Quality and Innovation

Eric Frazier of the Charlotte Observer told the story of Alyssa Rushing this week – a 20 year old student at the University of South Carolina whose mother has offered her $300 to “detox from Facebook” for a month. Alyssa’s mother, Melynda, wanted her daughter to focus on studying instead of social media – and viewed the challenge as a way to help Alyssa recoup the time she was wasting online:

Her mom, with just 40 Facebook friends, said she got on the network solely because she wanted to keep up with her children on it. Her idea for the $300 challenge came from her own past. As a busy mom trying to raise children, she once swore off TV and gained extra time to get things done.

She’s sure the same will be true for her daughter, especially given how distracting Facebook can be.

Next Tuesday, we’ll know if Alyssa was able to meet the challenge, because her month will be up. The question that I’m most interested in, though, is whether the one month pay-for-performance will lead to any long-term shifts in behavior. For a change to be permanent, the motivation must come from within. Although external motivators (like $300) might provide the impetus to get off Facebook now, what happens when the cash is no longer flowing? In 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported a higher success rate among smokers who were paid to quit, versus those who were not. However, there are no long-term indicators available. And besides, research shows that carrots and sticks don’t always work, anyway.

When I did my 42-day social media detox in the summer of 2010, all I was looking for was relief from the incessant online chatter – the anxiety and exhaustion that came from being frenetically, perpetually, and continuously distracted by status updates. As I peeled back the layers covering my anxiety, I realized there was a whole Pandora’s box of twisted emotions and my online habits were actually distracting me from dealing with the real issues all around me.

I check Facebook and other social media much less now – but my motivation is purely intrinsic: if I don’t keep a healthy distance, the anxiety will start to enshroud me again, and who knows where I’ll end up then. For me, it’s a matter of preserving mental and emotional happiness.

It’s kind of like dealing with an eating disorder. You can’t exactly swear off food since you need to eat to live – you just need to set very good boundaries detailing how you interact with food, and avoid putting yourself in situations that will threaten your health and well-being.

The game is all about devising effective structures to help you deal with your obsessions. And I think this is a huge issue for ensuring your own quality of life – at least in the very personal world inside your head.

I think every blog has at least one post that says “sorry I haven’t posted in a while.”

Today is that day for me. I started professor-ing in August and have been on the Manager’s Schedule (huh? what does that mean? — see http://qualityandinnovation.com/2009/08/14/makers-meeting-managers-meeting) ever since. By the time I get to Maker’s time, which is where I think about the things I see in journals and newspapers, I’ve been pretty worn out. I realized that effectively managing your Manager’s time is the key to getting Maker’s time. If there’s too much physical time or physical energy wrapped up in the Manager’s Schedule, just stop right there – don’t even plan to get any creative work done. When you sit down for your “planned Maker’s time”, if your body is weary, your soul is just going to want to sip on coffee and surf the net.

I will need to take a much more disciplined approach to my creative time if I’m going to produce any useful output. (Valdis, that means MoC!)

Point 1: Transparency in business and in government means that you know what’s going on (or can find out). You have access to information about the organization’s processes and results, it is clearly presented, and it is understandable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand accountability when transparency does not exist. In the emerging ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility, both transparency and accountability are important.

Point 2: In data management, we struggle with the concept of provenance: how to track what happened to your data at every step of its journey – from being collected, to being operated upon by a host of processes and algorithms, to being evaluated, analyzed and visualized.

McClatchy reports today that the U.S. government is having problems with both. In “Where did that bank bailout go? Watchdogs aren’t entirely sure”, Chris Adams describes the murkiness of the issue:

Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation’s financial sector, it’s still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Despite a new oversight panel, a new special inspector general, the existing Government Accountability Office and eight other inspectors general, those charged with minding the store say they don’t have all the weapons they need. Ten months into the Troubled Asset Relief Program, some members of Congress say that some oversight of bailout dollars has been so lacking that it’s essentially worthless.

Bottom line: achieving transparency requires successfully managing provenance. But in the case of the bailout, are transparency problems an information technology issue, or a policy issue?

Warning: This post contains wild, imaginative speculation which I considered (nonetheless) pretty fun.

I was reading yesterday about autocatalytic sets – described, on Wikipedia, as “a collection of entities, each of which can be created catalytically as a whole is said to be autocatalytic.” by other entities within the set, such that as a whole, the set is able to catalyze its own production. In this way the set The example given in yesterday’s reading was the egg – an egg can produce a chicken, which is then in the business of producing more eggs. The “chicken and egg” problem is thus embodied by the notion of the autocatalytic set.

Today, I picked up my local vegetable share which had a whole bunch of strawberries in it. I cleaned them, cut the green tops off, and sliced them each in two or three parts. And then, when I was about to pop one in my mouth – I saw it. Not a tasty strawberry, but an autocatalytic set. The seeds on the outside of the strawberry are in the business of making more strawberries, which are in the business of making more strawberries, and so on and so forth.

And then I wondered: if that little seed is where thousands of generations of strawberries are destined to come from, is a single atom eventually to be the source of a future solar system? Now: re-read the first line of this post.

I’m out in Colorado this week working with the NEON cyberinfrastructure team to put together presentation material for a big review meeting they’re having in June. It’s a challenging project, chock full of interesting and complex envisioned science experiments, elaborate engineering to design, construct and collect data from sensors scattered all over the country (and even airplanes), and the need for a high-performance interconnected software and hardware architecture to keep it together and maintain the data flow.

In short, it’s a hugely complex project – and for these presentations in June, we may only have an hour to condense all that technical information down into something understandable, well-organized, and compelling. How do we do it?

The answer: using effective storytelling. Quite randomly and serendipitously, I ran into a blog post by Chris Spagnuolo this morning (Twitter: @ChrisSpagnuolo) called “12 Things I learned from Story Time”. Apparently he went to the library recently with his 3 year old, and while listening to the story and observing the behavior of the children and the storyteller, extracted lessons for professional presentations. (I have a 3 year old too, so this post really connected with me!) Here’s a snippet of his insight into how to give a high quality presentation:

Ah, the expert mind…it always convinces us that we can’t learn from “simple” experiences. But after it was over, and I reflected a bit on Story Time, I realized that there were valuable lessons to take away from it that we can all use in our presentations. Believe it or not, librarians and others who read to children at Story Time may be some of the best presenters in the world, and we’ll never see them on TED or hear much about them (plus they have some of the toughest audiences in the world). If you really want to get your presentation game on, maybe you should start reading books to the itty-bitties at your local library.

I’ll encourage you to click through to read the 12 lessons. The suggestions complement Stephen Denning’s insights into storytelling as a leadership tool as well. Thanks for sharing, Chris.

According to some researchers, it’s the end of the world as we know it – sometime this century, in fact. Economists and policy researchers have actually envisioned it coming for about three centuries, though.

The most recent tap on this subject came on March 7, 2009, when journalist and Hot, Flat, and Crowded author Thomas L. Friedman published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, entitled “Is the Inflection Near?” He describes how the economic, financial and political systems that we have established in the world – particularly in the west – are inherently unsustainable, and that in order to achieve a truly green world, our fundamental systems for living life must shift:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

We can’t do this anymore.

What would you think if I told you that this was actually not a new idea, and that the notions Friedman presents were determined by a simulation done over thirty-five years ago? Furthermore, what if I let you in on the fact that people have been thinking about this conundrum since the late 1700′s? It may sound outlandish, but in this case, truth is stranger than fiction.

The simulation that I refer to was done in 1972, with a model called World3 which was coded in the object-oriented Modelica environment. It’s the subject of the Club of Rome commissioned study called “The Limits to Growth” (full text is here). Although the model has received criticism for some of its assumptions, a redaction in 2002 upheld many of the outcomes of the model. In 2009, Dr. Dennis L. Meadows (who directed this research) was awarded the 25th Japan Prize from The Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. Recall that the Japanese were the ones who initially recognized Dr. W. Edwards Deming for his contributions to revitalizing the economy – decades before the Americans embraced Deming’s teachings – and spawned the quality revolution in U.S. business in the late 1970′s and 1980′s that has embossed the landscape of how we do business today. From the Japan Prize announcement:

Dr. Dennis L. Meadows served as Research Director for the project on “The Limits to Growth,” for the Club of Rome in 1972. Employing a system simulation model called “World3,” his report demonstrated that if certain limiting factors of the earth’s physical capacity – such as resources, the environment, and land – are not recognized, mankind will soon find itself in a dangerous situation. The conflict between the limited capacity of the earth and the expansion of the population accompanied by economic growth could lead to general societal collapse. The report said that to avert this outcome, it is necessary that the goals of zero population growth and zero expansion in use of materials be attained as soon as possible. The report had an enormous impact on a world that had continued to grow both economically and in population since World War II.

We also have a rich literature dating back centuries that has studied the relationships between population, environment and technology. In the 1700′s, English economist Thomas Robert Malthus studied these relationships in terms of the projected effects of uncontrolled population growth. “Before Malthus, populations were considered to be an asset. After Malthus, the concept of land acquisition to support “future large populations” became a motivating factor for war.” (citation) The 20th century Boserupian Theory of Ester Boserup, in contrast, suggests that advances in technology will drive the capacity of the world to support population. Researchers like Steinmann & Komlos (1988) have simulated the interplay between both paradigms over time and suggest that there is a cyclical dominance. (I note that references to Malthus and Boserup, let alone Meadows’ World3 model, are rarely on the lips of policymakers.)

In my opinion, it is not climate change we should be worried about per se, but the social, economic and global political system that drives human interactions with each other and with the environment. Climate change may be a symptom, but it is just a tracer for the attitudes of unbounded material growth that are contributing to the effects (if you want to learn about climate change and policy, Prometheus is a good place to start – my point is not to argue the merits of “is it” or “isn’t it” happening because others including Pielke, Jr. do that very well). Regarding climate change, we need to decode what the data is trying to tell us about how we’ve structured our large-scale systems of interaction with one another – rather than merely trying to control our personal “carbon footprints” or recycle more (though these may be important ingredients in the solution).

There is nothing new under the sun. Only today, the forces of production, consumption and population have metamorphosed into a crisis of sustainability – a “perfect storm” to test our ability to live and work in the limit case.

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Steinmann, Gunter & Komlos, John (1988). Population growth and economic development in the very long run: a simulation model of three revolutions. Mathematical Social Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 1, Aug 1988. 49-63 pp. Amsterdam, Netherlands.