ross: Pinboard? Dan: Yes. It’s something I pay for. It’s very modest in cost. After another tool I was using went away, I adopted that. This is one of the problems, things you use, their lifespan is basically how long the person can either stay in business or not get too bored to continue. Ross: Yes, there have been some losses in particularly the bookmarking space. Dan: Everyone I know had Delicious at the beginning, not everyone, but that was the tool of choice for almost everyone. Then it got destroyed after selling it to a big company. This is how things go. Ross: You also mentioned tactics. In terms of other tools or structures, you may have already mentioned some of these, but are there any other specific technologies or aggregators, or things other than you mentioned, that you use or find useful in your information perusal? Dan: I think there are some very high-value aggregation-type things. Again, it’s how do we rely on things to be with us? These are the issues; the more you get used to any one tool or site, the more risk you’ve taken at some level to suddenly find yourself lost when it just goes away. That’s really an unfortunate situation. I try to use things that either I make myself or collect things in places where I can always download everything if the worst happens. It’s a question that’s really interesting because I don’t think anyone has gotten aggregation right. For years, I’ve believed there’s a big opening in news aggregation for someone to do it right, and it just hasn’t been done, which is at least not the way I would do it. If I were 20 years younger and didn’t have a lot else on my plate, I would probably just do something myself. Ross: It is interesting that just a couple of days ago, news initiated with this piece, hit an unfortunate end. They’re not the first ones to have a go. Dan: I would change the adjective unfortunate to predictable because that was a very bad joke to begin with, and it didn’t elevate beyond that. Ross: There are different frames around what a useful aggregator can be in the scope of what it picks up. In terms of your role in educating in helping people to deal with this, you mentioned at the beginning this idea of being able to ask questions, or to inquire, or to try to discern how to deal with what is purported to be factual and may not, so what are some of the things which people who are coming to this can efficiently try to pass content to see whether it’s worthy of their attention? Dan: I think it’s important to separate worthy of attention from worthy of trust, and maybe a third category, useful; because those are not the same. My goal is generally to find things that are either wildly entertaining when I want to relax a little bit or things that are both worthy of attention and useful. I believe that implicitly includes honest and done right. I’ve lost my thread there, but the things that I actually have to work hard to try and keep myself in training not to do, is to be diverted by expert trolling and steering me off into some sack that waste my time, one of the worst. If I’m going to waste my time, I want to do it by watching a movie where I empty my brain into the screen. Even then, that’s not a waste of time but I don’t want my time to be wasted by someone whose goal is to reduce my ability to think well, and to reduce my time to do productive things. There’s a lot of stuff like that out there. Ross: Are you referring particularly to social media or also the articles that are effectively trawling? Dan: Tabloid journalism has been doing this very expertly for a very long time; certainly, over a century. I think it probably goes back to as long as there have been newspapers and media. That sensation and wildness have always been more financially successful. Certainly, then what we think of as serious news. I don’t think serious has to be boring, I don’t think useful has to be boring, and certainly entertaining, by definition is not boring. Ross: As you say, you get articles where you might say, Okay, belief is one inappropriate response but also outrage is an inappropriate response because it’s just losing yourself and your attention to something where it doesn’t to an emotional or other response. Dan: In general, if something makes you angry that you read, not always, but in general, if it’s a headline or short, and it makes you angry, it’s probably designed to do that. It’s probably, not necessarily but likely, I don’t have good data on that, but I think, in general, things that are designed to make me angry, are more often not trustworthy than they are trustworthy. When people I tend to believe post things that make me angry, I even have to pay attention, ask myself what is it that they’re doing? What is it that they’re angry about, that I’m supposed to join them in that? Because maybe it’s not as bad as they think it is? Direct mail, as an example, the United States mailing lists, or email lists, are about making money, raising money, and from all angles of the political spectrum, is an outrageous abuse of language. Because it works; you piss people off and it works, they send you money. You scare them, they send you money. That’s a problem, but things we respond to the crisis, we respond to the ganglia takeover. Ross: Yes, indeed. As you say, there are many experts at this, that are taking us away from what we should be paying attention to. You mentioned the word useful a couple of times. One of the challenges for many people is that it’s often hard to discern while there’s so much out there, which could be useful. How is it that I draw the line and say that that is useful? I frame this just coming back to purpose, what is it that is important to you? Do you have any thoughts around how people can have a filter to work out what is useful to them? Dan: I don’t have any formula for that. I don’t even have a vague one. The more invested I am in a topic, and by topic, I mean, an issue and to get out of anything remotely political. For example, if I have an issue with some software I’m using, I can find useful help with carefully crafted searching. For all the fury that people have, sometimes well earned, about YouTube, dragging people down a black hole of toxic, horrible stuff, and it does, sometimes; they’re working on that but that’s been their history. For all of that, consider how many people have found the video that let them repair something simply, or get something working simply, that in another age, they would have had to call somebody and pay them. This is miraculous in its own way. We got to keep in mind that these tools, I don’t know how you could find the data to prove it one way or the other, but I think there has been more value of a positive con created by everything we’re talking about than that catastrophic toxicity, which is there. I think if the toxic stuff brings down our democracies, or is proved at some point to be responsible for that, then I’m going to have to change my opinion. Because then I will have to say, Well, being able to repair my toaster from a video does not outweigh living in a dictatorship. I think I would then concede, but even that is not solely to blame. You can’t blame social networks for things that traditional media have been doing routinely. The Murdoch family’s media properties for a long time have been injecting poison into public discourse for a very long time. I believe that the right-wing media, and Fox News, in particular, in my country, have done more damage by far than all social media posts by all people in all of the history of social media. Ross: Yes, it’s horrible. Dan: Yes. Again, people have to learn how to discern things. We’re off our topic by quite a tangent here so I’ll let you wash your brains out. Ross: To round out this idea of thriving on overload, which is something that you do, and you teach others to do, are there any final thoughts, or recommendations, or frames, which would be useful to people in being able to draw on your expertise? Dan: I’m cautious about saying that I thrive on overload. I’m not sure that’s true. I think people have been overloaded with the information long before there was digital information. We adjust our view of simplicity based on the era that we live in. I’m pretty sure that in the century after Gutenberg, there was a lot of worry about information overload because this printed stuff was wildly available suddenly, and people were getting views of the world they hadn’t had before. What I think we have to try to do is recognize first that you have to trust somebody. It doesn’t mean that you have 100%, absolute willingness to act for yourself based on what they say. It means that you rely on them to basically get things right when you know they know a lot about it. Find that, find those people, find those sources, find those outlets, and find them for the things you care most about. Retain healthy skepticism, not cynicism, but skepticism, about much of the rest. Recognizing the news, in particular, is an inherently flawed process when it’s done by people and organizations of integrity. I’ll revise a phrase that I’ve always loved about the arc of justice bending, things bending toward justice, this arc bends toward reality, context, and that we have to trust ourselves at some level; but don’t do it based on your gut if the facts say that’s not right. I’m always finding things that challenge my worldview, and that’s great. Ross: Absolutely, if you’re searching for those, it’s a massive short circuit of time and energy, if you can find the trusted sources. Establish that trust, and that saves not all filtering or verifying, but at least makes it far more easier. Dan: Implicit in that is don’t share things you’re not sure about. Help the people you care about understand these things that are difficult. If Uncle George is sharing QAnon stuff, don’t call him out in public. Tell him, Uncle George, I really care about you, and I’m really worried, but do it privately. We have to give each other a break. We have to cut each other some slack. It doesn’t mean we have to tolerate things that are lies, because I don’t. If we don’t make decisions based on our best understanding of reality based on facts, then we are guaranteed to go badly wrong. We’re in the middle of one of these existential things where in my country, there’s a substantial part of the population that is saying that it was one thing when they wouldn’t wear a mask and risked other people’s health, but then refusing a vaccination not only risked other people’s health but their own. I don’t understand that. I don’t know how people can get so caught up in cult thinking as to treat themselves and the people they care about that way. I don’t understand it. Ross: Both better information and better ability to make sense of that information, as we started with, is critical on that journey to hopefully having better, and more useful ways of thinking and acting. Dan: Nobody should imagine that this is all easy. The people who say it is easy, or the people who say that everything can be boiled down to a binary view, and very little is binary in our lives, everything has nuance, but some things just are not true, and some things just are. We have to understand the differences here. Ross: Yes, and do well on that journey. Thank you so much for your time, and your insight. It’s been really valuable to hear from your very deep experience in being able to make sense of and filter through. Dan: I appreciate it. I’m sorry; I got off on tangents here. I tend to think in too many different directions at the same time. Ross: Thank you so much, Dan. Have a good day. Dan: Okay. Take care. The post Dan Gillmor on going from macro to micro, useful aggregators, and the best tactics and tools (Ep10) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Choose the sources that are going to disconfirm what you think. You need to have the people who are going to challenge your thinking so you don’t go down a single rabbit hole. That’s the trick. That’s the art in doing this. “ – Harold Jarche About Harold Jarche Harold Jarche has been an independent consultant for the past 20 years working with individuals, organisations, and governments to improve collaboration, knowledge sharing and sense-making.  He is the author the Seeking Perpetual Beta e-book series and runs the very popular Personal Knowledge Mastery online workshops. In this episode, Harold shares his Seek, Sense, and Share framework; insights on network learning, finding different perspectives, and far more. Website: jarche.com Blog: Harold Jarche LinkedIn: Harold Jarche Twitter: @hjarche YouTube: Harold Jarche Book Series Seeking Perpetual Beta What you will learn What is Personal Knowledge Mastery (01:33) How is Personal Knowledge Mastery different from Personal Knowledge Management (04:26) What is Networked Learning (07:26) What is the Seek, Sense, and Share Framework and its practice (10:35) How the Seek process helped Harold make sense of Covid (22:22) Why he chooses sources that contradict what he thinks (26:02) How to make sense of complex issues with many diverse opinions (28:56) What is Harold’s daily routine (32:35) How to synthesize and add value to information (38:20) What is the difference between networks and communities (43:33) Episode Resources Lilia Efimova Denham Grey IBM Dave Pollard Ernst & Young Domino’s Pizza Citibank Valdis Krebs Dr Trisha Greenhalgh Perpetual Beta Coffee Club Feedly Pinboard Bloglines Jony Ive Sturgeon’s Law Transcript Ross Dawson: Harold, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Harold Jarche: It’s great to be here, Ross. Ross: We’ve known each other for a long time. One of our common interests has been what you have framed as personal knowledge management, or in your case, personal knowledge mastery. Can you explain what personal knowledge management is and how you came to that? Harold: It started when I started freelancing, which was in 2003. One of the challenges I had is that I live in the middle of nowhere; I’m about 1000 kilometers from Boston no or Montreal and major cities, I live out in the Atlantic, Canada. One of the challenges I had was, how do I stay current in my profession? How do I stay connected to people? And how do I not spend a whole bunch of money? I came across the work of several people, particularly Lilia Efimova, who was doing her doctorate about knowledge sharing through blogging at the University of Twente, Netherlands. There are a few other people who were talking about that, at that time, Denham Grey, who was working for IBM, Dave Pollard, who was working for Ernst and Young as the Chief Knowledge Officer. I was reading their stuff. I saw, particularly with blogs, because that was the technology of the time, that it was possible to connect with people without actually having to see them, without having to travel or anything like that. My budget was pretty well close to zero for travel. I started writing about PKM, just on my blog and sharing it mostly for myself, because I really didn’t have much of a readership. What transpired over time, was that I started taking a look at the discipline of how do we make sense of our knowledge, of our experiences? How do we build knowledge networks? How do we have others help us make decisions? How do we understand the constant flux of, which is increasingly more so today, of information, and particularly disinformation over time? I basically was writing for myself. I was putting it on the blog and basically just talking out loud to nobody. But several years later, probably, I’ve been writing about it for at least five years, I was contacted by the fellow who’s in charge of leadership development at Domino’s Pizza. He said this is really interesting stuff you’ve been writing about. Do you think that we could incorporate what you’re doing, and use it in our leadership training? I went to Domino’s head office, and we worked on this for a period of time. It was when the light went on that this is a thing that could help a lot of people. I kept working on the model and putting stuff out there. I had a whole bunch of half-baked ideas, which really was the process of PKM. I came up with a higher framework, using the alliterative terms of Seek, Sense, and Share, and then shifted from personal knowledge management to personal knowledge mastery, because I did not want to be directly linked to the knowledge management world, which was still very much about codifying information and pumping it out to people, whereas PKM is the opposite, it is people making sense, and then floating it up, sharing it with others, and what emerges from those conversations and relationships, then, is that shared knowledge base. It’s been 14 years or so that I’ve been working on that. It’s a work in progress. But now it’s been used with a lot of different organizations. We just finished implementing the trading education program. It’s very much a cohort-based learning program at Citibank. We’ve run several thousand people through that. It has four modules. What’s interesting is that the first module is based on curiosity, which becomes the underpinning part of Seek, Sense, and Share, which is, at first, you have to be curious about people and ideas. That’s where we are today with it. Ross: Personal knowledge is developing your knowledge as an individual, as you say, immersed in information. It’s particularly interesting that you are, as you say, so isolated yet you are still on the edge of change. There are a lot of different directions to go but one of the first things is how do you define your own expertise? What it is that you choose to keep current with? Harold: There are two areas. One is distributed work or what some people call remote work. I’ve been working remotely for 18 years now. I think that I’ve learned a fair bit about that, and it can help organizations and help people develop different skills. For example, one thing that I’ve learned about working in a distributed way is that asynchronous communication becomes critical. You can’t spend your whole day in Zoom meetings talking to people, you have to find ways of sharing information, not in real-time. We as bloggers understand that we’ve been sharing information asynchronously a lot. I think that the asynchronous communicators, the ones who do it well, are really going to do much better in this emerging remote workplace. The other one is networked learning. It’s working with other people and connecting to other people. In a lot of cases, it’s learning from people with who you don’t have a work or collaborative relationship. It’s like you and me, we share freely with each other. Over time, we’ve learned from each other, but there’s no deal in it or anything like that. What we’ve done is that we’ve built a relationship, which becomes very important when it comes to, if I want to know something specific, I know that I can call you up and say, Hey, Ross, can you explain this thing to me because this seems to be your field of expertise. More and more, that is where we’re all going, is that we’re only as good and as smart as our networks, and the network learning is a two-way street, is that you have to give in order to get. That is a big challenge that I find, particularly with organizations. Ross: Network learning or network knowledge is a critical part of this. Of course, we can pull up the news feeds and say how did that give us so much? What is that process? How is it that we build those networks? As you say it is this give and take, or is it simply just being able to find the right people and to share and build that relationship? How does that happen in practice? Harold: My colleague, Jay Cross talked about this a lot. Jay was a champion of informal learning. Jay often said that the building block of learning is conversation. That also becomes the building block of trust. It is that the more conversations you have with someone, the more that you trust them. There’s research in the pharmaceutical research space, that shows that people only share complex knowledge if they trust other people, so you have to build these webs of trust, one person at a time, or somebody connected through somebody else, who knows somebody else. That is how we make sense of what’s going on, particularly, good media literacy, that one of the first things you do is you take a look at it, and you say, Okay, what’s in it for this person? Who’s paying their bills? Why are they pushing this message or something like that? That’s where the trusted relationships that we’ve built over time, become good filters to find out… I might get some mainstream news about what’s happening in Australia, but I can send you a note and say, Hey, this is what they’re saying is happening in Sydney, is that really happening? And you get back to me and say, it’s not quite like that; actually, it’s a little bit more nuanced. I find that these international relationships that I have, have really helped me to make sense of the world, and have been really good in understanding this very complex pandemic, that we’re still working through the fourth wave here. Ross: I want to come back to the pandemic and the sense-making around that, but perhaps, your framework of Seek, Sense, and Share, and, of course, this is something which you teach and you help people in organizations with, but as you’re in practice, as you’ve created this from your practice, could you take us through that framework, and what those phases are, and how should we develop those capabilities? Harold: Yes. Seek, as I mentioned with the Citi project, is based on curiosity. It is that you have to find ways in which you can seek out diverse opinions. First of all, when I start teaching people this, I often use Twitter as an example. I say, Okay, start on Twitter. Point number one is why are you using Twitter? Is it to learn about something? Is it to connect to a community? It could be, Oh, I want to see what’s going on in my local community. Then I usually recommend finding 20 to 30 people who are talking about whatever it is that you’re interested in. It’s a little bit of a shotgun approach to start with. Then start paying attention to what they’re doing. You don’t have to engage yet, you’re still seeking. Then you can tune those signals; you can amplify the ones that are giving you good information, and you can decrease the noisy ones. Then you can take a look at, Am I getting the same information from these people? Am I getting diverse enough perspectives on it? And again, it’s that noise-signal ratio that you start adjusting a little bit. That’s a little bit of an art, though, there are some techniques to it. Ross: How do you amplify or turn it down? Harold: One thing like in my case, is that, because I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s hard to go back to day one when I did this, but I’m always on the lookout for people whose perspectives are different from the norm that I’m following. I may come across somebody who’s talking about learning and education, maybe training, and remote work and stuff like that, but they’re located in North Africa, or maybe they’re located someplace in Asia, where I really don’t have many connections, so I’d say, I should follow that person, and see whether or not I’m getting a more diverse perspective on that area. I’m constantly on the lookout for people on the fringe, or people who are not giving me similar messages. I’m also then cutting back on sources if I’m seeing that all they’re doing is that they are talking about the same type of stuff. One thing that I’ve done over the years, is that I used to follow a lot of sources of information, whether it was a news feed, or aggregated comments and stuff like that. More and more, I’m connected to individuals, and I want to see what their perspective is on it. That’s where it really comes in handy. One of my network connections is Valdis Krebs. Valdis is an expert on organizational network analysis. If I have questions that are related to network analysis, I just send a message to Valdis and I say, Valdis, this is what I’m looking for, where should I start looking? What may be is a seminal document or resource that I should start with? He then refers that back to me and says, No, you should start here, check this out, don’t look at that, do those kinds of things. More and more over time, I’m finding it’s those trusted human relationships that really become my major filter to make sense of what the heck’s going on, particularly as we see the rise of misinformation, and disinformation, and propaganda in social media. Ross: Is the next phase then sense? Harold: Yes, it is the next phase, and it’s the hardest phase. A lot of people take a look at your bookmarks or your social bookmarks, and see what you’ve got, and how many 1000s do you have, and what have you done with it? It’s like, Well, I just got them. That’s not very good. You’re getting all this input, which is fine, but are you going to be able to take any action on what you’ve learned? And to do that, I think sometimes you have to put out what I call half-baked ideas, and get feedback on them. Quite often, I may put those out on my blog. or I may share them inside some private communities. The nice thing about private communities is that if you put a stupid idea, you won’t get attacked by the trolls, who are all over social media right now. Sense-making, again, as a blogger, it’s been relatively easy. If you have an affinity for writing, then blogging is a really good and easy way to put some of your ideas out there, and get feedback from people as well. There are other ways of doing it. We’re seeing that a lot with platforms like TikTok, where people are putting out these short videos. I was reading about one person; what they do is at the end of the day, they would drive to work and on the way home, they would talk out loud to themselves about how the day went, what they learned, and what they were going to do about it. I guess it might get some funny looks if you’re doing that on the bus. I’m not too sure. You need to find a medium by which you can make sense of what is going on, and that could be having regular conversations with people. I think in some cases, this podcast series is part of what you’re doing in terms of thriving on overload. How are you making sense of it, one way that you’re doing it is that you’re getting various perspectives from a lot of different people. I presume that you’re going to be looking at synthesizing this as well. I think that for anybody who’s in any profession, particularly with the changes that we’re seeing, things like climate change, Australia and Canada are getting whacked pretty hard with it right now, is that how can we make sense of this world, who do we pay attention to, what’s important, and it becomes difficult. It’s when I run my workshops, the sense-making part is the part that we really talk a lot about, and it’s you need to find your own medium. In some ways, it’s like becoming an artist, so you’re going to be a painter or a sculptor. You won’t know unless you try and do it for a while. Ross: The next phase is share; though, it sounds like in a way that sensing involves sharing in many cases, if you are, for example, blogging, as you say, or throwing out these trial balloons for people to bounce off. Harold: Yes. The share part has various aspects to it. One is that by narrating your work or working out loud, or whatever term you want to use, is that you’re exposing yourself. There was a book written about it 10-15 years ago, and they called blogging, naked conversations, and it is kind of like that. By putting yourself out there, you’re also making yourself a target, where people will be able to criticize you. That’s the Share part, why it’s good for me to share, is because I’m going to get feedback. We’ve even seen this with students, the difference between the students submitting a paper to a teacher is very different than the student posting it online for the world to see. A lot of teachers have found that if the students put their work out into the general public, they actually put a heck of a lot more effort into it because they know that a lot of people are going to see that. I think that’s the same thing with any professional, you have to get out there. Then there’s the other part of it. It is that if we all share, if we all do this, in a free way, as we do with the blog, we’re actually helping to make the network smarter. We’re all doing our own little bit. I think that that has been one of the challenges in our more established democracies. People are leaning towards demagogues and populists, and there hasn’t been the voice of reason, or it’s been drowned out. We need more and more individuals to be able to contribute to those kinds of conversations and have those relationships, so I can talk to somebody who’s on a different part of the political spectrum; we can still respect each other, we can have nuanced conversations, and not be screaming at each other. That again becomes part of why sharing is important. Of course, there are real challenges. I know women who are quite active on social media and they’ve had to block 10s of 1000s of trolls and attacks. That’s the nasty nature of it. Finding the right balance, finding the right platforms becomes important. I share different things inside my private communities than I do on my blog or on other social media. It becomes a balancing act of sharing enough information, making enough sense of this stuff, and also you still got to get things done, that becomes important. Ross: As you know I’m a deep believer in the Share part, on lots of levels; personally, in contributing to the global brain and all these wonderful things. But I think there are many people who would say, is that necessary? It takes time, people might not respond in the right way. That Seek, Sense, and Share, is that for everyone to do? Harold: If you think about living in civil society, participating in a democracy, and if it is that the people who can be articulate are not sharing, where are other people going to get their information from? I find that if you’re not helping to make your network and your community smarter, then you may wind up with a dumb network that’s making bad decisions like voting for demagogues or going down the populist simplistic route. In a networked society, I think it’s part of the social contract. It also is something that is not taught in schools at all. That’s really missing. I’ve implemented PKM in one educational institution so far. I’m not doing really well in that. Ross: You mentioned before about the pandemic, I think that’s something which everyone is trying to make sense of. It’s not as if we can really truly make sense of it. It’s only a moving target with new data or new information and new insights. Partly, we want to understand what’s going on in our nation, in the world. But also, how do we keep ourselves and our family safe? How have you seen all this being applied by you and/or others in terms of making sense of what we’ve experienced this year and last? Harold: The pandemic hit, we got locked down. The first thing I did is I is I phoned my son, my son is a microbiologist, works as a research scientist, and going like, What’s all this stuff? What’s going on? So he explained a little bit to me. I started following the WHO, CDC, and the Canadian Public Health as well, to get the information. Then some weak signals came out that the WHO is political? Of course, it is, because it’s a member-nation organization. The CDC was a little bit slow on that, and you start taking a look at who are these people, and you know they’re researchers, and they want to make sure the research is perfect, and then start getting conflicting information. I found a couple of people who were a bit on the edge, and one of them just happened to be a person that I’ve been connected with on Twitter for a long time, so I knew her. That’s Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh, who teaches Primary Care Medicine at Oxford University. I started following her. Trisha suddenly started going off and criticizing the word that WHO was saying, and in early 2020, she and a team of 36 other scientists and physicians, put out a paper talking about that the COVID or the Coronavirus is airborne. Whereas, we were here washing things down, putting up Plexiglas barriers and things like that, and it showed quite clearly that this wasn’t working. I started following her, connecting to other people, actually, I wound up having a Twitter list called Pandemic. It’s off of my Twitter profile. I’ve got about a dozen people from three, four different countries with experience all over the world, who basically have gone a little bit against the mainstream because one thing is that they don’t have bosses who force them to toe the party line. I have been six to 12 months ahead of what has come down through official channels. We were masking when nobody else was. We then started getting the higher quality masks when people were wearing cloth-ones and things like that. It’s this little network I’ve got; some of these people follow me back, most of them don’t. But they are trying to help make the network smarter and passing on really good research and information about the nature of this pandemic. I’ve realized that every authority, every institution has its own agenda, and you have to know what that agenda is. Then you have to figure out how can you make the best decisions for you and your family. I found my little pandemic Twitter list has been pretty darn good. I’m kind of happy with that. Ross: It sounds like this is choosing your sources. Harold: Yes, choosing your sources, but also choosing the sources that are going to disconfirm what you think, so you need to have the people who are going to challenge your thinking so you don’t go down a single rabbit hole. That’s the trick. That’s the art in doing this. It’s having people who are on the outside, or who have differing opinions, not dumb, not total nut job opinions or anything like that, but people who see things differently. An interesting one that I follow on the edge because I’m very deep into things that are important to me, the pandemic has suddenly become important; but I’m also interested in climate change like anybody else. I’m following the arguments, the discussions, and conversations around nuclear energy as a good short-term alternative to adding more CO2 into the air. It’s interesting to watch how people have entrenched positions, and there is very little middle ground in this. Anyway, it’s a place where I poke a little bit and try to learn, but diversity becomes really, really important. It is having diverse sources of knowledge, particularly when we’re dealing with something that is complex, like climate change, or the pandemic. Ross: At one point you said, there were just a dozen sources in the pandemic, so this is not a very wide net. You’ve been very careful in curating that list of sources. Harold: Yes. It started with a few people. I’ve got folks in the UK, US, Canada, and every once in a while I tweet out and I say, Okay, this is who I’m following. Is there anybody else I should be following or anything like that? I’ve removed a couple of people; I’ve added a couple of people. But for the most part, the ones that I’m following are people who are in the business of communicating and information. They’re putting out a lot of stuff, and they’re referring to a lot of other sources. As one individual having 50, or 100 of these things to go through, it would be too much. I would definitely add to it if I came across something or someone that could add to the conversation, and the knowledge, that is being shared there. But yes, finding your limits becomes important as well. Again, if you’re spending all your time seeking and reading, and not doing anything about it, that’s not very helpful. Ross: In terms of the sense-making, you have diverse sources; take the nuclear energy as an example where you’ve got a lot of polarized opinions, not a lot of mil of ground, it’s a burden, it’s a responsibility; how do you then make sense of this complexity when you’ve got all of this diversity of opinion? I think that this goes to the point where people will say, Oh, it’s easy, when all my information sources agree, then I don’t need to have a difficult cognition of working out what’s going on. But I suppose that is one of the challenges as it becomes more diverse. It leaves us with the burden of trying to continually sort through that. Harold: Again, you have to say, what am I making sense of? Am I just reading this to read it and understand it? Am I going to try to put these diverging or diametrically opposed opinions and try to find some middle ground on that? I have a degree in education, but I’m not an educator per se. One of the things I did when the boys were in school was I started connecting with people who were talking about un-schooling, de-schooling, the big homework question, is homework valuable? Does it detract from learning? And I collected a lot of information about that. I used that to make sense of how should we be helping our boys in school? I’m not really interested in it anymore. I’ve parked that one over on the side. I think part of it in the sense-making is what are you doing with the information and the experiences that you’re living through? Probably one of the easiest things that I recommend, and one of the activities we do in my workshops, is I get people to take a look at a situation. Let’s say, it was the riots in the US last year, then get information from multiple spectrums, then put that together, and try to ascertain the validity of each one of the perspectives and where there are disagreements and things like that. Another easy way, in terms of sense-making, that I found is writing book reviews. When you’ve read a book, write about it, write what you think what’s important about it. I found that has just been helpful with other people. I have those reviews on my website where you asked me, Look, I’m really interested in a book, and I said, I read a really good one, several years ago, let me pull it out. It’s there, it’s on my blog, and all I have to do is share the link. That makes it a minimal effort for me, in terms of the sharing. Sometimes sharing is sharing at the right moment. But if you’ve got nothing to share, that’s not very helpful. The nice thing about the blog is I can write it but also I can share something. I know, I’ve used some of your posts from 10 years ago, that I still share in presentations or conversations saying, check this out here. Had you not read that and had you not made it easy for sharing, it would be difficult for me to disseminate that. Ross: Yes. Digging a little bit into the detail of what’s in a day for you, an information day for you? Do you have a routine? Do you look up particular sources at particular times of the day? What happens in the day in terms of information input, or assessing or working with it? Harold: Usually, the places I go, for sure, are my private communities. I’m a member of three online communities and they’re focused on different things. If there’s anything new in those, I will definitely check that out. I also manage a community called the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club, and we’ve got about 70 members in that. As the moderator and convener of that, I’ll check out what’s going on there. Then I use an aggregator. I use Feedly right now. I’ve got about 75-100 sources, and usually, at least once a day, I’ll go through the aggregator and see what’s new. I’m pretty quick. It’s like new, interesting, then if there’s something, I’m going like, oh, I want to do something with this, I put things into a very small holding tank because I know that holding tank would get really big. It’s like this is something I want to read in-depth or this is something that I think I can comment on or I can connect a, b and c here together, and those are blog posts to be written or things to be shared within my communities, I get those in there. Then I use Twitter. I usually check Twitter fairly frequently, unless I’m working. What I found pre-pandemic, was interesting; because I had two routines. I had my at-home routine, and then I had my travel routine. While I was traveling, I was only seeking and collecting stuff. When I got home, that was when I would be doing the sense-making and the sharing. Now my routine is focused on whatever my priority happens to be. Let’s say my priority this week is writing some of my own material or maybe it’s client work, maybe it’s preparing a presentation, those kinds of things. If I have a presentation that I’m getting ready to do, maybe a month from now, I’ll have that part. Then I will also have an eye to my feeds, into my conversations, go, Oh, hey, that’s an interesting connection, I think I can put that into this idea that I’ll be conveying in the presentation. It’s fluid. The other thing is to not compartmentalize. I don’t compartmentalize work, non-work, leisure, and things like that. For me, it’s one brain and it’s one flow as it goes through. I hope that kind of answers it. Ross: Yes, absolutely. Let’s say you’re going through an aggregator and you find something that you want to read more about later. Do you use a note-taking system? Do you tag it? Do you bookmark it? How do you then follow up? Harold: Short term, I bookmark it, and I just put it into my menu on one of the browsers, because I use multiple ones. The thing is, that gets full really quick, so that forces me to do something with it. Because I used to use aggregators and Bloglines years ago, and it had that save for later function. Then one day I’d take a look, I have 700 save for later items, I’m not going to read any of these things. That’s why the things that I save, I put into a very small container. Things that I think could be useful, but I’m not going to do anything in the short term with, I then put them into the social bookmarks system. I use Pinboard right now. I really like Pinboard, because it’s super simple. Also, you have to pay for it, which means that the fellow who runs it is going to be around for a while, so I’m not going to lose my data, and it’s quite easy to export on that. Pinboard is handy. I use it quite often with my clients. It’s that my client is interested in something, let’s say it’s remote work, so as I find articles and references on remote work, I will tag them; I will highlight pieces of the text and put them into Pinboard. Then the client, they’ll see some interesting stuff on that, I can take a bunch of those, stick them together, put a separate tag on top of it, the client’s name, let’s say or something like that, and give it to them. Now I have this curated list of 10,15, 20, whatever things, that are relevant to them. That’s the asynchronous sharing. I’m getting this stuff, I’m adding some value to it with my comments, with my tagging, with highlighting of text, then at the appropriate time, when someone needs it, I can give it to them. I’m not dumping them information that they may need six months from now because they’re not going to read it. Ross: You talked before about synthesis. Actually, you said, I will be synthesizing some of these conversations, which is absolutely true. But that’s again, the challenges we have is how do we synthesize, build our mental models, and so on? Of course, you create some visuals, some diagrams, or some frameworks. I know, that’s part of your practice but what is that process of cogitation or laying things out or writing them or drawing them? What is the process for you of synthesis, of building effective mental models? Harold: You can add value to information in a lot of ways. An easy and a low value add would be categorizing stuff, which is fine. Let’s say you find 50 sources of information about something, and you can find the top 10, or you can categorize it as type A, type B, type C, that makes it easier for you to share, it makes it easier for someone else to say, Oh, this is pertinent to me, and it also makes it easier to come back to sometimes and say, Oh, yes, I remember I put those things down there, and now is the time for me to do something about that. Another way of adding value, particularly if you’re doing client work, I’ve done this many times, is that I will read a very deep paper research document or something like that on a topic, and I will pick out what is pertinent to the client. I say, Okay, they talk about these kinds of things, this I think is really of interest to you, and this is why I think it is. That’s again, a nice way to add value to the knowledge. I know that you’ve talked about this as well over the years. Just another way of doing it is to present it. I think we’re seeing that a lot particularly in the younger generation with TikTok, is that they’re taking some complex thing that’s happening in society, and in 30 seconds, and quite often in a humorous way, they’re synthesizing the key points. I’d say, Oh, that’s what it’s really about. I think that’s a really good value add. I think synthesizing it, presenting it, presenting it in a different way, presenting it to a certain audience, categorizing it, summarizing it, those are all ways that we can make sense of it. Jony Ive gave a presentation when he became The Oxford Cambridge fellow in information or something, that was about three, four years ago. I read his speech which was quite good. He talked about the development of the iPhone and the challenges between design, shipping, and things like that. I took all of that, and I highlighted what I thought were the key parts, because he talked about how important curiosity is, but then it has to be balanced with the resolve to solve the problem, and to ship, and to deliver what it is that you’re doing. Yes, you can go, Oh, look, a butterfly, but you still have to build the iPhone and get it out there. Then I actually matched that up with my seek, sense, share model, and he’s basically doing that. He’s out there seeking information in his networks. He’s also focused on collaborating and getting work done. In the middle, he has this group of people from multiple disciplines who are learning from each other, who are sharing in this private space what’s going on, because the design is different from engineering, is different from marketing and all those things, but they all have something to add to it. He talked about during the day is that you’re constantly going from that out there curious, this is an interesting idea that may be fruitful later, all the way down to what is it that we’re going to get done today? And he says it’s this constant dance between curiosity and resolve. For me making sense of it, putting it, adding a visual, helped me convey that. Ross: Yes, the process of distillation; I think as you’re trying to get it in that 30 second TikTok is a nice way to frame it because if you can pull something into that, then that’s a real act of synthesis. Harold: Yes, and there are some really good folks doing it. The challenge, just to digress a bit, is how do you keep up with all of them without going down the rabbit hole. Ross: What’s your response to that question? Harold: I ignore a lot of stuff. That’s basically it. Ross: We could talk for hours because you have such depth here. I’ll obviously point any listeners to your website, Jarche.com, and your work. In terms of just wrapping up here, Is there anything else, which we haven’t talked about yet, which you think is critically important in being able to understand how it is that people can thrive on overload? I think we’ve covered a lot of really good territory, in terms of your framing of this, but what else is really critical to understand so that people can prosper when we have so much information, so much we need to make sense of? Harold: We’re seeing it right now, on social media, people are saying I’m leaving social media, I’m going into this private forum or something like that, it’s the difference between networks and communities. I firmly believe that we need to be engaged in both. A network is like the Wild West, and it is filled with trolls. Twitter is a network. Facebook is a network, no matter what they say. But these are really good places to get divergent opinions, and you are going to get Sturgeon’s law, 90% of everything is crap. There is going to be a lot of crap out there, but also balance that with a community, a community that serves its members, that is there for its members, that’s run by its members, and where there are trusted relationships, and you can stick your head out there, say something stupid, people may say, Harold, that’s stupid, but they’re going to say it in a nice way, like in a family way. It’s where you can feel comfortable doing those kinds of things. I think that folks who are in the learning business should really be focused on helping to develop communities, to support the communities, to help other people find communities, because things are moving so fast, we need to have safe places where we can share information. It’s both communities and networks, and don’t confuse the two. A network is not a safe place, but it’s a place where you could get some really interesting ideas. Ross: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for your insights, Harold. To your points earlier, I’ll probably, quite likely will ping you with an email, with a question here or two along the way. Harold: By all means. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insight. It has been a great delight to talk to you again, Harold. Harold: It’s always nice to talk to you, Ross. Thank you. The post Harold Jarche on personal knowledge mastery, the Seek, Sense, and Share framework; networked learning, and finding different perspectives (Ep9) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“What is the technology that can solve homelessness? That can make high quality health care accessible to all? I believe that is the world we should be creating.” – Brett King About Brett King Brett King is a world-renowned futurist and speaker, an international bestselling author, and a media personality who covers the future of business, technology, and society. Brett hosts the world’s #1 ranked radio show on FinTech, “Breaking Banks” with 7 million listeners, and is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Moven, a successful mobile start-up, which has raised over US$47 million. His books have achieved bestseller status in 20 countries, with his latest book on how to shape the post-Coronavirus world The Rise of Technosocialism, just out. LinkedIn: Brett King Twitter: @BrettKing Facebook: Brett King YouTube: Brett King Medium: Brett King Books The Rise of Technosocialism Augmented: Life in The Smart Lane Bank 4.0 Bank 3.0 Bank 2.0 Breaking Banks Branch Today, Gone Tomorrow What you will learn He gets as much as 1,300 emails daily (03:08) Relationships and paying it forward is important to him (04:03) But you learn to say no in a nice way (07:35) Making sense of rapidly changing FinTech starts at 30,000-foot view (09:08) He keeps an eye on application technology and user experience (15:25) He predicted the move to mobile wallets but not QR codes (18:31) It all started with a blog… (21:50) …having a thesis… (25:15) …and a strong purpose (27:40) Join the conversation and find the value in yourself (33:08) Episode Resources Moven Breaking Bad Wise Aristotle Sibos Innotribe Vitalik Buterin Ethereum Jehovah’s Witness Transcript Ross Dawson: It’s awesome to have you on the show, Brett. Brett King: Anytime we get together and talk, it’s always interesting. Ross: Absolutely. Brett: Thanks, Ross. Ross: You keep across amongst many other things, the edge of FinTech, and far more actually, which we’ll probably get to, and that’s a pretty fast-moving field. How do you keep across change and make sense of it, and understand what’s going on in this rapidly changing space? Brett: The sheer volume of what’s happening in FinTech now means that I can’t keep across everything, but I can keep across stuff thematically that has emerged over the last 13 years or so since FinTech was a thing. I’ve been running a podcast for eight years, and that’s in the FinTech space. We’re always interviewing startups and players in that space, so that’s a good way to keep you on top of the news, actually interviewing people. Then I have a close group of friends who back in the 2008, 2009, 2010 timeframe, were the early content creators and curators of FinTech related content. Now, they have big followings, so keeping track of what those guys are talking about also helps from a macro perspective. Where I sort of fail is on the email side. I’ve now got to the point where emails are almost totally useless for me because the volume of emails I’m getting is unmanageabple. I do tend to rely on people messaging me through LinkedIn or Messenger or WhatsApp or text or Twitter direct message, rather than emailing me, just because the volume of content I get through there is now too much to manage. 1200, 1300 emails a day at peak; you just can’t go through that many emails every day. There’s some stuff that I do better than others, but the curated Twitter feed, and the lists I’ve got within Twitter help me hone in on the core news that’s affecting the industry. Ross: Starting off with talking about the relationships; Relationships are the people you know from way back, and you cannot just follow them on Twitter but have conversations with them, and reaching out to people who want to be interviewed on your show, and building the relationships there. I think part of this is around the quality of the relationships as well as who it is you know? Brett: Yes, absolutely. That’s true; having people that trust you to deal with their message properly, when you’re in the public space, like I am, as someone that has been a foundational podcast on the FinTech side. The podcast called Breaking Banks came out, not long after the Breaking Bad TV series, you can see why we named it the way we did, but being sort of a vehicle for these people to talk about their startups, express their opinions, and so forth, early in the space gave me some credibility there as a team player. I’ve also been very serious about paying it forward. I’ve been successful in this space, because of a lot of people who’ve got behind my message and amplified it and so forth. I’m also very aware of my responsibility to do the same for them, so I try and make sure that I’m a good social media partner for these people as well, and can help them get their message across when required or needed, so then when I go and ask them to help me out on occasion or ask them for some input, they’re quite open to it. I think it is very much that when you’ve got a network like that, you have to keep that network nourished and recognize the value of the key stakeholders. Ross: So it’s not just about trust, as in trust, they trust you that you’re going to do the right thing with whatever they share with you, which can include, of course, privileged information potentially or other things, but also that you’re actively doing things in their interest and which could be sharing information or other things, which will… Brett: Yes, even just people being able to ask me for help. One of the areas and I’m sure you probably get this as well, one of the areas I get asked a lot is how they can get on the speaking circuit? How to build a speaking business? Because a lot of them see the stuff that we do, and they’re like, I would love to get paid to speak. Helping people understand how the speaking business works, and what they need as a platform to be able to successfully generate leads for speaking opportunities and all of that, that’s always going to take a bit of time because unless you’re in the industry and initially in the space, you don’t really understand the economics of how that works. That’s one area. Also, often getting asked to connect people with other people in FinTech, that’s another common one. The other thing is when you start building a profile, and you have the bestselling books, you have the radio show, you also get a lot of people that will connect with you on LinkedIn, or connect with you on Facebook, and next thing, they contact to me saying, hey, I want some help with my business. Often it’ll be something like, you know all the banks, so maybe you could help introduce my company to all these banks. I was like, dude, I run six companies of my own, so being a sales force of one for your product is not really super appealing to me. Having to say that in a nice way, so they don’t get offended is sometimes tough. One of the challenges is, as you get more time-poor, and there are more demands on your time, giving your time for other people and giving them assistance in that way, you have to be a little bit more selective. I do try at least take a 15-minute call or something like that, where I can, and help these people where I can or where I’ve learned those lessons. I think that’s important to pay it forward in that way. Ross: So it’s not just information, but the value in many ways that flows in the networks of relationships. I guess it just becomes much more challenging when you’re prominent. I suppose, in a way a conduit for many, for their information being able to get out. You talked before about the themes. FinTech is incredibly complex and multi-layered from payments through crypto to transaction processing. I don’t think anybody really understands the whole; it’s impossible. It is so rapidly changing, with Defi and so on. So how do you make sense of that? It’s not just about information, of course; it’s about actually building an understanding of what is changing, and from what has been this old establishment of the way money works to the way money is going to work? You mentioned those themes, is that one of the ways in which you pull out and build this understanding? Brett: Yes, part of it is just taking that as futurists or forecasters, taking that 30,000-foot view and saying where is it that this is going to? Where is it likely to evolve to? When you start looking at things like crypto, Defi, or NFTs, this is an effort to digitize the world, to digitize money, digitize transactions, digitize assets, because we’ve created this digital framework of the internet and e-commerce and so forth on top of that. It’s the natural evolution of money. Paper money, when it was created back in the 16th century, the first central bank in Sweden was the first issuer of paper notes, the Chinese had leather at some point as well in the past, but the point is, these national fiat currencies were built for value exchange within their geography. Today, the world is opening up into a global commerce platform where commerce can happen in real-time. You’d expect money has to evolve to meet the needs of the 21st century. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is purely the fact that banking historically has not been accessible to most people on the planet. Up until the year about 2011, I think, you still had a 45% of the world that were unbanked, that never had a bank account. In the United States, 20% of households are still unbanked. Part of that is because of the rules that banks have created about who can access their services. You must have a driver’s license or a passport, you have these hoops that you have to jump through from an identity perspective. Imagine you are a homeless person, you don’t have an address, you don’t have a telephone number, how are you going to get a bank account when you can’t fill out those items on the application form,? As banking has become more entrenched in regulation around anti money laundering and the Patriot Act, and all of these sorts of things, we ended up inadvertently excluding more and more people from the financial system when it should be the opposite. Then at the same time, you’ve got the smartphone that’s come in, and the smartphone has opened up access to mobile wallets, the equivalent of a bank account in parts of the world. For example, Kenya went from 25% of the adult population having a basic bank account to basically 98% of the population having a mobile money account through M-Pesa. You have these competing mechanisms. There is a heavily regulated industry that is very worried about things like anti money laundering, and customer identification, or know your customer rules and so forth, making it harder and harder to do banking, and then technology coming in, and making it more accessible. Those two worlds have collided and you’ve seen different regulatory approaches to that. You talk about the different themes. Now we’ve got RegTech, SupTech – SupervisoryTech, and even just within regulation, we’ve got these different flavors of FinTech within that space. You’ve got the crypto environment, you’ve got cryptocurrencies, tokens, ICOs, NFTs, Defi, all of that. Then you’ve got the basic banking stuff, whether that is mobile deposit-taking, mobile money, or mobile wallets. You’ve now got companies like Wise, who have cornered the market on international transfers, that are faster and cheaper than what the banks can do. You’ve got buy now pay later schemes, which are replacing credit cards, providing credit access contextually in a purchase experience. You’ve got so many of these different things happening at once. The really interesting thing about banking is that, during the .com, they missed the whole e-commerce message; they avoided that. They had branches, agents, and advisors, and they didn’t really want to disrupt that model, so when the internet came along, they resisted digitization, but the smartphone means that we’ve accelerated all of these new models in this space. The rate of change is actually faster than what we anticipated. Then there are the big venture capital raises. Q1 of 2021 was the biggest quarter we’ve ever had for FinTech investments. It shows no sign of slowing. It’s a really interesting space. Ross: Pulling up to the meta level or the metacognition, taking out the content of finance, and FinTech, and banking, what are the thinking processes that you apply to make sense of those? You talked about some of these countervailing forces of regulation, and technology, and new spaces emerging, and so on, what are your thinking structures as a futurist, which could be applied to any domain, not just Finance? Brett: One of the areas is the application of technology. Where is technology taking us? What will that technology enable us to do, that we couldn’t do previously? Then you get technology patents that have been in other spaces of our lives, that become design patterns for banking. For example, I can text you a photo or a movie from the other side of the planet, and you’ll get it instantly via SMS. Why does it take three days to send money as an example? That’s one area, application of the technology to make the system more efficient and just work simply better instead of using 1960s or 1970s computers and telegraph lines. The other aspect that I look at is, and it’s very apparent in the user experience space, particularly with the app world we’ve seen that development, but in the next sphere of this with the application of artificial intelligence, smart speakers, smart assistants, and so forth, it’s removing the friction. What do banks provide for us? This is how I broke it down in bank 4.0. I said, if you look at a bank, and what a bank gives a customer, its three basic core pieces of utility. The ability to safely store money, the ability to safely move money, and the ability to access credit when you can’t afford something. That’s the three core pieces of utility the bank provides. What the banks have done is they’ve created products that they can distribute through the branch that provides that utility. But what’s happening now is people are stripping away the friction of the branch product layer and figuring out how do we just deliver that core utility to a person when and where they need it? That’s really sitting back and abstracting what it is that banks do, and is there a way for banks to do that more efficiently? Then you apply the regulatory constraints, you apply technology, you apply customer experience development capabilities, the capabilities of app stores and smart speakers, and you just track that on a trajectory in terms of where it’s likely to go. Ross: Do you do that visually at all or any other ways where you lay this out to try to build out what that structure is? Brett: One example where I did do it visually, which is in Bank 2.0, my first book in the space, which was released in 2010. I tracked out the uptake of mobile phones and the use of mobile phone technology for payments, to extrapolate where I thought mobile phones would be used more for direct payments or discretionary payments than plastic cards. I predicted 2016, that mobile wallets would overtake plastic cards as a payment vehicle. I was wrong. I was out by a year. Alipay and Tencent and WeChat Pay were really the core movements behind that. We didn’t necessarily see that coming. We thought it might be NFC chips because the NFC would turn your phone into a credit card. Back in 2010, we thought that NFC might be the vehicle. It turned out to be QR codes and other stuff. The network effect of having mobile phones was too good of a use case for payments that you couldn’t see mobile phones disrupting. That’s something you could actually track on a trajectory basis. Where it’s a bit trickier is on the regulatory side. It is when will regulations adapt to the new reality. Market by the market, that’s very different. For example, China was very open to competition against the banks in those early stages and that’s why you have these massive tech fins in China that exploded. Ant group at its height before its aborted IPO was worth about $330 billion in terms of market cap valuation, which would have made it the fourth-largest financial services organization in the world if they had listed at that point. In the US, there’s not even architecture from a regulatory perspective for FinTech businesses. There’s no FinTech charter. Now, the EU has FinTech charters, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, all of these different jurisdictions, Singapore, and so forth, have got that infrastructure, but why hasn’t the US allowed FinTech charters? That’s more complicated, but it comes down to the fact they’ve got a lot of legacy legal infrastructure, like the Community Reinvestment Act, which is the determination that was made in the 1970s about how financial inclusion should be executed in the US bank branches. If you now introduce a FinTech charter in the US, you now have something that is illegal from the CRA act, so you need to reform that law to be able to enable it. Every market is a little bit different and a little bit harder to predict but on a macro basis, when you zoom out and you look over the space of 10 or 20 years, obviously, you still have that momentum. Ross: I would like to come back a little bit to “analyzing the macro” but what you’ve just uncovered, this wealth of understanding, of knowledge, about what’s actually happening, not just in one jurisdiction but in many countries around the world, pull back and tell me, how did you learn all this? This is probably podcast interviews, or how much reading do you do? Is this all on your head? Do you have any kind of note-taking system? What is this process by which you’ve accumulated this wealth of knowledge? Brett: I used to write a blog every week before I did the radio show. I used to write a blog every week, and I’d write about the space, and often for doing 1000 words on a blog, I would have to spend three, four, or five hours researching the topic. If any of the people listening to this interview have read my books in the past, you’ll see that I do a ton of research associated with these elements because that helps me sound down the ideas. Sometimes that research will take me off in a different direction. I might have a thesis in my head, and the research challenges that thesis, and I’ve got to rethink it. That process of research, synthesizing that information, and coming up with a concept around that is key. The other thing was, as you said, interviewing different people, watching that stream of consciousness as this FinTech movement started with all these different players. There were networking events and conferences and stuff that I would go to, that have now and historically become nexus for a lot of this stuff. SWIFT is the international payments organization that runs an annual conference called Sibos. At Sibos, back in the early days, there was a group called Innotribe, the innovation tribe. I would go to these events annually and meet these new startup founders. That’s where I met Vitalik Buterin who’s behind Ethereum. It’s where I met the guys that founded Wise. It’s where I met the guys that founded many of these startups over the years, the Blockchain and Bitcoin guys, and so forth, so it’s a combination of things. In terms of note-keeping or record keeping, I don’t really keep a catalog of these ideas, but I do find that when I write about stuff, I tend to remember it. If it’s something important, I’ll write a blog post or something like that, that’s part of the process of me remembering that information. The other advantage I’ve got is now I’ve been in this space for 10 years plus so I’ve seen that evolution. I can talk about why things have evolved in that way because I’ve been watching it each step of the way, and there is a potential inference that you can get from that in terms of where you’re going to go from here, so you go looking for data again to support that thesis. Ross: Absolutely. I think blog writing or book writing forces you to do your research, you have to go dig. You mentioned this idea of having a thesis. Having a thesis is something which forces you to do the research, you say, Okay, I want to support this, and then maybe you find that it hasn’t there; part of the point there is that you want a thesis, which you’re not too wedded to. It is something which then provides you a starting point to find the information, which suggests what is happening. Brett: I think this won’t be a surprise to you. If you look at my basic thesis, I’m a techno-optimist. I think technology can solve a lot of the problems that the world faces. There’s often that lens that I put to it, what is the technology we’ve got that can solve homelessness? What is the technology that can make high-quality health care accessible to all? Now, I’ll go looking for things to support that thesis, because I believe that’s the world we should be creating. Often, it doesn’t necessarily work like that because there are other forces or mechanisms, but that tends to be at the core of what I’m doing. The other element of this is also helping people navigate through these changes. That’s another core thing. Most people don’t think exponentially, they can barely think linearly when it comes to something that’s going to happen in 10 or 20 years’ time. “It’s too abstract. It’s too far away for me to worry about”. The problem with that very immediate short-term thinking that humans have, the next quarter, the next annual results, the next four-year election term, whatever it may be, that’s about the extent of where we do our forward planning. As a result, there’s a lot of chaos that develops with that, because we don’t plan how to get ourselves through these periods of disruption. When I talk about disruption, and how it’s going to affect your business, and what you should do, I’m trying to help people just absorb the reality of how this is going to change their world, and get them used to that so that they’re more adaptable when these changes come down the pipe. Ross: There’s obviously some strong purpose in what you’re doing, I would like to hear a little bit about that. How did you become a techno-optimist? And how have you framed your purpose in what is your work, what you’re doing, and how you’re communicating? Brett: It’s a complicated question. Part of it comes to my upbringing. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. I’m not as active in that religion as I once was. They have a belief of the future, not an afterlife per se because they believe that the earth is going to be converted into a paradise. That optimism, that we could live in harmony with the planet, and live in harmony with animals and all of that, conceptually, that was a very nice ideal to have. We seem to be getting further and further away from that with climate change, pollution, and things like that. Obviously, then I’m looking for what’s the ideal? Or what’s the mechanism that could get us to a better lifestyle for humanity? The aspirational element? Part of that is what technologies can we apply. Also, I read and watched a lot of sci-fi as a kid, and when I looked at sci-fi, a lot of sci-fi was dystopian. You have the Star Trek universes and stuff like that. But I was like, how can we avoid that? How can we avoid the mistakes that might obviously lead us down a dystopian path? What could we do to optimize the chances that humanity has as species? So very philosophical, like what is the purpose of humanity? What are we here to accomplish? What are we here to do? When you look at Aristotle and the great thinkers of the past, they all grappled with this question. I don’t think it’s money, I don’t think it’s capitalism per se. I think that system is largely an abstraction. We humans could easily survive without money if we just set our mind to it. Money creates all of this activity around generating returns and profits, and all of these other things, which complicates that core mission of what humans could accomplish in my view. It’s not an optimal form of humanity. Now, capitalists will argue that we’ve had tremendous innovation through the capitalist movement. That’s true, but at the same time, it’s a mechanism that creates competition against each other. Companies competing against each other, nations competing against each other for trade and GDP, and so forth. Whereas, if we were competing for humanity, then I think we’d make very different decisions in respect to how we deploy resources, for example. That optimism from sci-fi and so forth, it became for me short-term sci-fi but what do we do at those inflection points throughout history? How do we respond to these changes? How do we create mechanisms that encourage advances that are going to be good for everybody or broader social good? How do we push back against things that create greater inequality, greater disparity, and so forth? That has become the mission over the last few years. Again, how do we use technology to make the world a better place? But ultimately, in 10,000 years, where’s humanity going to end up? And what are we going to have accomplished? And if that’s the case, if we could get there, then what are we doing about it today to ensure that humanity has the best chance whatsoever? You look at guys like Elon Musk when he talks about becoming a multi-planetary species and all of those sorts of things, I think that’s exciting. I think the potential of being able to live longer lives with longevity treatments, I think that’s tremendously exciting. I think people should have the option, the ability to have highly automated societies where we don’t have to work as much, and we can pursue learning, or play, or travel, or whatever. I think it’s all positive. That’s within our grasp but we have to make a decision collectively to go after it. Ross: If you’re talking 10,000 years, then that’s suitably a macro frame. Brett: Yes. Ross: There’s that idea, that’s the inspiring perspective. Thanks, Brett. Just to round out, what would be your advice to someone who’s looking to keep across an incredibly fast-changing space? For example, what’s happening in finance? What would your advice be as to how they should be aware of what’s going on and make sense of it? Brett: Obviously, if you’re in a specific discipline, find the top 10 or 20 people in that discipline, who were thought leaders, who publish or regularly produce content in that space. There are tons of ways to access that content now, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Just plug into their stream of consciousness, because that’s how you’ll initially get up to speed. The greatest way to really refine your skills in that space is to attempt to put yourself in the middle of that conversation yourself, refine your message so you can talk about a unique perspective on that play or that specific industry that others might have missed. Find the value for yourself in that dynamic, because once you do that, that creates massive enthusiasm. If you can carve out for yourself a platform where other people are listening to you, and you’re changing the minds of other people, that’s incredibly empowering. I know you’ve experienced this as well Ross when you’re in front of an audience, and we’re doing less of this physically these days, more virtually, it doesn’t matter, but when you’re in front of a physical audience, at least a few hundred people, and they come in with preconceptions about their space, and you’re able to take them through a thinking process where you change their mind, or you give them a realization, or they have an Aha! moment, and you’re able to see the light come on as you’re speaking, that’s incredibly powerful. I do think I chase those moments. Informing people is one thing, but getting people to go, Wow, I never really thought about it like that, and then that changes the way they think, or maybe takes their career in a different trajectory; For me, that’s just one of the most powerful things in terms of what I can do as a contribution to society. Ross: Absolutely. In order to get that you’ve got to come up with those perspectives, I suppose. Brett: Exactly. You got to be well researched, you got to be able to defend your position, you have to be able to explain both sides of the argument, all of those things that come. Look for those opportunities, look for where you can insert yourself in the conversation, and provide value. Ross: Thanks, Brett. It has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for your insights. Brett: You are very welcome, Ross. Great to work with you, as always, and hope to see you down in Oz soon. I know the lockdowns and everything is pretty crazy right now, but hopefully, things will start to improve. Ross: We’ll be moving around more before long, fingers crossed. The post Brett King on understanding fintech, writing for sense-making, thought leadership streams of consciousness, and changing how people think (Ep8) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Information can pass through your head all day long, but unless you can capture it and put it on a shelf somewhere, it didn’t mean anything. It’s the capturing and putting on a shelf so you can find it again, that’s the important part.” – Leslie Shannon About Leslie Shannon On this episode, we learn from Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting for Nokia based in Silicon Valley. Her work involves examining new technologies and how they will converge through this decade. She is a five-time undefeated winner on the US game show Jeopardy and racked up many successes on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. LinkedIn: Leslie Shannon Twitter: @lshannon45 Facebook: Leslie Shannon What you will learn What Leslie Shannon’s typical day looks like at Nokia… (01:49) …and as a collector of trivia (02:50) She uses flashcards and PowerPoint to remember stuff (03:59) Her PowerPoint presentations can go as large as 400 slides (7:45) Sometimes it doesn’t happen the way she expected and that’s ok (11:07) Every new solution is the kernel of the next problem (12:29) You always have to ask new questions (13:24) A lot of technology is looking for a problem to solve (14:02) Find, Filter, File, Familiarize and Formulate (15:56) Leslie’s routine that involves a lot of unsubscribing (20:43) It’s an exercise in imagination…(23:44) …and connections (27:34) Find the system that works for you (31:30) Episode Resources Unsubscribe-A-Mole Connections (BBC Documentary) Transcript Ross Dawson: Leslie, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Leslie Shannon: Ross, it’s lovely to be here. Thank you much for asking me. Ross: You are definitely on top of lots of new information, both as in your job, as a professional trend scouter for a global organization, and also as a very successful competitive trivia person. How do you do it? Leslie: It does take a lot of mental discipline. Just to explain a little bit about both the job and the trivia side of things, in my role as a trend scout, I’m physically located in Silicon Valley, and my role is to look for new technology. I’m in the telecommunication space, so new technology that will come at some point in the future requires some kind of telecommunication support. I find all these little nuggets of things that small companies are doing, big companies are doing, then I think of them as building blocks, and then I weave them together to build these imaginary castles of what’s going to be possible in the future. If this company is doing that, and that company is doing that, and this other company is doing that, we can imagine a future in which this amalgamation of all of these different new things is possible. Then I tell that to the people within my company, so they can plan what’s coming. I tell that to our customers as well, so they can plan how to design their networks for what the future is going to bring. Then on the trivia side, constantly, every single day, my antennas are up. What is the fact that I didn’t know? Then I note it, and again, in order, to remember it, I have to weave it into something. If it’s historical, some narrative that my brain has for the history of the world, or I have to have some mnemonic, I have to hang some kind of tag on it, so I can retrieve that information later. Weaving it into the stuff that’s already there is the easiest way. Both of these methods require finding information, filing it in a way that I can retrieve it, and then using storytelling or some kind of synthesis to make sense of it, and then communicate that sense to others. Ross: Wow, it sounds like a fun life. Leslie: It actually is. The thing with trivia is that you need to review it constantly to keep things fresh. There’s an app on the smartphone, it’s a flashcard app that a lot of people in competitive trivia use. Every time I see something new, I make a flashcard about it. I’ve got over 20,000 flashcards now. The key is actually to keep revealing them and to keep reviewing them. Similarly, when I find a new innovation, that I think, oh, okay, that’s really interesting, I make a PowerPoint slide out of it, because my means of communication is PowerPoint presentations, either internally or, to others. A picture is worth 1000 words. If I’m talking about new technologies and if I’m just talking, people will go, yeah, whatever; but if I’m showing a picture of the thing that I’m talking about, oh, that’s concrete, maybe that really is going to happen. To keep reviewing the actual slides that I have, in both cases, I have a file, I’m continually reviewing what I have, continually refreshing the narrative in my head, and refreshing my understanding, so that it doesn’t get old, it continues to stay fresh, and the new information is continually assimilated, and incorporated, which also means continually questioning my own assumptions, which is actually very important as well. Ross: That is beautiful. Let’s look at the PowerPoint slides. I have two questions. Is there a particular format for the slides? What information have you got? Have you got a picture? Leslie: Yes, always a picture. The bulk of the slide is the picture, and that’s really to communicate to the audience that this thing is real; this thing is going to happen. One of the ones that I just made yesterday, I saw that the University of Basel in Switzerland was using augmented reality on smartphones to help people deal with arachnophobia through exposure therapy. The idea is that you’re using your camera on your smartphone to place scary-looking spiders in your environment so that you get used to seeing scary-looking spiders. You stick your hand there, you look at your hand through your camera, the app puts a giant hairy spider on your hand, and then you get used to it. It turns out that people who have had that exposure through the augmented reality app are much calmer when they encounter a real spider. For that one, absolutely a picture of the hand with the camera and the giant hairy spider. I can talk about it all but as soon as you see that, the big hairy spider on the hand, you get it. You are going to remember it much better than I will. So yes, the picture is the main thing, then a little bit of descriptive text. Here, the thing is, the slides can go traveling; I have had slides stolen by other people, and then presented as their own. I don’t put the whole story in the text on the slide, but just enough to indicate there are some interesting things here. I always have the source in the note section. If you have any credibility at all, or in order to have any credibility at all, you’ve got to be able to point to where this came from. Ross: With those PowerPoint slides, you’ve got a certain format to them. What are the merits of getting the PowerPoint slide? How do you cross the threshold to say, it merits a PowerPoint slide. Leslie: Within my industry, it needs to be something that our customer base could ultimately somehow make money from. My customer base is the phone companies of the world. What is something that a phone company could conceivably offer to their end-users as a service or something? There’s a lot that goes into that. That’s the first level of criteria. Then the second is how earth-shattering is this? Because the spider thing is cool but that’s not very earth-shattering unless you have crippling arachnophobia, in which case, it could change your life. But in general, the sliding scale, however, sometimes it’s hard to know what is a standalone thing and what is ultimately going to be part of a bigger story; chaining together several things from different sources, you can tell the story of a much bigger development. I have a massive one right now, it’s about 400 slides. Here’s my index, and I have categorizations, so I make the slide, I slot it into my categorization. Then I have a short version that’s my master story. That’s what I’m telling at any given time, and that’s about 50 slides. There are different levels of criteria; first of all, do I care about you at all? Then it’s like, okay, apply criteria, will my customers care? Can they do something with this? The second level of criteria, do you make it into the giant file? Oh, the highest, do you actually make it into the small file? And then you actually get presented out to others. To make it into the small file, it’s got to be part of the overall story that’s being told. Right now that’s a story about how head-mounted displays and mixed reality glasses are ultimately going to be displacing smartphones by 2030. That’s the big story that I’m looking at. There’s a lot of little stuff that goes into that. If I come out and say that to you right now, “No way”, something in your brain is saying, “she’s nuts, that’s completely never going to happen”. It’s up to me to assemble the facts that I have, to assemble the different bits of evidence that I’ve gleaned from all these different areas, to assemble that in order to tell the story, to show this is how I came to this conclusion. Okay, now at the end of the 50 slides, what do you think? Generally, at that point, people go, oh, okay, that’s not crazy, maybe that is going to happen. It’s about telling a story, and it’s about persuading others that all kinds of crazy science fiction-sounding things actually are going to happen. Ross: You have a thesis, I suppose, is that accurate? Leslie: Yes, I do have a thesis. That’s actually the thing that I need to keep revisiting. Ross: I was about to get to that. The intent is to persuade them of your thesis, and I agree with you on this particular thesis, but it’s not a certain one. Leslie: Right. Lots of variables. Lots can happen. Lots can change. Lots can go wrong. I have been doing this for a while and some of the things, for example, five years ago, I was looking very hard at what Google and Facebook were doing in terms of alternate ways of bringing connectivity to rural markets. They were doing all kinds of things with free Wi-Fi, they were looking at drones, and Google’s Project Loon, the balloons and everything, and I was saying these guys are serious about disrupting the way that connectivity is delivered, we need to pay attention to that. Now the story’s not over but that has not developed the way that I thought it would. My industry breathes a sigh of relief but the people in rural markets, it’s like, Hey, we’re still underserved here. Another thing that I do, and this isn’t much about information gathering, but a way to test my thesis is to look for gaps. Places, where there are gaps in terms of technology, are the places where the innovation is most likely to catch hold. Innovation for innovation’s sake, nothing, worthless, doesn’t mean a thing; innovation that solves existing problems are where there is a gap in what we’ve got today. If there is a match between an innovation and a current gap, or a current problem, then that’s when I think it’s going to get traction, which is why I think, finding new ways to connect the people in the world who are not yet connected, and finding a lower-cost way to do that, that problem is still out there and something’s going to come in and do that. Maybe it’s going to be the satellite technology, I don’t know. Within every new solution is the kernel of the next problem, so it’s never-ending, we’re never done here. My smartphone lets me do all kinds of fabulous things but now, where do I plug this thing in? That’s the new problem. It’s always rolling forward. Ross: It puts on to get us towards, so you’re spotting your innovation, part of the filtering, that is to say, does this meet an existing gap? Does this have relevance? Is this useful? Leslie: Right, does it fit the gap, it’s how significant is this, how big is the gap? How big is the problem that needs to be solved? Ross: Does that mean you’ve already mapped out the gaps? The ones which you are looking for solutions to? Leslie: Yes, there are. However, again, there is complacency. You can’t just say, Oh, I have my list of gaps and I’m done. You always have to be open to questioning. What am I assuming that might be wrong? What are gaps that I was not aware of? I was not aware of the gap in arachnophobia exposure training. Now I know about that. The guys at the University of Basel, seem to have filled that. Sometimes when you see something that’s when you become aware of the gap, oh, look, here is a solution to that, I can totally see that’s a good thing. One of the problems in this industry, especially with trend scouting, is way too often there are technologies in search of a problem to solve. I remember once I was talking to the CTO of a major Oceania-based telecom service provider, and he was saying, I need a blockchain app. I’m like, oh, okay, well, what problem are you trying to solve? What’s the issue that you need to address with blockchain? He just looked at me, he’s like, I need a blockchain app, and I’m like, okay, I hear what’s going on here. His board or somebody above him said, Oh, blockchain is cool, we need some headline around blockchain, go make it happen. It’s ridiculous how often that kind of thing happens. It’s the use of a new technology; it will only find fertile ground if it is actually in service of an existing problem. You need to start with a problem and see what technology that leads you to, and then you’ll find something that’ll take root and grow. If you’re trying to force blockchain on people, guess what, whatever ideas you come up with are probably not going to be good ones. Ross: Let’s move on to scanning. That’s part of the job, you guys scan, look around, see what you see. You obviously see a lot, so what do you scan? How do you scan it? What are your tools? What’s your process? What’s your routine? Leslie: I subscribe to lots of industry newsletters, both in my own industry and adjacent industries. Every day, I look through all of them and I go really fast. I’m looking for keywords. Ross: Does your email have newsletters? Leslie: Yes, it has been the email newsletters, absolutely, online. If something’s interesting then I’m like Okay, this is great, I pull it over, I drop it to an Excel spreadsheet, and then every single day I try to make at least one slide out of something from my Excel spreadsheet. My target is 20 slides a month. I don’t always make it but that’s the volume that I’m looking for, a cadence of about a slide a day. Scan quickly but also just be aware for anything. If I happen to come across a trivia point, then I’ll just drop that to my flashcards and keep going. It’s really Find, Filter, and then File. That is the input hopper. Then once you have the file, familiarize, by reviewing; and reviewing to make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything either on the trivia side or what are interesting elements of my story here; because sometimes I put things in the giant 400 slide deck and I forget that they’re there, so when I’m just reviewing those, I’m like, Oh, that was interesting in the past but now it’s important, I’d forgotten about that one, bring it in. Then formulate, formulating the story that I’m going to tell whether it’s an external story to convince people about the credence of new technological developments and the importance of those or formulating a story so that I can remember key bits of information and random bits of information that I happen to come across. It’s the five F’s, Find, Filter, File, Familiarize and Formulate. Ross: You made that up? Leslie: I did. Ross: Good, write a book about it. Leslie: It works for me, your results may vary. It’s important in all of this to find a methodology that matches your own brain. I was extremely lucky in terms of the game show success that I’ve had. I have a reasonably well-organized brain. I can retrieve things very quickly because of the way that I’ve consciously filed them, and I happen to be just naturally a fast person. Fast on the buzzer? Sure, no problem. Create something where you pay money for people to remember things quickly. Okay, that just happens to suit me. The same way that somebody who’s very tall and has great reflexes, Oh, guess what? Basketball is the sport for you. I’m just lucky that my own way of approaching the world is rewarded in this crazy game show way. Different methods work for different people and it really depends on how your brain is organized. I’d say lean into that as opposed to say Well, there’s this method that I heard about from this other person; no, lean into it, discover your own method, that is what I say to other people. Ross: Just coming back to the Find, newsletters, you find better than scanning publications? Leslie: Yes, basically I’m paying somebody else except the newsletters are free, I’m paying somebody else to do the scanning for me because I only need the keywords, because I know very strongly that what it is that I’m looking for, so all I need is a couple of words. Okay, that’s worth pursuing, not, not, oh, that’s worth pursuing. If somebody else has actually gone through and read the original articles and extracted the keywords for me, absolutely I’m going to make my time more efficient by piggybacking on their labor. Then I’ll go and I’ll actually read the full article before I make the slide, and absorb the deeper knowledge which will then make it more memorable for me, but having somebody else to do that initial abstraction is invaluable. Ross: Do you have any routines in terms of times of day that you go through your scanning, your note-taking, on your reading the articles? Leslie: There are multiple daily and weekly email newsletters that I get. I’m in California, which is the worst time zone; my headquarters are in Europe and I’m 10 hours behind my headquarters. By the time I wake up in the morning, most of my colleagues, their business day is done. When I wake up in the morning, my inbox is full of everybody else’s day, and it’s actually quite wonderful. I can just stay in bed, and just go through the emails and read them all very quickly on the phone, delete the stuff; okay, nothing, nothing, nothing, save the ones that I want to look at more in-depth. Then when I get to my desk, I’ve already cleared out the dross from my inbox, the things that I have left, these are the things that I’m going to attack today. Then I can put my focus and attention on them directly. That’s the daily rhythm that I have for that. I’m also critical of newsletters. I don’t have a hard and fast timing, but if I have not gotten any nugget from a newsletter in about two or three months, I’m not measuring it exactly, but if I get the feeling like, well, it’s been a while, unsubscribe. I’m an unsubscribe monster, stuff that ends up in my inbox, I will look at everything once. Sometimes random stuff comes to you and it’s good. It’s like, oh, here’s a marketing message from somebody, okay, unsubscribe; here’s an ad for a call, unsubscribe. I try to keep my inbox as information-focused, and information that I care about focused as possible. There was a New Yorker cartoon years ago about the unsubscribe-a-mole, like whack-a-mole except unsubscribing, that’s the way it is; being ruthless so that the things that come into my inbox, I know are things that I want to pay attention to. That’s part of it as well. Ross: When you take notes, do you note the source, as in the newsletter source just to keep track of that? Leslie: No, I do not keep track of the newsletter unless the newsletter itself has done the reporting. I need the initial source. I will use the newsletter as a stepping stone to the initial source. Sometimes that’s a little unfair on the newsletter creators because I’m not giving them the publicity that they probably deserve. Ross: I was thinking more about just being able to track where you got the information; which were the most useful newsletters? Leslie: Yes, it’s original source for sure. Ross: You used this delightful phrase in the beginning around imaginary castles of pulling these things together? What’s that process? How do you pull together all of these snippets, insights, innovations, and things that you see to build these building blocks together to create these imaginary castles? Leslie: It’s funny because, in my education, I actually have a Master’s degree in the history of art. My undergraduate degree was in neuroanatomy, where I cut up a lot of rat brains. I have a biology sciences background, but then I did my graduate studies in the history of art. The thing that the history of art teaches you to do is to think nonlinearly, to think visually, and to think beyond the spreadsheet. It’s an exercise in imagination. For me, a lot of it is visual. What is it to use these technologies? And also putting myself in the shoes of these things, and always asking myself what problem does this thing solve? What problem does this thing create? Then that thinking about it that way, you end up with this three-dimensional puzzle piece that’s got various shapes on the outside of it. Then when you see something else that has a reciprocal shape, you can just put them together. That’s very much the way that I think. That’s not so useful for other people. Ross: Do you use anything visual to take notes, write or draw things to piece things together in your mind, or is it all just an imaginary construct? Leslie: It’s all just an imaginary construct. Ross: Does it have dimensions? Is it in two or three dimensions? Or as in this shape? Leslie: Thinking about the new technology, that’s actually quite amorphous in terms of the way it’s represented in my head, but thinking about the trivia that is actually quite solid. I’m closing my eyes and I’m looking at the timeline for the 19th century in my head right now. That’s important because I’ve always got new things to put in. As opposed to the technology work that I do, it’s up to me where I put stuff, it’s like, oh, I think this might go with that, that’s really interesting, look what you could do with these two things putting together. For the trivia stuff, you have to file it in the right place; you’re not going to access it again. That is very visual, particularly things with history, things with dates, and geography. Now I’m seeing the world and the different countries that are lighting up in the information that’s the tagging off of the different countries. That filing system is very visual for me. Ross: Right, though it is a filing system more than a tool of synthesis in that case? Leslie: No, because I like to think of it as individual categories, or like Christmas trees. Now when I closed my eyes, I saw the world, actually just looking at the globe, Brazil is the country that’s right in front of me here. What do I know about Brazil, it’s actually like decorating a Christmas tree. The more that you know about something, the easier it is to hook more on and the more decorated, and shining the Christmas tree becomes. Now when I close my eyes, I don’t actually see a Christmas tree but I see Brazil is glowing a lot more brightly for me than Bolivia is. Bolivia is dark because I don’t know as much about Bolivia, as I know about Brazil. The more that you hang on the Christmas tree, the more brightly it glows. The more you put on, the easier it is to put more stuff on and then access it again later. Ross: Because there are more connections? Leslie: Yes, because there are more connections. I remember one of my favorite TV programs when I was a kid was Connections, hosted by James Burke, a British guy. Ross: Several of my guests have mentioned it! Leslie: Oh, my God, the book to that show was like my favorite book. That was probably the thing that taught me as a teenager, connections are important when they cross, divide, you don’t have to stay in the same groove all the time, you’re not locked into a lane here. One of the things that stuck with me out of connections was James Burke’s point, whether it’s correct or not, I don’t know, but the Renaissance was not triggered by the printing press, the Renaissance was actually triggered by the invention of the index, and the ability of people to find information, once they had filed in a book somewhere, and that I totally agree with. Information can pass through your head all day long but unless you can capture it, and put it on a shelf somewhere, somewhere where you can find it again, it didn’t mean anything. It’s the capturing and putting it on a shelf, so you can find it again, that’s the important part. Ross: I do have to ask for your compact with the story, how did this start? I love those jewels, degrees, those are wonderful compliments, so you’ve obviously found your path, how did this happen? Leslie: The fundamental thing is I was trying to figure out how people work? What’s going on? Also, I love doing stuff with my hands. I stumbled into cutting out rat brains, experimenting on rats, making changes in their brains, and see what happens. I was doing my undergraduate degree, but then at the beginning of my junior year, the third year of university, I am like, I need to be a well-rounded person, so I took Art History 101, just the basic art history. By the end of the first day, of the first class, we were looking at the cave paintings of Lascaux in that very first class, I was suddenly just blown away. It’s like, oh, my God, I’ve been cutting up rat brains, and I’m no closer to understanding the human mystery, what makes us tick. In this one day of looking at the product of human beings in a particular time and place with their limitations, you can deduce and understand so much about the society that produced something far more than you can by cutting up a rat brain. I instantly reworked everything so that I could double major in both art history and neuroanatomy. I ended up going to graduate school in the history of art. It’s not just limited to art. Any object tells the story of the society that made it and the time that produced it if you only look. Learning the history of art taught me to look, to not make any assumptions, to look and to be open to what does this event, what does this new development, what does this object has to tell me if I’m open to reading it? Lucky me, I had a degree in the history of art, and that has turned out to be an excellent way to become a technology trend scout, X decades later, who knew. Ross: Fantastic story. It doesn’t need to be brief but to round out what would you advise to someone who says, All right, I’ve got lots of information, how do I make sense of it? How do I keep on top of that? What’s your summary advice? Leslie: Find the system that works for you. People will suggest things like index cards or I don’t know what. When something clicks, like people recommended the flashcard app on my phone a bunch of times before I really tried it, I started using it like, oh, this is the one, so if you haven’t found a system yet for organizing information in your life, keep your eyes open, keep your mind open, listen to what other people are saying works for them, and try it. You never know until you actually try something, whether it’s going to work for you. Again, try to get rid of any assumptions you might have, and give it a go because the most unlikely things might end up being the things that work. Sometimes it is, what is the thing that’s going to solve your problem? What is the problem you need to solve? I need to not only take the information that I take in about my trend scouting, but I need to then present it to others, so making a PowerPoint slide, two birds with one stone, I’ve now got this record of this thing that I found, that I can instantly present it to anybody else, so that kind of thing. What are the multiple problems that you have? What’s the most efficient way that you can do it in a way that actually matches the way that your mind works? There’s something out there for everybody. Ross: That makes a lot of sense. In a way what you’re suggesting or perhaps I’m reading too much, but you’re implying that the problem is the way of being able to structure or make something of what it is the information you encounter. Leslie: Exactly. Why is it that you’re gathering information? What is the information for? If it’s just for you, like the flashcards, then something that is just for you; if it is something where you need to turn it around and present it to others, something that will actually get you down that path in terms of the presenting it to others, whether it’s a PowerPoint or a book or whatever. Efficiency is also something that’s near and dear to my heart, so try to cut out inefficient steps, that’s another part of maximizing your time. I try to touch information as little as possible. That’s why it’s like, the first cast going through the emails in the morning, okay, yes, yes, no, no, then straight into the Excel spreadsheet. Then I’m going to make a slide today, okay, yes, I’m going to do that one, oh, no, that one looked good at the time, no, toss. Don’t spend too much time agonizing. It’s a little bit of that Marie Kondo. If this piece of information sparks joy, hang on to it, it’s important. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it, off it goes, and keep curating the things that spark joy for you. Ross: Fantastic, Leslie. Our conversation was not just instructive, but also entertaining and inspiring. Leslie: I hope not too overwhelming. Ross: Absolutely. It has been delightful. Thank you so much, Leslie. It’s a real pleasure to talk to you. Leslie: Oh, Ross, as always, terrific questions you’ve been asking. Thank you. You really made me question and query my own processes in a way that I hadn’t done before. Thank you for that. I’m actually now much more conscious of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Ross: Fantastic. The post Leslie Shannon on finding nuggets, storytelling for synthesis, the five Fs of sensemaking, and visual filing (Ep7) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“If you’re an executive at a company, and Bill Gates is calling you going, What the hell’s going on? And you have the answer, you’re going to get called more.” – Robert Scoble About Robert Scoble On this episode we learn from technology evangelist and author Robert Scoble whose work as a blogger and communicator for Microsoft, Fast Company, Rackspace, and others has truly shaped the evolution of social media. He is the author of 4 books about technology including ones dedicated to AI and spatial computing. Find out how Robert is always the first to know about what’s coming in consumer technology. Blog: scobleizer.blog Facebook: Robert Scoble LinkedIn: Robert Scoble Twitter: @scobleizer Instagram: @scobleizer YouTube: Robert Scoble Books The Infinite Retina The Fourth Transformation Age of Context Naked Converstations What you will learn How Robert keeps up to date on the latest technologies (01:33) A lot of information also means a lot of noise (03:29) So be selective on whose Tweets you listen to… (06:22) …because Twitter is still the best place to get information (07:16) Why you should get off social media as fast as you can (12:13) Watch your blog’s comments section for interesting people (14:12) Speed matters (16:30) Where Robert got his start (21:36) His routines and structures (25:27) He keeps his focus and says no to everything else (28:56) You need to think of what’s going to happen in 5 years (31:51) AI is changing everything (35:30) Episode resources Robert Scoble’s Twitter Lists TweetDeck Gary Shapiro Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Andrej Karpathy Lynda Weinman Pottery Sebastian Thrun Transcript Ross Dawson: Robert, it’s fantastic to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us. Robert Scoble: Hey, thank you much for having me on the show. Ross: Since I’ve heard about you a very long time ago, you’ve always been on the very, very edge of new technologies and what’s going on. How do you do it? Robert: 40 years of community building online, that’s part of it. For people who don’t know what I’ve done, if you go over to Twitter, you can see my TweetDeck. I have about 70 different lists, all raining down like the matrix. This is something that every listening team at a corporation uses. They watch a wide variety of people online, and new sources and things in real-time, and they can respond to that in real-time. I was part of the listening team at Rackspace for seven years and helped them quite a bit with figuring out who to listen to, and how to deal with the information flows. Ross: Let’s dig into that. How do you build your lists? And how do you keep scanning? Robert: Thousands of hours of OCD. There are different ways to look at this. If somebody needs to learn something from scratch, I’ll have one set of advice. If you told me I have two years to learn everything there is about artificial intelligence, I’d take you down one path. If you’re already up to date on artificial intelligence, and you’re already working at a tech company, you’re already working at Tesla or Apple, building AI systems, then I’ll have what I’ve built, which is a system to keep you up to date and refreshed. We could probably come out in both areas. Ross: I’m interested; since we’ve got probably people of both groups listening, let’s look at both parts. In a way, we’re really looking at those who already know the basics and saying, Okay, what’s new? What’s changed? Robert: That’s getting a little easier now; particularly on Twitter, there is a search engine. Now you can type artificial intelligence into the search engine, and you’ll see anybody who says artificial intelligence on a tweet, it’d show up on that stream, on that feed. That’ll lead you somewhat to the right place. But the problem is, now you’ll get a lot of noise, a lot of trolls, a lot of advertising, a lot of things that have nothing to do with artificial intelligence. Or if they do, they’re from people that you probably don’t care about, and probably on topics you don’t care about because you’re already fairly advanced on artificial intelligence; you’re not just trying to learn about the space and build your own list; you’re trying to stay up to date on the advanced stuff. For me, that’s when you start really building your own lists, and you have to get to know people who you’re listening to. That takes time, or you can steal my list. Ross: You can very generously share. Robert: I built a list on artificial intelligence, one on computer vision, and another one on autonomous cars for this reason. But if you don’t know who you’re listening to, you’re still going to get a lot of noise and a lot of fluff. Filtering out that is really tough. Ross: You share all your lists, so everyone can benefit from all of your work in building them. Robert: Yes. Ross: Of course, the people might prioritize different people in the list or have other people they think of or different ways of framing it. Robert: What I would recommend is you start with my list and a search, and you build your own lists. Because you’re probably focused on something very specific in AI, and you want to keep up to date on your very niche thing. Therefore, you don’t want to listen to 2000 people because they’re across everything. You want to listen to maybe 20 or 30 people who are very focused on the same thing you are, and that means you’ll get fewer tweets every day, and you’ll get a lot higher likelihood of some signal and not a lot of noise. You’ll still get noise but you’ll get a lot more signal that’s interesting to you. Then if you do a search on AI, and get everything that everybody says, every tweet with the word AI in it. Ross: One of the challenges with the Twitter lists I find is that you can’t do a 24-hour scan. I mean, if you’ve got anything in it, then you’re just time slicing. You just say, Okay, I’m looking out for this time, I can see what’s in there, but I missed everything else, which is going on the last whatever period. Robert: That’s true unless you listen to very few people. If you listen to very few people, then you can go back through the past 24 hours at 20 people’s tweets because 20 people are not going to tweet that much in a day, particularly if you pick the right 20 people, because then these are AI people. They’re not influencers who are doing 100 tweets a day, these are people who are probably going to do 10 tweets a day, so that’s 200 tweets. That’s the trick. It is to find the 20 people that will keep you up to date, and they will retweet into your feed the important things that are happening in the field. Ross: Twitter has changed a lot particularly in the last three, four years. How has the value or the use of Twitter lists changed for you in the last period? Robert: I do the same thing on Facebook, so I can spend a lot of time with you about optimizing Facebook for trying to get some signal out of that thing, which is really difficult. The same thing on LinkedIn, I have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. Then I come to Twitter, and I have 100,000 people or news brands and things on my lists, and I watch them on one screen. Twitter has some real advantages over the other two. One, you can follow people a lot easier than finding a month on Facebook or figuring out how to follow a friend. Two, if you’re using TweetDeck, which is how I read Twitter, it has columns across the screen. Those are in real-time, so if somebody publishes a new tweet, you don’t have to refresh the page or the browser to see a new thing. This is really important for watching breaking news, for instance. This is why almost all the world’s journalists are on Twitter because they can watch the world on one screen without hitting refresh on the browser, it’s really important to do that. Three, you can search for things. If there is breaking news, like, Haiti just had an earthquake, if you care about that, you can put the Haiti earthquake into the search engine, and you’ll see everybody who mentions the Haiti earthquake in a tweet. It’ll be a lot but if you’re highly interested in what’s going on in a specific news event, that’ll be very interesting to you. The others are still important for community building and for engagement. I get more engagement when I publish something on both LinkedIn and Facebook than I do on Twitter because Twitter is going so fast that people just don’t have a lot of time to sit there and chat all day long. Also, it doesn’t have the affordance to do that. It’s really not meant as a chat room or as a thing where you put a lot of comments underneath something and go back and forth on a topic. A lot of times if I care about engaging with somebody, I’ll take them out of Twitter and take them over to LinkedIn, or Facebook, or some Messenger, or even direct messages in Twitter, where I can chat with them fast back and forth and learn something, and not do that in public because you’re spraying that stuff into the public view, and it pisses off your readers and makes all their noise levels go up. Ross: Do you spend any time on some of the private messaging apps like Telegram or Signals or things like that? Robert: I’m on all of them: WeChat messenger, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, Discord, there are a lot of places to spend your time. This is also starting to become a problem because where do you spend; let’s say, you have an hour to be online, where do you spend that hour? You can split that hour, up amongst communities in a bunch of different places. Maybe that’s fun to you but usually, most people just want to get what they need and get out. By the way, I can’t look at TweetDeck for very long. This gets into information overload. If there is breaking news, and I’m highly interested in something, like if Nvidia announces a new video card today or an earthquake breaks up, yes, I will watch TweetDeck and I’ll be highly interested in it, and I’ll be very focused on it, but my brain will fry after about half an hour. We did not evolve to look at that quantity of information and try to figure out who is writing and what’s going on that long, your brain can do it for short periods, but not for eight hours a day, it’s a very specialized job, and if you’re doing one of those jobs, you’re probably at a listening team at one of these companies, and your job is to look at TweetDeck all day long. You need breaks if that’s your job because you’re going to go fry your brain. Ross: A lot of it is trying to find what is the signal. You say, Okay, this is really interesting, and it’s not much seeing the 100 tweets. You say, Okay, here’s one tweet, which just points to a link or makes some particularly important point. Often there are links, and we say, Okay, I hadn’t seen that before; that’s interesting, that’s new. If that’s where you’re scanning, and then that’s pulling you to wherever it is, you should be going. Robert: I’ll give some heretical advice. Get off of social media as fast as you can. Social media is really good about presenting you a group of people interested in the topic, autonomous cars, AI, photography, art, whatever you’re into. But you will learn a lot more from an hour conversation off social media, like what you’re doing here, than if you tried to listen to me on Twitter. I never talked about information overload on Twitter, so you’re probably not going to get too many tips out of me. But in a conversation like this back and forth, you’re going to get a lot more depth. I built my whole career around doing what you’re doing, which is to go to people’s offices, take my video camera, sit down for an hour, and learn something. That’s a much better technique. The problem is how do you learn who is really up to date on AI, Twitter’s really good about that, or LinkedIn, maybe, but it’s not really good about depth. The trick is, I assigned myself a goal of having a conversation like this every day, at least one conversation, and that would get me the depth I needed to keep up to date on the industry, and also find out little tricks and techniques. If I’m a programmer, I’m not going to learn how to program C sharp very well on Twitter. I might learn it in StackOverflow online but for the really secret stuff, you got to talk to a programmer who knows it. That’s why pair programming works so well. Sitting next to somebody else, and programming with somebody else really amps up your knowledge on something. Ross: As a part of just knowing who do you have the conversation with, I suppose, it’s getting them to give you the time to have the conversation with you. Robert: That’s really hard. Here’s an example, I wrote a blog post about the Consumer Electronics Show several years ago; a big blog post. There were about 100 comments underneath the blog post. One of them was from Gary Shapiro, who runs the Consumer Electronics Show, he’s the CEO of CTA. But the commenting system that WordPress uses, doesn’t show that that person is important. The only way you would know that comment is important is to know who Gary Shapiro is, and know that he runs CTA, which runs the Consumer Electronics Show. You have to do a lot of mental work to figure that out. Most people will not do the homework to figure out who is commenting underneath a blog post. If you go to the Verge or go to TechCrunch, are you going to look up each person commenting and figure out who actually has something to say here or not? No. There are some ways to figure that out. Google is actually pretty good at telling you who somebody is if you care but how many people are going to do that homework? The shortcut is to rely on somebody like me who has already built a list of who’s important in the industry, or who’s in the industry. I don’t put a lot of low-quality people on my list. If you’re low quality if all you do is tweet about politics all day, that’s what I call low quality, unless you’re a politician. If you’re a politician, you’ve got to tweet about politics all day long. But if I were an AI engineer, I don’t want 100,000 tweets about politics. I want to know about what’s going on inside Tesla or Apple or something like that, what the latest techniques are, what the latest tools are, what the latest challenges are, or where to get the best service. Ross: People talk about information sources, such as New York Times or The Economist or whatever, but for you, they’re all individuals. Robert: The Economist and the New York Times are people like me, they choose the experts you want to listen to. It’s a shortcut because you don’t have time to figure out who to listen to. You don’t know who Gary Shapiro is, you don’t know who Andrej Karpathy is, he runs Tesla’s AI. I know who that is but you might not know who it is, so you rely on people who know what things are, report, get rid of all the noise, and bring you the nuggets of information. I learned this in college; I ran the Associated Press wire machine at San Jose State University, and I was running it when OJ was found not guilty; There were 600 plus stories in the first hour on my wire machine. The next day in the San Jose Mercury News or local newspaper, there were two stories. That leads you to be biased because you’re only getting somebody’s filtered view of the news, you’re not getting the entire story. I like to have the entire story. I like to know what is actually going on right now. Also, that gives you faster speed, which if you’re an investor or a news person, having the speed matters. If you’re an executive at a company, and Bill Gates is calling you going, What the hell’s going on? And you don’t have an answer, you’re not going to get called anymore. If you have the answer, you’re going to get called more, and you’re going to get promoted. For instance, I have an example of this. One night, I was watching Twitter, long before any of these new tools, this was years ago; there was a big earthquake in China, and three tweets came up about the earthquake, 1000s of miles apart. We beat CNN on the story by 45 minutes. Now, that’s not going to be true anymore, because CNN is using these same techniques, and they’re using AI tools of their own to watch the news and bring just important news that’s breaking in the world so that they are not beat by 45 minutes anymore. You can still beat other news sources in a lot of areas by being on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Facebook. You’ll see things happening in your industry like people dying, or news events breaking; somebody announces a new product, you’ll see it before anybody else. If you care about being up to date, and that’s part of your brand, you want to be the engineer at your company that everybody calls all the time because you’re always up to date, then you got to play a different game than just watching the New York Times because once it’s in the New York Times, everybody knows it. Ross: Do you go direct to any mainstream media? Or is it always through social channels? Robert: One of my TweetDeck columns is the entire world’s media. I have the BBC, The New York Times, Fox, CNN, every news source I can find, in one column and if there is news breaking in the world, I go there and I can see everybody’s opinion, like my wire machine back in college. I have the same thing for the tech industry because I care about the tech industry. I have all the tech news sources in one list. You can watch them, they are public on my Twitter, you can go to my Twitter list and search for World News list, and Tech news list, you’ll get the entire world’s news and all of the tech news. Ross: One of the key things here is about sense-making. Take augmented reality, for argument’s sake, you are “The man”; who you need to know, let’s call Robert. Robert: If you’re at Apple or Salesforce, there is a strategy team. People like me and I talk to many of them, they figure out where to go. Ross: Exactly. But the strategy is not an accumulation of tweets, it is an understanding of the whole, and the sense of what’s going on, and what are the possibilities and pathways that we could follow? You are across the edge of everything that’s happening. How do you go from that to that having made sense or grokking that space? Robert: I was lucky, I fell into this at Microsoft. I was on a team called Channel Nine, I was one of the first five people to start this thing. It is still going today, 15 years later. I noticed that I learned a lot by taking people to lunch when I got my job at Microsoft. Because I had a blog, people would invite me to lunch and say Hey, let me show you something cool. and I’d be like, Why don’t we ever put just this lunch out on the public view and let everybody know what I know. I started doing that. That led me to go around the world. First of all, I interviewed 600 people at Microsoft, from Bill Gates to the janitor. I got to understand Microsoft really well. I got to understand what Microsoft Research was, what are they doing? What are all these pieces doing? What’s the Xbox team doing? What’s the Windows team doing? What’s the tablet team doing? What’s the mobile team doing? I had friends all across the company, I interviewed them and spent a lot of time going around every day. I had an unfair advantage there. It’s really hard to do that unless you’re an executive. If you want to be a strategist, you better figure out how to do this, because that’s how you’re going to get the insights that Bill Gates doesn’t have. That’s why Bill Gates is going to call you because you’re going to have an answer that he doesn’t have before. Or you’re going to bring him, Hey this is what Apple’s going to do next year, and here’s how we should react or what we should be doing. Generally, they’re more than a year ahead. I went to the world’s research labs. I went to South by Southwest 25 times, I did a lot of parties, which is part of relationship building, hanging out with people who are cool and learning what they care about, who they are and what they’re working on. When they’re drunk, they tend to leak a little bit more than when they’re not. A little life hack. Now that I’m sober, I hear this all the time that the sober people love getting other people drunk, because they say things, the mouth gets a little looser when people get a little alcohol in them. I was also at Consumer Electronics Show, and I would work my butt off going to all the littlest sweets in the back halls, which is where all the little startups were. That gave me insights that I could bring back to the big corporations and write books about. That’s still playing out. 10 years ago, I saw PrimeSense, a little Israeli company at one of those suites, and the founder showed me 3D sensors. My iPhone just got the 3D sensor last year. It took eight years, from when I saw it at the back suites in CES to when it’s actually in a mainstream product, so I had an eight-year lead on every normal people. The same things are happening right now. I’m talking to people who are building AI systems; and talking about automatic labeling systems, I knew Tesla was building one a year ago before they even announced it a few days ago. Ross: Do you build any frameworks, or visuals, or written, or even construct your mind to be able to pull together these pieces into something which is coherent? Robert: I wrote four books about technology and I wrote them about 10-year trends before the trend happened. The last one, Qualcomm’s Head of AR – Augmented Reality, said it’s a must-read. I’m pretty good about seeing where things are going to go over the next decade and talk to 1000s of people about that. I still do that today. That’s how I synthesize what’s going on and then I write a book about it and put the book out. Ross: Do you synthesize through writing the book? Robert: A book is a forcing function because you got to have something to say, 70,000 words on the topic, you better figure out what you’re going to say. It forces you to put it into a form, with chapters, and an outline to start with, Hey, this is what I’m seeing happening. That outline can be a white paper that you bring to your boss, it could be a speech you give inside your company, whatever the package is, that forces you to get an insight and package it up, that’s going to be pretty hard for most people. This is why they say if you really want to learn something, teach it to somebody else; because if you’re going to teach it to somebody else, you must know what you’re talking about; because if you don’t, it’s going to be obvious very quickly. Ross: The speech is a great one because the book is a lot of work. Whereas the speech, you can give a speech and it does force you to do the work. Robert: Speeches are a lot of work. Ask somebody who speaks on the main stage at TED, how many months they put into their speech. I know people who put a year into their speech. First of all, they put a lifetime into the speech. I saw a woman give a talk on spiders, that’s all she studies, so she knows her topic really well. Then she had to practice her speech so that she could do it in front of 4000 of the world’s richest people. It’s hard. If you’re giving a speech to Bill Gates, I guarantee you, you’re preparing a lot before you get a one-hour meeting with him. Ross: It forces you to structure your thoughts. Robert: Not only your thoughts, but you’re working with a team that probably is going in there. You probably only have 10 or 15 minutes of an hour with him on a topic, or a technology, or a thing that’s happening in the world, or a competitive thing; you’re working your butt off for weeks to go in for a beating because that one meeting with an executive like that, changes not just lives, it changes businesses, many lives can come changed out of that one meeting. Ross: Do you have a routine structure to different slices of how you scan stuff or dig into stuff? Robert: I have a focus that I turn a lot of things down. This is a trick. You can’t be an expert on everything now. You can be a generalist and know something about everything, but you can’t be an expert. I can’t be an expert on AI. I’m not Andrej Karpathy who’s working at Tesla every day building the autopilot system. He knows way more than I’ll ever know. He’ll even forget more than I’ll ever know about AI. I can’t do that. But if you want to try to get up to him, you got to say no to everything else because the only way you’re going to beat something like that is to focus. I focus on consumer electronics; I have for 40 years, and I say no to things all the time that aren’t on my focus. Right now, it’s spatial computing, that’s what I care about, and what it means for the home. I get that Ethereum is really important, and crypto is really important, I have a list on that too. But that’s not on my interest level, so I don’t take an interview about it. I don’t write books about it. I don’t chase that. I want to be the world’s expert on where Apple’s going, or where business with augmented reality is going. There are a bunch of reasons I focused on that. That’s where I spend every moment of every day other than playing with my kids and watching Ted Lasso or something like that. In my professional time, I focus right on that topic, and I say no to everything else. That’s the real key. You got to know why you’re saying no, and how to say no because it’s really hard to say no. I know I’m the world’s worst person to say no, but it gets easier when you say Hey, it just doesn’t fit into my focus area man, I’m focused on Apple and you’re working at Salesforce, asking me to talk about AI tools in the corporation and not my thing. I might take it, which is why I’m bad at saying no. But I know that every time I take a meeting that’s not on my topic area, I’m not getting further to my next project, or my next book, or my next job. Ross: Thriving on overload, we are talking about looking more to the ones who are already pretty good at all of this, but what’s your advice? Somebody comes along and says, Okay, I know a lot. I’m trying to keep across the change. He’s getting a bit overwhelmed, what’s your advice? What are the things that you would tell a person to do? Robert: I think we’ve already said several of them. Know how to say no to people and why, have an idea, thesis of where are you headed. I can ask even you, where are you headed in five years? What are you doing this for? What drives you? What makes you happy? Where do you see yourself in five years? If you don’t have answers to that, think about that because that’ll help you focus your efforts. If you say I’m going to be CEO of Salesforce in five years, how are you going to do that? We can have a really interesting conversation about how to become CEO of Salesforce in five years. I know lots of people become like the CTO of Facebook, after being in normal people for a long time. Two, you got to know who to listen to, and start with 20 people. Make a list of 20 people that are really baller in this industry, or in the topic. If you’re trying to learn how to do pottery, you better know who Lynda Weinman is, because she has a pottery studio with 3D printers in it. You should go down and visit her if you want to do bleeding edge pottery. She would be one of the 20 people on your list. If she’s not, she will be, pretty quick, once you start building a list like this, because you’ll find the other 19, and then they’ll all start saying, Hey, look at Linda’s stuff. You start looking at Instagram who has the hot pottery pictures, and who’s charging $6,000 for a piece of pottery? It’s Lynda Weinman. The world starts pointing you at these people and that gets you up to date. Start building a list of just people. You don’t need to follow 100,000 people like me. That’s a little crazy. You might in 20 years, you might become me. I’ve been watching 20,000 people on behalf of Procter & Gamble or something, but most of your audience is probably not that, so find 20 people that are in your industry, who’re in your focus area, that you really care about. I guarantee you if you follow 20 people, they will pull other people who are cool, interesting, knowledgeable, bleeding edge, doing weird shit, into your view. That’s how Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all work. They all bring other things into your view. Start with 20 people and away you go. Read a book. As you said, read the New York Times, it’ll get you up to date pretty quick on a lot of topics, or The Economist, especially. You can read an Economist article, and do some homework on that article; Google each person that’s mentioned, and you’ll have your 20 people in one article. Ross: There are a lot more exciting times to come and since you’re a futurist, keeping across change, what’s going to change and how do we keep across overload in the coming years? Robert: AI is changing everything. My oven has AI in it, it looks at meat or bread I put in it and doesn’t burn it. My audio system has AI in it. Now my phone has AI in it. My car has self-drives, my Tesla self-drives and it has 19 systems that are all running on AI. That’s where I’m focusing a lot of my effort on, understanding how the world is going to change. The real question is, how do you get five years ahead of everybody else because that’s pretty obvious today? If you’re in business and you don’t understand AI, you better catch up because it’s going to really change everything about the world, every product, and every company. The trick is now how do we get five years ahead? What does Elon Musk going to need in 2026? Carwashes. How did I come up with that? Because I talked to a lot of people about second-order effects. If this happens, if autonomous cars happen, and I can lay out why it’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen sometime in the next five years. If that happens, what happens after? That’s a little bit of creativity but it’s about hanging out with people who are at the bleeding edge and writing books with the bleeding edge people. You call up Sebastian Thrun who ran the Google self-driving team, when you talk to him about what’s going to happen after self-driving because he’s thought about it a lot, he has some answers, like, car washes. Cities are going to change and he lays out how. MIT built simulators to simulate what happens if we take parking garages out of cities? What does it look like? How do people move around? There are people working on that. You interview somebody working at MIT Media Lab and all of a sudden you figure out how cities are going to change. That’s how WIRED magazine writes its articles. Ross: Yes, prescribe the edge. Robert: Just 20 people, it’s really easy. You start with the right 20 people like Sebastian Thrun, and you’re going to hear some crazy stuff. Ross: Yes, and it’s all fun. Thanks, Robert. That has been really insightful and it was great to talk to you. Have a wonderful day. Robert: Thank you. It’s fun hanging out and talking about something I don’t usually get to talk about very much because I’m nuts. People don’t really think about how did he write four books that predict decade-long trends. Thank you. The post Robert Scoble on how to find the latest news, how to use Twitter for insight, finding the 20 people you need to follow, and the value of conversations (Ep6) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I have this wish that more people will come forward to collaborate in building up some infrastructure for what we know, that we might use together to make better sense of the world.” – Jerry Michalski About Jerry Michalski On this episode we learn from the incredible connector Jerry Michalski. His fascinating career is hard to summarise, playing a central role in the emerging digital economy as long time managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter. He is now leader at the Relation Economy Expedition (REX) as well as an advisor facilitator and speaker at the Institute For The Future with a deep focus on trust and relationships Website: jerrymichalski.com Medium: Jerry Michalski LinkedIn: Jerry Michalski Twitter: Jerry Michalski YouTube: Jerry Michalski What you will learn How the word consumer started his journey to collaboration (02:21) He still uses a 23 year old software called TheBrain (05:45) Why he is sharing his brain… (17:47) …and it’s the only asset he will pass on. (20:01) How and why he’s building a more collaborative brain (21:26) Delicious still has no successor (23:54) What information sources does Jerry use (27:18) In spite of all his information, he feels less overwhelm (31:36) On connections and serendipity (33:51) His routines and structures (36:01) He has a collection of mental models and thinking frameworks (38:54) OODA loops and virtous circles (42:12) Being a pattern hound (44:04) Using dialogue to enhance his and collective models (47:56) Episode resources TheBrain Open Global Mind Kumu Miro Nassim Taleb Henry Molaison Nicklas Luhmann Delicious David Allen GTD Connections TV series Farnam Street John Boyd OODA Loop Episode images The images below are referenced during the conversation with Jerry. Contrarians Who Make (or Made) Sense  https://bra.in/4jrdQp David Bohm (1917-1992)  https://bra.in/9jrB85 Virtuous Circles and Vicious Circles  https://bra.in/5vB5Ja OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act)  https://bra.in/7pDkZn Useful Thinking Frameworks and Mental Models  https://bra.in/8vPM9p Design from Trust (DfT)  https://bra.in/9jYPAq Types of Accident  https://bra.in/8vm7QZ Transcript Ross Dawson: Jerry, it’s a great pleasure to have you on the show, Thriving on Overload. Jerry Michalski: It is a great pleasure to be here, and it’s nice to have a chance to talk with you as well. Ross: Yes, it’s been too long. I’ve got to say you’re certainly one of the very first people that sprung to mind when I thought about people who are excellent at thriving on overload. Jerry: I love that. Thank you. Ross: We’ll try to go through in a little bit of the frame we have around Thriving on Overload; firstly around purpose. In a world of information, how have you developed the clarity of filtering information, or how do you find what’s relevant to you? Where does that come from for you? Jerry: I can point to two things. One of them is an insight, and the other one is an accident. A long time ago, both of the events happened within a couple of years in the mid-90s, when I was a tech industry trends analyst; not a Wall Street analyst, I don’t care what next quarter’s earnings are going to be, but is AI going to kill us or save us? Or where should we apply neural networks? Those were the things I was looking into back then. The thing that was an insight was one day, there were a couple of briefings I can point to when I suddenly realized that I didn’t like the word consumer. At the time, I was working for Esther Dyson, who was the doyen of the tech industry. I said, Hey, this word bothers me, and she said it’s just a term of art in the ad business. My little inner voice, which I’ve learned to listen to a lot, said, Hey, no, there’s something much more profound going on here. Word consumer is a symptom of a much deeper problem. This is my advice to young people, pay attention to that little inner voice, because really often it’s giving you a very good clue. For me, it gave me the clue that we’ve consumerized our world that involved the whole series of breaches of trust, and that whole mission took me deep into the notion of trust. I have a whole bunch of things I’ve thought about, which are weirdly about institutional design around trust. If you wanted to create a high-performance, high-trust team, I can point you to other people; that’s not my issue, but really, why did we design our whole world around mistrust, is the question. That was the insight that led to a quest, to a path of inquiry for me that is rich and live to this day. Then the accident, the serendipity was that back then I was writing Esther’s newsletter, and I decided to write about bookmark management & mind mapping. I’m not sure why I picked those two things. This was back in the early days of the web, and browsers, and all that. Even back then everybody knew that the bookmark feature in your browser sucks, and nobody uses it, so what else might we do to save the breadcrumbs of where we’ve been. I’m halfway done writing the issue, I’m unhappy with everything I’m seeing, and this little company had booked a visit, the company had a piece of software called TheBrain. I remember making the appointment with a little eye-roll, going, TheBrain? It turns out that this piece of software was exactly how my brain worked. I wrote about them, I invited them to our conference, and I started using their software, not knowing that 23 years later, I’d still be using their software, really not knowing that 23 years later, I would be curating the same data file that I started the very first day I started using it. My path to being able to cope with information is highly unusual, arguably unique, and has a lot to do with my passion combined with this weird tool that lets me collect up what I see and hang it in the right place, almost like ornaments on a Christmas tree, or pieces of a puzzle. The world’s largest puzzle is how does the world work? I’m busy snapping little pieces in place, which gives me a little oxytocin hit, which causes the lather, rinse, repeat addiction response to kick in. The time that other people would spend maybe putting a link in a spreadsheet or somewhere, I put adding a link to this one curated mind map. Ross: It’s probably a good time to tell us what is TheBrain? Jerry: TheBrain is a mind mapping piece of software. The easiest way to show you is to share my screen. Ross: Some people will just be listening to the podcast, so can you describe that? Jerry: Okay, I’ll describe it as a football announcer. The mind map has a blue background and words or phrases, mostly phrases, linked by lines. The color scheme that I use is the color scheme that this thing shipped with 23 years ago, a dark blue background with a little bit of fading at each side, a little bit of gradient, words mostly in white on this dark background, lines in a light blue, and occasionally, I use the colors yellow or purple as highlights. I just took us to a thought because it’s called TheBrain, every node is called a thought. I just took us to a thought I called Lessons from my Brain. Under here are a whole bunch of different thoughts, one of my favorites, because it’s an unusual insight, is that we are an amnesic society. What I mean by this is that, because we’re not storing things in a way that we can refer to them with each other, we’re stupider than we normally would be. We have cultural amnesia. Gore Vidal famously once said that America is an amnesic nation, we have no memory, we don’t care about history, all of that. I’ve got this little tool where, for example, I’ve been tracking the Trumpocalypse, and everything from Trump before he started running for office, all the way through the campaign, his presidency, the January 6 insurrection, and all that, I’m a little bit of a newshound, so all those events are sequenced in this little memory, except everything you’re seeing in this Brain I put in by hand, and it’s just me with this weird little artifact, and I’m dying to be collaborating with other people to create a shared memory, except the tool doesn’t really do shared memory very well. My passion project right now is called Open Global Mind, and we’ll get into that. Open Global Mind answers the question. What if there was an open collaborative thing like this, but also like Kumu, Miro, and other tools that help you visualize and analyze information? I’ve been hacking this tool a little bit, to do things that are different than unusual, like storytelling, or gathering evidence, or simple things. An easy way to demonstrate it, if you want to go there, is I was a tech industry trends analyst, and I needed to know who competes with whom, who founded what company, who funded what company, what PR companies represented them, and all of that; I can cruise through that information in this tool easier than any database I’ve ever seen, and easier than anything else. It just snapped in place at the right moment for me. Different people have different representational schemes. My wife has a calendric memory. It’s like she’s flipping through the calendar in her head, and I don’t know what I did last week, without the aid of my artificial calendar. This thing happens to really fit how I represent things. Ross: Would it be accurate to describe this as a mind map where each of the element clicks is a hyperlink to another mind map? Jerry: This is actually one big mind map. We have an amnesic society. Amnesia is under memory. There’s also elective memory loss, then there’s institutionalized amnesia, organizational amnesia, social amnesia, a whole bunch of different kinds of things. Apparently, Henry Gustav Molaison was studying amnesia. He had students named Brenda Milner and Suzanne Corkin. Molaison wrote about patient H.M. who had a traumatic brain injury, etc. You see that I’m basically making these links. All these little links between the thoughts, I’ve put in by hand, because these things are related to each other. Ross: This gets to a really fundamental point. Let’s say you have a new piece of information, you find an article or resource, how in your mind do you go through the process of working out where that fits in your Brain? Jerry: It’s really simple. Before we go forward, I just want to correct myself, Molaison wasn’t a scientist, he, in fact, was an accidental research subject because he had a lobotomy after a traumatic brain injury, and suddenly things happened to his memory that changed everything, so here’s a couple of articles titled “The brain that changed everything”. Sorry about that. Do you see anything in the flow of information in your day that’s worth remembering? Ross: Yes. Jerry: Me too. It turns out that I probably see 50 or 60 things every day that are really worth remembering. Then there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam that I let go by. The first decision is, is this worth remembering? The second decision is where would it go? I’m curious about everything. I was just on YouTube, and right there on the side, there was an explanation and simulation of the ExxonMobil Refinery Explosion in Torrance, California, in 2015. I clicked on it and started going there. Then I decided, that’s interesting. I already had a couple of refinery accidents. One, I had the attack in Saudi Arabia, and then I had a Texas City one, so I added the animation that I just watched. I just dragged it into my Brain, creating this thought in the meantime, under Refinery Accidents and Incidents, which is under Oil Refineries and Types of Accidents. Just to illustrate, here are types of accidents, which are GPS accidents, ice skating falls, roadkill, satellite accidents, wardrobe malfunctions, remember Janet Jackson? That’s an accident, or maybe not. Then just to show you how absurd this gets when you start doing it for a long time, one day, I realized I had a lot of types of thoughts, so I created an Uber thought called Types. Here are types of abuse, types of accident, types of activism, types of addiction, types of advertising, types of age, aircraft, alcohol, and anarchy. At this level, it’s just fun to wander around. This is not a useful thought for me. We’ve just gotten to the seas here, types of capital, this is a scroll bar down here, so you can see that there’s an awful lot of collections of types, some of which are really interesting, like, variants of capitalism is really interesting. How many different ways that people titled capitalism, both destructive capitalism and attempts to reform capitalism, I collect all that stuff, which means that later when I find a new article about the same thing, I’m actually putting it into the same context and making that part of my Brain richer and better. I publish my Brain openly online, so anybody can go browse through it. Ross: Coming back to purpose, what is it that makes something you want to keep in your Brain or not? Jerry: When I first started using this, I was a tech industry trends analyst. The company Edify, for example, I don’t have much around them because they are all around an interactive voice response, they got some money from Greylock management. Then if I click on Greylock management, we’ll see that they also invested in Dig, Crunch Fund, and Coda. These lists are out of date. I don’t make any claim that these lists are complete. But obviously, there was a purpose for my use of this tool for my job immediately back in 1998,1999, 2000. Then, I was like, I can store everything here. As I said, I’m on this quest around the word consumer and trust but I’m curious about everything. I then started arranging this slowly over time. You know how when you’re a blogger or a podcaster, you suddenly realize, Oh, I have to have fresh content for the blog. There’s never been a day in my last 23 years, when I was like, Oh, I must add something to my Brain today because there was no reason to, but every day, naturally, 10 to 50 things showed up that were worth remembering. I would then get into this quick habit of adding something to my Brain, which is really a quick act; it can be under a minute. I can take something, an article worth remembering, and just drop it in. Over time because there’s a part of me that’s trying to digest how the world works, and then transform that into insights, I have a process that I call Design from Trust, that I’m trying to stand up as a practice, where the assumption is we lost trust in humans, but then we went and designed all of our institutions from the basis of mistrust of the average person; if we flip that equation, what does that look like? That’s all here in TheBrain. I’ve got it all cataloged here, I just haven’t written the book about it. Ross: Do you ever use paper or any other visual tools outside TheBrain? Jerry: I have next to me a little Squirrel pad. I use it rarely. I can only write on graph paper, on Squirrel paper, only on one side of the page, this is an old habit from 30 years ago, and only with the pen; I can’t use a pencil anymore. I have a little metal clipboard that I love. Then I have an iPad, and I use a drawing app on it. But I use them all occasionally. Ross: Essentially, this is where you capture and organize your thoughts? Jerry: Exactly. Now, I don’t do outlining for an article. Let’s say I’m writing a post somewhere, I would have a link to the post here in my Brain but the outline for the post would be in Google Docs, or medium, or wherever it is I’m writing the piece. I don’t use TheBrain for outlining. You easily could and many people do. I just don’t do that, partly because I feel like I’m serving two audiences. One is just me and my idiosyncratic use of this tool to remember stuff, but because I’ve been publishing my Brain online for a really long time, at least 15 years, I have a second audience which is whoever trips across this thing and decides to try to use it, for which, thank you very much, but I want to make this clear enough that people can find their way through and run into stuff that’s actually very useful to them. I have a thought that people are generally more trustworthy than we think they are, which is one of my beliefs. I have a thought called My Beliefs right here. I think this is really interesting and useful, and I can show you why I think this, and who said it, I’ll let you know. I was at South by Southwest years ago, and Craig Newark and Jimmy Wales interviewed each other. They said this sentence basically twice within the 90 minutes that they were talking because both Craigslist and Wikipedia are designed from the trust. That’s what got me started thinking about how these things all click together. I won’t claim that this curating has given me the different kinds of ideas that I now have, but it sure has helped. It really helped, so when I’m trying to remember what was that article I saw 10 years ago, and chances are that Google has forgotten about the article because Google loves things that have fresh inbound links. PageRank is like who is linking to this piece, and if a piece wasn’t popular, or was long ago, it’s probably fallen off of Google’s memory. Thank God, the Internet Archive has the Wayback Machine, because I use that all the time to basically do CPR on dead web links. I don’t get rid of broken links in my Brain, partly because as Nassim Taleb tells us, we don’t hear from the graveyard often enough. One of the things I can do is somebody shows up and says, Hey, we have a cool new group calendaring app, and I can say to them, you want to see the couple 100 companies that have died trying to do this? Can I show you who tried and died? Maybe we can talk about what special secret sauce do you have that’s going to make sure you survive? Ross: Just want a comment on the point of saying, alright, I’m going to open this up for the whole world to see the inside of my Brain. Jerry: First, there was no reason not to. I can check a little box, so if I click on a link, it gives me a little dialog box. Then over here, there’s a little lock symbol; if I click on the lock, it makes this particular thought private. Now and then as I synchronize to the cloud, to TheBrain’s web servers, whenever I sync, that refreshes, and I do that several times a day, which puts the most up-to-date version on the cloud. Anything I marked as private, nobody else gets to see it. I can protect the things that I care to protect, and I don’t protect very much. I’ll give a speech inside a company that nobody outside the company is meant to know about, that thought is private. But the people I meet who are employees of the company, I attach them to the company, and I make them publicly visible. Nobody needs to know where we met, that linking thought is for me. My notion of the benefits of publishing this publicly has obviously grown over time, as this has become a bigger asset, as I’ve done more thinking about what it means to work like this in public, etc. I’m a little bit vulnerable for doing this, so I do have that thought called My Beliefs. You can very easily infer my political stance and a bunch of other things from how I arrange things in my Brain. My intentions there are to actually have conversations of other people who’ve done something similar. I’m anxiously looking forward to a conversation with a QAnon fan, who has done some curating not necessarily in TheBrain, but somewhere, to try to build a factual argument for any piece of what they believe. Okay, so pedophiles are in charge of the government, great, where’s your evidence? And how does it fit together? Or anti-vaxxers? Or just conservatives? I’m more on the liberal side but I have plenty of critique of liberal beliefs. I’m using this to sort through what do I believe? And then not just what do I believe, but why? Ross: That’s wonderful. You have shared extensively on social media at various times in various channels over the years, so this is perhaps the biggest sharing, you’re sharing TheBrain and everything with your Brain marking. How does this relate then to your other social sharing? Jerry: It’s funny, I’m Twitter user number 509. Ed Williams is a friend, but a different friend of mine basically said, Hey, try this when it was still just an SMS service. I don’t have a zillion followers, but I’ve been on Twitter since it was born, and I’ve used other social media, but I have no large audience anyplace. My wife and I recently were doing our wills, and the only asset I have that matters to me when I pass on is this thing. The only asset I have that matters is my Brain. It’s easy to fund a server still being alive to serve up TheBrain contents frozen on the day of my death. Okay. But a really interesting question is, how might there be other people who then pick up and start using this as a sourdough starter, and then keep going? The project I’m doing now Open Global Mind, one small motive for that project is to get me out into a more open collaborative tool with other humans doing this so that what I’ve done is just a starter for some new layer. Think of this as on top of Wikipedia, but different. Ross: Tell us about the tool, where that’s at, and where it’s going? Jerry: OGM, Open Global Mind isn’t actually trying to build a tool, we’re trying to first look around for open source products that exist. There’s a thing called Graphviz, which does visualization; there are a few other bodies of open source code. We’re also trying to motivate existing vendors to write toward each other so that their tools can interoperate, and to separate themselves from their proprietary data formats. Almost everybody has seen Minority Report, and they have that Tom Cruise scene where he’s doing the analysis and flipping things around, isn’t that cool? Some of our geek friends were actually advisors on that movie, so it’s a really good simulation. Although I’m not a huge fan of VR gloves, and all that stuff but imagine a conversation between people using different kinds of tools for memory, and connecting ideas, and building arguments, who weren’t just trapped in little rectangles with a chat on the side but instead were in idea land, and when you showed me something you believed in an argument that I really liked, I could grab it and link it into mine, and say, for this topic, refer to this thing Ross just did. I already have referred to you in my Brain, I’ve got a bunch of stuff around you and things you’ve written in posts, and that’s an interesting start. But what does this look like at the next level when we’re starting to think together? And when we’re starting to set up experiments or arguments to try to convince other people to do something? So heading down that road. Ross: I sometimes think that the defining theme of where my life is going is collective intelligence. Jerry: That’s fabulous. Collective intelligence, collaborative sense-making, hive mind, whatever term you want, that’s the place where we’re aiming. Then there’s a whole bunch of small subgroups. There’s a bunch of people who are fans of subtle custom, which was a system developed by Niklas Luhmann with index cards and a coding scheme, and they’re emulating that in software. Then there’s the cult of Rome research, which is doing backlink key outlines; then there’s a bunch of others, and none of us are connected to each other. Each of these is like its own frothy little cult. I’m really interested in what does it look like when a heavy Rome user, who’s done a lot of this work, and I talked to one another? And what can we build together? Ross: One of the things that hopped off for me is actually social bookmarking and Delicious, and so on, which was a big loss when that disappeared. Is there anything now that you feel in terms of social bookmarking or other things that are useful? Jerry: I was not a Delicious user, because I was already a Brain user, but Delicious was the closest thing to TheBrain without any of the visual aspects, but certainly the social side of it was more than TheBrain, the shared links, the hash-tagging, a bunch of other interesting stuff, and I regret the day Yahoo bought them. I, even more, regret the day that they went under, and Joshua Schachter is now driving sports cars. I’m like dude, couldn’t you have just funded this thing to stay up as a server? A lot of old Delicious users wound up on Pinboard, which is a mediocre substitute. Then there are a couple of other tools that are picking up some of that but don’t quite have the magic or the community because, for example, C19, as a hashtag on Delicious, was a rallying cry for historians who cared about the 19th century. They were using a C19 to share what they knew in a beautiful way. I totally agree, Delicious was a huge loss when it went away. We need a lot more things like that, that can play nicely with things like this Brain tool, with Graphviz, with Kumu, and with other kinds of tools. I don’t know why more people aren’t interested in that space where we can enrich the way we communicate. Ross: Yes, it does seem that there’s less happening now than there was, unfortunately. Jerry: Yes and no, because the little cults that I talked about are new. A lot of those are new, frothy, and interesting. Whether it’s personal knowledge management, or personal knowledge graphs, or network knowledge graphs, there’s a whole bunch of subcategories, I’ve got most of them named in my Brain and collected up. They’re all trying hard to figure this thing out, and many of these people are really good bloggers or chroniclers of their activities, on whatever medium you want. If you want to get in those conversations, they’re openly available; but you’re right, in another way, a lot of this stuff has died off, and there isn’t a great deal of interest. Ross: I will have a look at your Brain to find those references. Jerry: I’m happy to send you links or whatever. A nice thing is that I can send a shortened link to any particular thought, any specific thought in my Brain to anybody. That’s easier than going to Jerrysbrain.com, clicking on launch Jerry’s Brain, and then trying to use the search function, which is okay, but slow. You can get around that way but it’s so much easier if I send you someplace directly in the middle of TheBrain. Ross: Actually, that would be awesome to get the direct links for where you were referring to earlier in the podcast so that people can track our conversation and to delve into what we’ve just been chatting about. Jerry: We can add them to the comments, no problem. Ross: What are your information sources? The things that you use regularly? How do you choose those sources? How do you find broader sources beyond that? What is your structure for finding and using your sources? Jerry: I’m no scientist or information technologist about this stuff. It’s been a pretty organic thing. I love the New York Times because I lived in New York for five years and got really used to it and its writing style. For example, there have been plenty of controversies about its agendas and whatnot over the last couple of election cycles, but I have a lot of references there, and that’s the only paper that I will regularly go look at. I only look at it online, I don’t get anything delivered on paper anymore at all. Then I subscribed to a bunch of different newsletters most recently, probably Heather Cox Richardson, the historian, who’s doing political commentary, no opinion. There’s a whole bunch of people, and I’ll turn them off once they’re less relevant for me, so I’ll unsubscribe. I spend a bunch of time trying to unsubscribe from things because I get way too much mail. I also know way too many humans who are interesting, and every now and then they’ll throw something overboard. But for me, the social network is the source of my best links. I’ve been careful about curating who I follow on Twitter. If you treat Twitter like Facebook, and you just follow your friends, your Twitter feed will be trashy, it’ll be awful, and you’ll be like, God, Twitter’s just terrible. But if you’re careful about who you follow, then I see world news hits first in my Twitter feed before CNN gets it, before I hear it anywhere else. If I happen to be looking over at Twitter, and there’s an earthquake somewhere or an explosion somewhere, or something, it’ll start there. I rely on Twitter for contemporary newsy stuff. I rely on my social network, that’s just lots of people and a few newsletters for the bulk of things. I don’t really subscribe to many publications, summaries like ZDNet, or The Economist, or whoever, they’ll send out, Hey, here is a bit, and I’m like if there was a good article in your publication today, I will hear about it some other way. I don’t subscribe because every organization is going to send you 20 great things every day, and that’s just way too much, that’s overload. I do get the feeling of overload periodically in doing what I’m doing. In particular, I will add, because I’ve been obsessive about this Brain thing and trying to figure out how to digest the world at the expense of making a normal income, and all those kinds of things, I’m devoting a lot of time to doing this, even though it’s a quick act to add something new to it, and only a couple of times I’ve sat down and thought, Oh, crap, I’m having a feeling of overwhelm. That’s happened a couple of times during lockdown, but really only twice. At those moments, I’d got way too many tabs open that I wanted to filter into my Brain, I just came up with three great conversations, I’m done, I’m spent. Also this little feeling of maybe I’ve just lost a grip on what’s happening in the world. I don’t usually get to the point of I should just give up. I fall short of just throwing my hands up and deciding to give up, but trying to be a little coral polyp on the reef filtering the nutrients that go by is an ongoing act. You’re always wafting with the current picking up like, oh, that’s good. I wish many more people did this because what I see that’s important, and pick out depends on my filters, my worldview, and how I think the world works, and I’m really interested in other people’s worldview, and the tools like this make it really easy to model, explain, elaborate and then show your worldview. I find that to be really important. Ross: You’re getting to the essence of what this is all about. I’ve got to say, if you had that feeling of overwhelm only a couple of times, then you’re doing better than most people. Jerry: I think I feel less overwhelmed than most because I have a very productive way to put things in a place where I know I’ll find them again. David Allen is the Getting Things Done guy; he says, you have a whole bunch of open loops in your head, you need to put them in a system that is reliable, where you know, where you don’t have this worry that you’re going to miss a loop and drop something. He helps you design a reliable system. I’m terrible at GTD, although I took a couple of David’s workshops. I’m terrible at GTD but I’m really good at knowing that what I’ve put something in TheBrain and then linked it up a little bit thoughtfully, and I failed to go through the rest of my logics for when I put things in TheBrain, that I’ll find that again, that it’s now more useful than it was before, and that it’s in its context. It’s like it has found its little home. Going back a moment ago. First, is it worth remembering? Second, what is it part of? What does it connect to? I’ve got enough things in my Brain that there’s almost always a place I can go to, so I go there. I don’t know if you noticed, but I have my screen always set up where TheBrain is flush right and the browser is flush left, and there’s an inch gap. The only reason I do that is that the easiest way to add something to TheBrain is to grab the URL, the little icon next to the URL, I grab that and I drag it across into the blue background of TheBrain. TheBrain goes, Oh, you’re adding a thought, under the current thought, I should pick up the name of the file and whatever URL you’ve got, and create a new thought. That’s what it does, and 80% of the time, it does a pretty darn good job of that, and I’m done adding the thought; but the other 20% of the time, I have to go clean it up, edit it, move around the text, which is easy to do. Then I sit down and I think what else should I connect this to? Because this isn’t a hierarchy, TheBrain is not just like top-down. It’s a multi-directed graph of some sort. I know nothing about graph theory, but TheBrain doesn’t care if I make circular references, or if I over link or whatever, so I’m really interested in connecting things to things that are similar. My Brain is a very happy pattern finder. I do lots and lots of patterns over matching and linking up which means then when I come in to find something, I’m like, who was that woman who did the paper on whatever? I can usually find my way to it. Ross: You mentioned serendipity before. When you’re out exploring or finding, is there any way in which serendipity is more likely to happen in what you discover? Jerry: Serendipity, curiosity, and innovation are not things that I worry about, I have no scarcity of any of those. There are a lot of reasons why. One of them is that I keep a bunch of open channels, and I have a bunch of friends who will send me stuff. Another one is that I’m curious about everything, and I’m always nosing in corners looking for stuff. Years ago, when I was 35 years old, I finally read my first good history book, and that gave me the nose for Oh, wait a minute, history doesn’t have to be about there was this battle on this date, and here’s who won; you can actually peel back the curtain and see what was going on; isn’t that cool? That led me to a different form of inquiry that helps me go through and connect things up. One of the big motivators for me was James Burke’s series Connections, which aired on PBS here in the US, but then it was a book as well. It was all about serendipity, and connections. So someone used Limelight, which was made popular in theaters as a way of lighting the stage, and turned it into a signaling system between the semaphore stations. Then suddenly you have the Saturn V rocket, remember that episode? My mind works a lot like that. Also, I have successfully preserved a child’s curiosity and openness to finding new stuff. I’m busy trying to figure out how other people think. I want to know why people voted for Trump. I don’t think they were all misogynist, racist, homophobic assholes. I think a lot of them, for example, wanted to break the system. They really wanted to shatter a system that was nonfunctional for them. They were like, this guy with his bull in the china shop approach is very likely to break the system enough that we’re going to have to get a new system. That’s a logic to me. That makes a lot of sense because I think the system is broken, too. I just would fix it a different way, but look how far I’ve gotten. Ross: Do you have any routines or structures during the day or the week? Are there times of day when you scan sources, or think about things, or do deep dives? Jerry: This is a great and painful question to answer. The thing I should be doing is I should eat the frog, as they say, every morning. The night before, I should set up with the one most important thing I could do the next day, and then just do that and ignore everything else for the first couple of hours, and my life would be very different had I figured out how to do that. Instead, I try to get through my email and I start following things. Before you know it, I’m curating my Brain, adding stuff in, which is beneficial in the sense of these were all little pieces of the puzzle, but not great in the sense of, I probably should have sent that email today. I think I’m overly in the dig, click, connect, and weave mode. I think of TheBrain as a modern loom. I think of this as me weaving information together because the little lines between thoughts are very much like the warp and weft of a fabric. Weaving is one of the earliest technologies. The only problem is everything that was woven rotted and went away, and the people who made large stone monuments to themselves survived because the stone is more durable than fabric, which is a shame. Because the weaving was really important, it was how we stayed alive to carry stuff, to get dressed, and whatever else. The pyramids served no particular useful purpose I can see. Metaphorically, similarly, I’m really interested in how we might together weave what we know together, so we don’t have to keep having the same stupid arguments over and over again. I apologize to go back to Trump for a second, but if the American press corps had agreed with some memory device, and said, hey, these six lies that he’s been saying over and over again, let’s all agree that the next time he utters that lie, any one of these six, there’s just 6/3 real things, we will turn off the camera, stand up and walk out of the room together. Can we just agree on that? Okay, good. I don’t know that that would have solved the problem but it would have been a little bit of animal conditioning, to show Trump that his assumption that the news media could not shut its eye and leave might be wrong. Having a shared memory for journalists might have been a good thing. For me, the idea that we don’t have a shared memory makes us much easier to spend, makes us stupider than we actually are as humans, means that we’re perfectly happy to go watch TikTok videos till the cows come home, because hey, it’s only a minute, and it’s got some cute music, and somebody did something light-hearted. Wait a minute, we have five major crises in front of us. Wouldn’t you do something fruitful toward any of them? Or if you don’t want to try to fend off crises, wouldn’t you do something positive that helps people? Ross: You’ve been implicitly talking about mental models throughout, about how you’re building your way of seeing the world, to be able to build it and collaborate around that and to refine and make it better. Your repository is TheBrain but it is not in the software literally, it is inside your mind. What’s the relationship between what you are thinking in your mind and the external resource of TheBrain or anything else? How are you continuing refining and developing? Jerry: Farnam Street famously has published a couple of books about mental models, but I’ve been collecting mental models for years. I see yellow as an attractor that says hey, there’s a lot of stuff under here; so these yellow things are OR tools, dynamic programming, linear programming, Monte Carlo, nonlinear programming, queuing theory, etc. That’s just one little subsection of useful thinking frameworks. The Cynefin framework is in here from Dave Snowden, brainstorming techniques, etc. I have a massive collection of mental models here that aren’t curated toward each other, meaning somebody who took this collection and went down another level with it could actually say, this one is like this one, here’s how they’re different; somebody could front end this collection with, if you’re stuck in this kind of a situation, here’s how to find your way to a useful mental model or thinking framework. I think that it would be terrific work to do. Then some of these thinking frameworks are proprietary. I don’t like good ideas that are locked behind an IP gate. Apparently, in our culture, smart people write books, and they put their best ideas in books. Then we protect books with digital rights management. We make it really hard to use the information in books, and then we expect culture to move forward. Seriously people? What we want to do is have creative people make a living, let’s solve for that, and let’s solve for that around walking away the content. I’m a huge fan of open source, open content, open as much as you possibly can. There are business models that are successful, where much of what is done is actually open. Then the secret sauce or the proprietary data is not, and that layer is protected. That’s fine too. But we have way too many people who are over protecting intellectual property, hiding ideas from one another when we actually need to work together. Ross: Synthesis is one of the key frames through my life. It’s bringing together disparate ideas and making them one. TheBrain shows connections but there’s this vast amount which you cover through your voracious curiosity, what is the process where you synthesize, pull things together to make sense from these things, and coalesce all of this array of different resources you’ve discovered? Jerry: Let me show you two examples. One is the OODA loop. John Boyd, Air Force Colonel, a crazy guy who used to call his associates at 2 am and say, I’ve got an idea. He invents this brilliant thing, which was used by Dick Cheney. In John Boyd’s biography, the author credits and acknowledges that. Dick Cheney is a big fan of Boyd, so I wrote a piece that I didn’t actually publish. Back when John Kerry was running, I wrote neocons are inside the democrats’ OODA loop. Because everybody on the far right understands OODA, nobody on the left understood it. When there was swiftboating, flip-flopping, and all the things that kept John Kerry off balance were being done because this was political use of OODA. That’s just one little piece of synthesis. This one, I understood by myself and got into it. Another one is virtuous circles. One day, I was trying to learn more about Brian Arthur and virtuous circles, and all that. In doing so, in my Brain, I suddenly realized that vicious cycles are what happens to everybody else in a virtuous circle. One of the examples of a virtuous circle is Microsoft bundles up Excel, Word, and Access, and sells that as the Office suite. The other vendors don’t really have as good an Office suite, and all of a sudden, everybody decides we have to use Microsoft, and there’s a virtuous cycle that lifts Microsoft to market leadership, which is a vicious cycle for Novell, Lotus, and everybody else. That came to me from sitting here and looking at basically cycle, circles, making these connections in here, feedback loops, positive feedback, negative feedback, all of that. These insights don’t happen that often directly while using TheBrain but they happen to me all the time because I’m a pattern hound. When I get them, I try to represent them in this Brain. What’s interesting is that this Brain isn’t just a collection of companies that sell products, that have people in them, that were funded by Venture Capital firms, that live under categories, there’s a piece of my Brain where I’m doing that, but I’m also trying to think out loud, think with whoever else wants to play, about all these topics and make sense of the world. Ross: You’ve mentioned that word pattern hound more than once, what does that mean? How do you sniff out patterns, find them, or articulate them? Jerry: A big piece of pattern recognition is I curate the world’s largest published Brain with 460,000 thoughts, 850,000 links, and 23 plus years now. This idea that when you look from one place to another, there are things that are really parallel to each other, really works for me. I have a thought that’s really important to me, which is going to look messy, my apologies, but it’s contrarians who make or made sense. Years ago, when I was starting to figure out about trust and all that stuff, I discovered that I had a bunch of heroes, David Bohm, who invented the dialogue process, Alice Miller, who did the unresolved childhood trauma, and a bunch of stuff around family systems thinking, Christopher Alexander, the cranky urban planner, and architect. These people are all on this list. Then I realized one day that all these people shared something that none of them would have called by this name, that’s when I came up with this idea of design from trust. I saw the pattern that all of these people were saying, in my discipline, education, architecture, urban planning, finance, self-image, health, whatever, we don’t trust humans anymore, so we built these really coercive institutions that control people, and really have screwed up. We screwed up how to do policing, for example. Each of these people also then suggested a positive way to fix that. Christopher Alexander invents pattern languages, which are a way of distilling wisdom in any discipline so that ordinary muggles can come in and perform much higher levels of design, discussion and make more intelligent choices because they have distilled wisdom at hand, like light from two sides, make small niches for children, and how to cite a home on a lot. How do we do this for every domain? This is one of the major patterns that I’ve found. I think if we all tried to design from trust, a book I need to write, we might actually solve a lot of the world’s problems because design from trust is cheaper, it reconnects us in the community, and it actually seems to solve problems. Design from trust is really scary and counterintuitive. I wrote an essay called the Two Oh Shits, which is in here, which basically says, when you hit a system designed from trust, like Wikipedia is designed from trust, your first reaction is, Oh, shit, this couldn’t possibly work. What moron invented a system where anyone on earth can come change any page? Then you bounce around in there, try a couple of pages, look at something that you know a lot about, and the second Oh, shit is like, Oh, shit, this seems to be really working. What makes it work? What is the secret sauce here? How do I get more? That process to me is super fascinating because I think that’s the direction we need to go to fix what ails us. Ross: Just one thread there was David Bohm’s dialogue. Jerry: Yes. Ross: WikiHow is a wonderful and often neglected resource. This is a little implicit in what you’ve been sharing, but how do you use dialogue? How do you engage in dialogue to be able to enhance your models, or other people’s models, or collective models? Jerry: It’s funny because I’m a facilitator. I’m a convener; I have meetings that I pull together of different kinds, and Open Global Mind right now is mostly a community of practice that is busy working on these different kinds of things. When I lived in Manhattan, I attended several Bohm dialogue sessions, and I was really struck by how subtle the whole process is because we would show up, we would take our coats off, we would sit down and start talking, and before we knew that there was a special something in between us, that the place we were in, the conversation we were having had grown to feel different. That’s a piece of what dialogue is. It’s not about trying to convince anybody of anything. It’s not for therapy, but it might feel like it. I try to incorporate some of that in the conversations that I host. I’m trying to listen with care to what people bring to the conversation, and unpack it. I’m probably a little too directive as a facilitator but I feel the safe space in which to say things that matter to you, is really important for civilization to move forward, and also for companies to make good decisions, to make wiser decisions. We don’t have a lot of those safe spaces. We don’t listen well. Another thought I have is that we’re in an epidemic of not listening to each other. We’re all busy ready to say things, and not that ready to stop, sit and actually listen to other people. In fact, one of the safest, easiest ways to bridge the cultural divide is to listen respectfully to other people. It’s crazy how well that works. Bohm is a small piece of that puzzle for me in the middle here, but he was a super interesting fellow. By the way, Bohm’s ideas were met with silence and derision. It is a thought here in my Brain. Ross: Not by everyone. Jerry: Not by everyone; some things come around later, and make a lot of sense later. Ross: Yes, that’s perennials. You are really an exemplar of thriving on overload. You’ve pointed a path through what you’ve done, a unique path, and you’ve pushed it out further than anyone else. I really hope your project succeeds in being able to provide a more collective frame for this filtering, gathering, and sense-making. Is there anything else to share from your insights and experience on how other people can learn from that to thrive themselves on overload? Jerry: Yes, many small pieces of advice. One of them is, you can browse my Brain for free at Jerrysbrain.com. I would love for anybody to join the conversation and the actions at Openglobalmind.com, the same sort of thing. A thing for young people, in particular, is to pay attention to your little inner voice, because many people have a lot of trouble finding their purpose in life, like, what is my purpose? Doing stuff without a real purpose is not nearly as much fun as having a purpose. Although sometimes having a purpose is really frustrating because if your purpose is to stop the earth from melting because of climate change, man, we are in a lot of trouble right now around that. I’m in Portland, Oregon, where we just had the three hottest days on record, the last three days. Today’s normal, it’s still way above normal for June averages, but we just had Portland’s highest temperature ever by a lot, by five or six degrees. Find something that irks you, and chances are that irritation is the source of something the world actually needs. Because younger children are really brutally frank, but they’re actually seeing things as they ought to be. Then we teach them, we basically socialize all that wisdom out of them. One of my beliefs is that we’re born pretty connected to the world, to each other, and to the earth, and we don’t figure out what to do. I have a lot of things to say to younger people and I have this wish that more people will come forward, to collaborate in building up some infrastructure for what we know, that we might use together to make better sense of the world, to bridge those divides that are being widened intentionally, we weren’t always this far apart on everything, there’s this kind of a wave, where every now and then mostly politicians figure out that if they pump fear and mistrust, and undermine facts in science, they can drive a wedge and win some elections. That’s where we are. One way to combat that is by sharing what we know. Another way to combat that is just through listening and safety and has nothing to do with technology. I don’t want to say that if we only all curated TheBrain, we would solve the world’s problems. I actually want to say, if we listened respectfully to each other and went out for a beer, we might actually solve more problems, but then we might want to sit down and decide to express what we know, share it better, and build on it. That’s the piece I’ve been working on for a while here. Ross, thank you for the invitation here. I love your questions. I love your quest. Thriving on overload is important. My wife just finished writing a book Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. Your books are very allied, and we’ll probably see each other on the road on a book tour. Ross: Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much, Jerry. It’s been really insightful. I look forward to speaking again sometime for long. Jerry: Thank you very much. Ross: Take care. Thanks. The post Jerry Michalski on collecting, connecting, and curating two decades worth of information (Ep5) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“When you have a framework, you can plug things in, and the things that you plug in matter less than the framework.” – Tom Stewart About Tom Stewart On this episode we learn from Tom Stewart who’s had a far-ranging career immersed in information and ideas. After his early career in publishing, he became a journalist for Forbes magazine leading to his breakthrough book Intellectual Capital in 1997. He went on to become editor of Harvard Business Review for six years, and chief marketing officer of Booz & Company. He is now the Chief Knowledge Officer of AchieveNEXT. His most recent book is Woo, Wow, Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight. LinkedIn: Tom Stewart Twitter: @thomasastewart Books Woo, Wow, Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth Of Organizations The Wealth Of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization What you will learn How successful people stay on message (02:31) Why Tom is in love with big ideas (05:46) How he pioneered a new trend in book publishing. (08:37) How Tom got started writing about a new idea called intellectual capital (09:30) Why the value of information is in doing a Marie Kondo (10:41) The Michelin guide as an example on how big ideas frame smaller ones (12:16) The 3 kinds of thinking and why abductive thought leads to ideas (19:41) Speaking and debating is a way of processing information (24:09)  Peter Drucker learned by listening to himself (25:26) Routines and blocking time on the calendar (28:41) Writing isn’t always with a pen or keyboard (30:01) Filtering information is about going to the right person (32:42) How to thrive in a world drowning in information (36:15) Episode resources The Harvard Business Review The 8 Step Process For Leading Change – John Kotter Abductive Reasoning Fortune Magazine Marie Kondo The Michelin Guide Peter Drucker The Evelyn Wood Seven-Day Speed Reading and Learning Program by Stanley Frank Transcript Ross: Dawson: Tom, it’s an absolute delight to have you on the Thriving on Overload podcast. Tom Stewart: Ross, it has been far too long since we’ve seen each other face to face, although we’re not seeing each other face to face. So, pixel to pixel, I guess. But it’s wonderful to be here with you. I guess the last time you and I were together was in Manhattan, I think, somewhere in the West 20s. But I remember a lunch with you in Sydney Harbor a few years ago, that was one of the most perfect days and a perfect lunch. It’s good to see you again. Ross: Absolutely. Tom, you have thrived on information throughout your entire life. I first knew you as a journalist. Obviously, you’ve taken that far beyond that, editor at Harvard Business Review and many other roles. As a starting point, what is it that helps you frame what information is useful to you, is relevant to you, as something you should be paying attention to? What is the bigger frame or the purpose or the objectives or the expertise you’re trying to develop which helps you frame that? Tom: I remember seeing once the then CEO—I can’t remember which Houghton it was—who was the CEO of Corning, I was interviewing him at Fortune. It was one of the first CEO interviews I had at Fortune. I remember him sitting down at the interview and he had a piece of paper at his right hand. He wrote down three or four words on that piece of paper. Those were, I realized later, the three or four messages he wanted to work into whatever answers he was giving to my questions. I had a bunch of questions to ask; he had a bunch of themes he wanted to make sure were woven into that answer. I realized this was good media training on his part. I also realized later, when I read the work of John Kotter—now Emeritus as Harvard professor—who wrote a wonderful book called The General Managers, he shadowed a bunch of general managers and found what they did. He found that each of those successful general managers had three or four load stars, three or four issues, three or four things—like the things that Jamie Houghton had written down—that they attach their actions to. “I’m trying to drive the organization forward on these three areas. So, whatever you bring to me or whatever I read in the newspaper or whatever my customer says to me, whatever it is, I try to hang these things like baubles on a Christmas tree around these themes.” Now, I don’t know that I’m that way. Personally, when I got into the business of business, before I went to Fortune, I had been nearly 20 years in the book publishing business. I was an editor. I was commissioning books. If you asked me what kind of books I was the best editor for, I’m not sure I would have understood the question. I was a magpie. I like this, I like this, I like the other thing. A little, nagging voice kept telling me, “You really ought to focus.” Even though a good publisher’s list is eclectic and has many different books and different types on it, there would be some value if you were an expert in jazz, an expert in avant-garde fiction. An expert in something so that your expertise was a magnet that drew things to you and also that the magnetic energy went to and from, where you’re a part of that community. I never really did it. I never really did it in the book business, although willy-nilly some sort of things kind of happened. But what I did discover there was that I really was very good at getting excited by ideas. That idea, that sort of excitement at the idea—a cat with a new toy, a Tigger just swarming with energy around something—that excitement with a new idea is what has sort of framed me or what has inspired me. Now, that is like a cat with a new toy. That tends to be “now I’m bored, I’m going to go on to the next one.” That’s the pattern. The pattern is, is there an idea that has gotten me excited, that gives me some new way of interpreting all that stuff that I’m seeing? It’s some new Christmas tree on which to hang the things I say. Those ideas have changed over time. But it’s that desire to see, to make sense of things. It’s that desire to say, “Yes, that’s true because of this larger thing that is true,” and you can attach to that idea. That has helped me. I’m not sure it’s helped me decide what’s irrelevant, but it’s helped me decide what I’m going to focus my energy on. Ross: In a certain way, you’re starting from the excitement. If it excites you, that’s where you go. Perhaps later on, you can deconstruct what it is that excites you. Tom: Yes. What’s also interesting is that, these days, we get to call it mansplaining. But I have a deep drive, as I said, to try to make sense of things, to try to come up with an overarching theory. This is all part of a big picture in which we see X, Y, and Z. I’m intellectually most comfortable at 39,000 feet. So, the degree to which I can abstract things into principles and frameworks and ideas and so on and so forth, that’s where I’m excited. When you have a framework, you can plug things in, and the things that you plug in matter less than the framework. Ross: How do you go about building these frameworks? Tom: I don’t know. Years ago, when I was first at Fortune, Fortune had had a tradition of publishing a beginning of the year article that was like the most fascinating business people of whatever you’re at what. One year, Walter Kiechel, who was the deputy managing editor, and Marshall Loeb who was the managing editor, Walter persuaded Marshall to do fascinating ideas instead of fascinating people. That was for 1991, it was 30 years ago. I was relatively new at Fortune, but somehow my reputation as being this idea magpie had established. They came to me and said, “Would you work with Charlie Burke,” who was a senior editor, “and would you be the writer? They’ll be other writers, too.” We ended up with 20 short articles, and I wrote about 10 of them. That was actually where I first started writing about intellectual capital, that little piece, the lead piece in that packet was called “now, capital means brains, not bucks.” That got me into the whole intellectual capital area. But it was in there that I met a guy named Eli Noam. Eli was a professor at Columbia University, later went on to be a telecoms regulator for the state of New York. One of the things in this essay, in this package of essays, was a precious, little article that I wrote called Everything that Communicates Must Converge. At the time, this was this radical idea that if you can put it in ones and zeros all communication, a media blend, then they become this hyper media, this thing that we’re now kind of used to. Eli, it turned out, was somebody I read about. We got in touch, I went up to his office to interview him. He told me that we’d been college classmates, which neither of us had known at the time. Eli Noam said this gnomic thing to me, he said, “In a world of information overload, the value added is the information subtracted.” It’s your ability to do a sort of intellectual Marie Kondo and say, “This does not spark joy, I don’t need this. Get rid of this.” It’s the erosion of the crap and the remaining of whatever granite is there that is the more solid rock, that’s what reveals what’s important. Since I’ve never been particularly a detail-oriented person anyway, that idea resonated with me. “That’s great, none of these details matter, let’s just get the big picture,” that resonated with my personality. That was really how I started thinking about that. That’s on the one hand, this idea, the value added information is subtracted. Now, I’m sort of thinking aloud because there’s another hand. As I said, I like 39,000 feet, I like reasoning from the big picture down to how the big picture explains this detail. If you go and open up one of the classic Michelin Green Guides, the Green Guide to France, the Green Guide to a region of France, whatever it is, you will notice that those Green Guides all begin with geology. They begin with, “This is Tuscany, here is the geology.” They discuss the geology and the discuss the geography and they discuss the climate. They discuss all these other things, and then they work from there to the history. Then they work from there to go look at this Chateau, it’s a three-star Chateau, and here’s this amazing journey. There’s something about that that appeals to me. Here’s the big map, and then you can start locating this human activity, this CEO trying to do this with his company or her company. You can locate them on the map. It has an analogue—and I’m just realizing this right now, I have no idea if there’s intellectual kinship—this Michelin Green Guide framework has an analogue in the Annales historians’ work. If you take a look at the great work, for example, of Fernand Braudel who wrote this three-volume history of capitalism and also wrote a magnificent work called The Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a two-volume work, Braudel is the same kind of thing. In his case actually, he works the other way around. He does this history of capitalism, the first book, called The Structures of Everyday Life. But it’s farmers, nomads, how people actually live their ordinary lives. Then he puts businesses on top of that, and then he puts global enterprises on top of that in the sort of emergence of capitalism. But it’s the same sort of thing, let’s find this foundational stuff or this super structural stuff—depending on where you’re working—and then use that to explain what we see and to try to give it some sort of context. Ross: Probably the framework is, I suppose, from the fundamentals to the “what’s built on top of that,” as you’re describing the Michelin Guide. Part of, I think, the framework is around connections, what are the connections between the different elements, and often visualizing things as a tool to be able to do that. Do you ever describe some of these frameworks or use visual things, or do you map out connections? Is this all inside your mind, building these lattices of the underlying geology and geography of the domain and what lies on top of that? Tom: Well, I’m going to show you this—even though it won’t show up on the podcast. This is how I take notes, it’s indecipherable. Sometimes I number things, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Other times, I’m simply sort of randomly doing things. Here’s a more typical page, these are the notes from panel discussion we had. There’s some Roman numerals in there were I thought I identified some themes with it. Later on today actually, I have to write that up, take those for four Roman numerals, and turn them into prose. We had a lively discussion, and these were the four elements of things we talked about. But of course, this is pulling the other scattered pieces. The short answer your question is yes. I’ve never been a visual notetaker. I’m not one of these people who can draw cartoons on walls or anything like that. But what will happen to me in the course of a conversation or an interview or whatever is that a visualization will come to me. It’s very often a two by two. I have no idea why that is, maybe it’s from having spent half a dozen years in consulting; everything can be expressed as a two by two. But something like that will come to me. The other day, I was interviewing a wonderful guy named, Larry Inks, who’s on the faculty at the Business School at The Ohio State University. I was talking to Larry for my podcast, and we were talking about the questions of getting back to work or reorganizing the workplace, what do you want to do as you think about a COVID-infused world? Somehow, in the course of our conversation, something ended up being a two by three. But something came up and I said, “I picked up something I’ve read in HBR about. You need to think about three kinds of jobs, and then you need to think about short term and long term.” Three types of jobs, short term, long term—one, two, three—you’ve got a six-box matrix, and then within that you can start making a decision. So, that sort of thing happens to me, and I’m not quite sure why. At one point, I was thinking about the Episcopal Church, in the rite to confession, we have done those things that we ought not to have done, we failed to do. We’ve had sins of omission and sins of commission, we have not loved our God our whole hearts and our whole minds, and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. That’s a two by two, right? They’re sins of omission and sins of commission. Those two sins are not loving God and not loving our neighbor. You can set them up as a two by two. You could actually put that two by two up on the wall and you could say, “Let’s do a little self-inventory,” if one were congressionally-minded. I’m still sort of waiting for the priest to give a sermon to say, “Here’s a great way to organize your inventory of where you’ve gone wrong. You can just take it right here from the confession, put it up on a two by two, put it on a PowerPoint slide projector against the wall and think and repent. I don’t know why it happens, it just does. Ross: I think part of this process is that when we look at this idea of thriving and overload, I think many people are unaware of their own processes. That’s part of what we’re trying to do, is to unpick that, to take that to the next step. You talked about the sensemaking, you were talking about beginning to build these frameworks with these geologies and geographies, or matrices. What is then the process? Is it getting into a state of mind? Is it a way of thinking? Is it sort of being able to get other perspectives on what you’re doing? What, for you, is that process of being able to make sense to where the exciting idea becomes something which takes shape for you? Tom: When we were growing up, we were taught that there were two kinds of thinking: deductive and inductive. The deductive thinking was reasoning from the theory to the specific or drawing a conclusion from things that you saw. Inductive was sort of building it up from the bottom. It turns out, as I think we know—but I didn’t learn this until not many years ago—there’s this third thing which is called abductive. Abductive thinking is and in fact what we do when we think. We look at a bunch of stuff and we think, “I’ve got an idea. It’s the process of hypothesizing.” It’s the process of saying maybe this means X, which you then test. It’s that leap to an explanation. It turns out that that’s it’s a mystery of consciousness, and it’s critical. If you simply sit there inductively, you will be looking at all the grains of sand and never see the beach. If you simply look deductively, you’ll see the beach and never see that fantastic starfish right at your foot. But it’s that abductive thing. There’s some fascinating studies that were done by, I think, Antonio Damasio, who was a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. I think he might now be at NYU, but I’m not sure. He did some studies of people who had had damage to certain parts of their brain. One of the studies that I remember from one of his books they study, these people were given a deck of cards, and they put some galvanic sensors on their skin just so that they could get some sort of visceral response. They were given this deck of cards, I think they were supposed to turn cards until they saw something, and they were going to try to win whatever this game was. The way this thing worked was that the card game was rigged. There was a certain pattern. Once you detected the pattern, you could figure out how to win the game. They discovered that normal people would go along, and after ten or so cards they get a galvanic skin response. They get a spidey sense that something was going on, something intuitive. Then they would say, “I think that this is what’s going on,” and then they would change their behavior and they’d start winning the game. That was the normal response. But these people whose brain was damaged in an area where emotions could take place, they could go along, and some of them never saw the pattern at all. Some of them saw the pattern, but they had no galvanic skin response, so it didn’t affect them anywhere else than intellectually. Those who saw the pattern could not change their behavior, they would see this is what’s going on, but they still played the game in a way that guaranteed that they would lose. So, somewhere in there is this thing that there’s something that sparks—something that sparks it. I’ve never known for me what it is. I do have this ability, whatever it is, to connect A to M and Q to B. Although these things might be related, I don’t know why that is. A psychologist once told me that she thought I had an unusual ability to see connection—sometimes connections that weren’t even there—between the different pieces that might be lying on a table or on the blackboard in my mind. I will just sort of say, “Well, that’s connected to this,” or you can explain how these things might be connected. If that’s the case, then maybe you can connect other things to it. But I just don’t know the process. Ross: There’s no conditions, as in the state of mind, what you’re doing. Is there a particular time when you can? Tom: Sometimes, when I’m talking, this is actually true. When I was in high school, I was a high school debater. I was a very good one. I really liked it. What I learned in debate shaped me in two ways. Number one, almost everything I write, I’m trying to make a point. There may not be a plot, but there’s an argument. We’re trying to get to something. The idea of marshalling evidence in support of any idea is my intellectual framework, partly because of that. It also convinced me that debate as a technique is a really good way of exposing falsehood, but not a very good way of finding truth; that winning an argument is not the same thing as finding. I had to reframe my head as I got into college saying, “No, wait a minute, just because you won the argument doesn’t mean you were right.” So, I had to think about that. But it is true that the act of speaking, for me, is a way of connecting things and finding frameworks. Finding something to complete the sentence I just began may cause me to reach back into my memory or just something else that somebody told me, and it does this. This reminds me of a funny story. I’m not going to compare myself to Peter Drucker, but many years ago Warren Bennis, the great management writer and thinker, went around and talked to people about how they learned. He talked to various of his peers. I don’t know if you ever met Peter Drucker, but he was a journalist’s dream or nightmare. Because with Peter Drucker, you never had to ask more than one question. You would say, “Peter, how’s the weather?” He would go on and he would give you this extraordinary answer, and it was kind of wonderful. So, Warren goes around, he’s asking all kinds of people, “How do you learn?” He goes to Drucker and he says, “Peter, how did you learn?” Drucker says, in his Austrian accent, “I learn by listening… to myself.” In a sense, that is it. I found that, as a journalist, I could go out and talk to all these people, but it was the act of having to write it down where the learning took place. I didn’t learn from the listening, I learned from the writing. I think it’s the act of trying to turn all this stuff into a simple, declarative sentence, or a complex sentence, that generates the connection and the framing and the learning. Ross: Absolutely. I’m a deep believer that teaching in dialogue and conversation are a large part of how you frame things for yourselves. To be frank, I learned by listening to myself when I’m talking to people. Tom: When I was a kid, like everybody else, I wanted to grow up to be either a doctor or a scientist or something like this. Then I realized that I never felt that I learned very much in labs. I felt that I learned more in lectures, but the labs might give me stuff that I could attach to what I learned in the lecture. My learning took place at that abstracted level. I was not very good at looking at that annelid worm and figuring out everything that you could figure at that level. But tell me about the annelid worm and then I could say, “Yes, I see it here.” That makes me ask a question. I could then ask a sharp question about it and go further, but I needed some abductive leap before I could get back down into the detail. Ross: Taking just a bit of a hop to filtering. You have access to any number of potential sources of information, how do you select your sources? Do you have any structure to that? How you select your sources and inputs? Do you have an information routine, and how does that go? How is that structured? Tom: I’m intellectually most energetic in the morning. I’m intellectually most vibrant in the morning. If I have my dream day, I pour myself a couple of cups of coffee, do some warm up exercises on the keyboard, which is to say get rid of the easiest email to get rid of, and then dive into whatever serious project I’m working on. I can give it a good solid couple of hours before I start petering off into distraction and a lack of energy. That’s my dream day. In reality, it’s more chaotic because three days a week we have a morning team huddle that goes from 8:30 to 9:00. There’s the email and something urgent comes up, and one is distracted from it. What I’ve had to do is I’ve blocked time on my calendar writing projects or other projects, and I just block. I try to create spaces where I do that. Now, even then, I have found that when I’m working on something, I need that warm up time. I was at Fortune and what would happen is you’d go out report, report, report, report. You’d read, you talk to people, and then you’d have the week when you were writing. When I was there, we all wrote from offices, which was kind of nice. The offices had this long corridor inside our 1271 6th Avenue Rockefeller Center that was dimly lit. They’re canister lights on this dim corridor. I remember I’d be writing along and then you’d sort of hit some roadblock. You know how this works, you have to stand up, you take a walk. Apparently, there’s actually neuroscientific reasons for this, that by standing up and taking the walk you ignite other parts of your brain that have been tied up so new things happen. One time I’m walking a counter clockwise around the office and I see Andy Kupfer, and he’s walking clockwise around the office. At the second time I passed him I said, “Writing?” He said, “Yeah.” Then we tread back to our office. But when I’m actually in the middle of writing—aka, thinking—I still need to do that warm up. The metaphor I sometimes thought of is it’s like a potter with a bunch of clay, you got to get it working. I would sit down and fiddle and edit. I’ll go over what I wrote yesterday, I’ll start rewriting it. Only after I’ve been doing some stuff there could I begin to push it forward. I’ve sort of intellectually procrastinated and edited and polished long enough, “Back to the coalface, Tom. Push it forward.” When that would go on, things would happen in the process of that. You’d sort of say, “I got an idea,” or you’d stand up and you believe. I will be going to the subway and say, “Oh, that’s the idea” I started keeping, before we had telephones, little pieces of paper, so that if something occurred to me I could write it down. Sometimes, once or twice, I even wrote it down on my hand, “This is the solution to that problem.” I would keep it so that I wouldn’t lose it like a dream when I got back to the coalface the next day. Ross: What sources of information do you go to? Do you tend to go to primary sources—in particular, publications? Do you use social filtering or aggregators? Where do you find the information that keeps you across what’s going on in the world? Tom: I pull on string and keep pulling. I don’t rely on aggregators. There’s Wall Street Journal and Financial Times news summaries that come and a couple of other things that come that I look at. I’m checking a couple of newspapers regularly. But mostly, when I have an idea that I’m pursuing, I will sort of see who or what I already know, I can talk to about it. The other day, I was having a conversation with Russell Kline, who is the CEO of the American Marketing Association, whom I met when I was at Ohio State because he’s a big Buckeye and he was a loyal alumnus. We got to know each other and we became pals. I was talking to him about an article that I’m working on, about the effect of pandemic disruptions on customer loyalty, and I was asking him for his ideas. I said, “Who else do you know?” He gave me the name of a couple of people who he thought were doing some interesting work on that. One of my jobs today is to send them a reminder email, “I just sent you a note, can we talk? I’m working on this.” I’ll talk to them, and they’ll lead me to somebody else. Because those two are both professors, I will say, “Do you have any examples of stories?’ They’ll give me a story. So, that’s usually the way it was. When I was at Fortune, consultants were always really great because they had a financial dog in the hunt. They wanted to talk to Fortune because they wanted to be quoted in Fortune because it might be worth business to them. So, they would always pick up the phone. They were an easy get. They would give you smart ideas, smart frameworks—of course, they had a vested interest. Then I’d say, “Do you have any clients?” “Well, I can’t talk about my clients.” “Well, can you talk to your clients and can you ask them if they’d like to talk? Because I need stories.” I always find that if I’m getting passionate about something, what happens is there’s a moment. First it’s a fog, then you’re really talking about great stuff. There’s a moment when I get distracted by a rabbit hole. When I know that I’m about done is when there’s this tiny, little byway and sideway that I’m so interested in. I’ll go down and say, “Back up, that’s too small. Nobody’s interested in that.” That’s when I would know I was complete, or as complete as journalism ever gets. When I would start going from the arteries, to the to the capillaries, to the tiniest capillaries, I get back to the arterial flow. That’s where you need to be. It’s sort of that process. Ross: People at the heart of it, which I think is classically the great source. As an information master, having been awash with information and synthesizing and pulling together and being able to convey these ideas, is there anything else to share in terms of insights or advice or prescriptions or proscriptions on how to thrive in a world awash with information? Tom: Quoting a guy named Christopher Locke, we were talking about information overload, and he called it infoglut. I got a note—I’m not sure whether it’s an email or an actual letter—a few days after this article that I wrote appeared from somebody whose name I’ve forgotten. It said, “The solution here is that you need to be able to read more and read longer,” that this is a physical fitness problem. It’s not that information overload, it’s just that you are not fit enough He had developed, he said, a series of eye exercises that you could use. He said the problem is you get fatigued because the muscles that move your eyeballs get tired. I rolled my eyeballs and ignored him. He actually sent me some floppy disks—if you remember floppy disks—that revealed these exercises. This reminded me of something that I did when I was 12 or 13 years old. There was a woman named Evelyn Wood, who had something that she would call dynamic reading, but it’s all Evelyn Wood speed reading. It was a technique for reading a page, by scanning rather than reading, that will allow you to read at a much faster pace. This idea that the way to cope with information overload is to be the fastest hamster in the wheel it out there. Ultimately, it’s self-defeating. Ultimately, we’re creating more terabytes of information every day, you’re going to get drowned by it. I think that the one piece of advice I would give is get off the wheel. It’s to say you can’t possibly keep up. These tools that we have, the tools that create this tsunami of information coming out complete with all the garbage—the telephone poles, the trucks, that dirty dinner dishes that it sweeps up—create the ability to instead of waiting for it to overwhelm you, give you the ability to fish for what you need. Rather than let it overwhelm you, think “I am looking for X.” Be a hunter, don’t be overwhelmed. Instead, use it to search rather than have it sweep over you. Ross: Take control rather than be controlled. Tom: That sort of means you need to know what you’re trying to do. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there, and you will get lost on the information superhighway—to continue that metaphor. But if you do know where you want to go, or if you have an idea, “This is kind of what I’m interested in, I want to think about this topic,” then these very tools that would otherwise overwhelm you will actually allow you to get this stuff. I don’t want to say take control because I don’t think you can. But at least you can start shaping what you’re seeing and bring it to a manageable universe of relevance, and you can then start working through that to find what you need to find and to do what you need to do. Ross: Absolutely. That’s probably a good note to end on. Thank you so much for your insights, Tom, some great stories and great insights from everything you do. Wonderful to have you on the show, Tom, and look forward to catching up with you again before too long. Tom: Thank you, Ross. Ross: Take care. The post Tom Stewart on the excitement of ideas, building overarching theories, abductive reasoning, applying Marie Kondo to information, and getting off the hamster wheel (Ep4) appeared first on Humans + AI.