Author: Scott Berkun

Open letter to college graduates

Posted on in open letter, Philosophy, rantby Scott Berkun

Dear college graduates:

I will share what no one told me when I graduated: live for yourself. Do not make life choices based on what parents, girlfriends, boyfriends or buddies will judge you for doing or not doing. Be wary of people who tell you about regrets – they are projecting theirs onto you. At 21 it is far harder to figure out how to live for yourself than you think. You probably haven’t yet discovered that you don’t know who you are.

Eventually you may find living for yourself hinges on living with and for others, but you’ll need to live for yourself first to find that out. Spend an hour a day believing nothing – it will be good for you. Some of the best things about college are what you unlearn.

Make bets. For every day since you entered kindergarten there have been safe choices waiting for you. Go to elementary school. Go to high school. Go to college. You’ve done all the safe choices already. Don’t die with a headstone that merely says “was safe”. Make some bets. Expect to lose some, and be open to surprise about which ones. Your profit in all outcomes will be to figure out who you are. If  you were good at playing it safe, your mistakes and failures will be the first things in your life that are truly your own.

Move. Escape your house / town / state / country for a time. Every year that goes by in a career makes it harder to ever wander again. Work as hard as you have to, doing shit jobs, if it lets you get out of your hometown. See something else. Don’t complain about your old stomping ground as if it were the world. You’re still a kid – go see something before you decide anything. If you go somewhere you hate, you can always move somewhere else. That’s the upside of learning how to move.

Stay in touch. The surprise of my degree was  the people I met – my education could have been obtained elsewhere, but the collection of insane and wonderful people I met would be hard to replicate, many of whom I’m friends with today. Had I been less of a fool, I’d have stayed connected to more of them. Don’t be shallow – don’t use people. But do stay connected with the people you have bonds with. You’ll lose most,  but you can help pick which ones you’ll keep.

Accept the Paradox. The confusion you feel about what to do or where to go may never leave you, and that’s OK. Don’t wait around expecting it to resolve itself. Graduation does not guarantee clarity. Most people twice your age don’t know what to do with their lives either – why believe you should have it all figured out now? Certainly try, but know the odds. Make commitments and work for goals, but never believe their utility is persistent or guaranteed.

Believe in work. All things equal, those who put more in, get more out. If you can’t find the job you want, make it. Do it for free, and do it better, and you’ll find someone who will hire you.  It may not be easy to get what you want, but if you swallow your pride and put in more passion than the slackers, you’ll be rewarded. Not by the universe, but by your self-respect.

Best wishes.

Movie Review: Winters Bone

Posted on in movies, Recommendedby Scott Berkun

There’s something captivating about movies where you don’t know all the rules, but care to stick around to find out. This is why I like some foreign films, the ones that aren’t too weird, in that they grab your attention and mind in ways American films rarely do. They are actual artifacts of drama, instead of exercises in  “guess which cliché will happen next”.

Winter’s bone is about a young woman in Missouri who, to save her family, has to take on many hardships and risks. And at its core as a quest driven narrative it works well. But what makes the movie so engaging is how it captures the sense of a place, and a people. All of the characters feel like a part of the world being filmed (and it turns out, many of them are locals), and there’s a patience to the dialog and the plotting that lets the fears of this world, and the questionable nature of the characters, stand in relief.

It’s not an easy film to watch – but it is a fantastic and heroic film.

Watch on Netflix, imdb listing here.

How to ruin a design: the 9/11 Memorial

Posted on in Creative Thinking, design, Managementby Scott Berkun

Update:  After a great comment, I changed my opinion about this.

I rarely use the word requirement – it’s a weenie word. But I know if you royally screw up requirements, regardless of what you call them, no designer’s power can save you. Case in point: this story about the design of the 9/11 Memorial in NYC.

The specific problem in question was how to organize the names of all those who died:

In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg… suggested that people be loosely grouped according to their location that day. And so Arad [the architect] created nine categories. Around the south pool, he’d list everyone who died in the South Tower and at the Pentagon, along with the first responders and the passengers on Flights 175, 77, and 93. Around the north pool would be those who died in the North Tower and on the plane that crashed into it, along with the six who died in the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993.

As is often the case, it’s an executive who issues the problematic requirement, unchallenged by more practical minds, that sends the project into a tailspin.

Chronological is what worked well for the Vietnam memorial (and many others). But they passed on that. So alphabetical perhaps? Noooooo. Too easy. Perhaps by specific incident (Tower 1, Tower 2, Pentagon, etc.)? That’s where they started, but that was too simple  – here’s what they did instead:

But how to group these? Arad and Daniels settled on the idea of a distribution that would seem random, reflecting the chaotic and arbitrary nature of the event itself, but that would have some kind of underlying logic, reflecting the bonds that preceded or came of it. “One of the biggest messages of the memorial and the museum is that the people who got up and did whatever they did that morning, and then died doing it, were no different from the rest of us,” Daniels said. “They were us, we are them.” In 2009, the foundation sent out letters to the victims’ families, soliciting “meaningful adjacencies”—that is, the names of others with whom each victim should be listed.

Random, as a goal? Really? And getting everyone involved in creating requirements? Can you see where this is going?

By the end of that year, the foundation had received twelve hundred requests for adjacencies (and these didn’t include the self-contained adjacencies, such as, say, Ladder Company 7 or Cantor Fitzgerald, which, with six hundred and fifty-eight names, represented the biggest, and most challenging, adjacency block of them all) The reasons for these requests were varied. Sometimes the victims were cohorts, or best friends. In other cases, the families knew, from last phone calls, whom their loved ones had been with in the end—in an elevator, on a ledge—and wanted those people listed together. A same-sex couple and their three-year-old son all perished on Flight 175; their names, certainly, belonged together.

These are moving stories of course. And stories that should be shared. But why did these stories need to define the design of something as simple as a name list? On a project that’s been delayed for nearly a decade? Every other war memorial in the history, including the great ones, didn’t need to go this far.

At this point it was probably too late to simplify, as all the victims had already made their requests. How could they be turned away? But as any good designer knows, if it’s this hard to figure out or explain, odds are no one who visits the place will make sense of it either. But they pressed on:

At a certain point, the foundation recognized that this job could use the assistance of a computer. Even so, the first few computer scientists and statisticians the foundation got in touch with said that it couldn’t be done. “It really did seem insurmountable,” Daniels recalled. But then his chief of staff called Jake Barton, the principal at the media-design firm Local Projects, who took on the assignment, and, with a data artist named Jer Thorp, designed an algorithm that could sort the names in keeping with all the overlapping requests. Before long, they had a distribution designed to please everyone, including Arad.

I’m certain many families would be better honored by finishing the memorial sooner, and making it a welcoming and calming place for all visitors, rather than the micro details of how exactly names are grouped, or not.

I haven’t seen the latest plans for the complete memorial, and I admit the entire experience is unlikely to be ruined by this small set of issues. But I’m also confident the time spent overthinking the list of names earned much more effort than it was worth.

Requirements is a maligned word among designers, but for anyone who sees my point – pick up a copy of the wonderfully potent Exploring Requirements by Weinberg. It will forever improve how you think about problems, designs and working with clients through them both. Had Bloomberg or Arad read it, it would have saved all the victims and NYC much wasted time.

Why you get ideas in the shower

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovationby Scott Berkun

[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity]

When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things. Recently I was forwarded a link to AquaNotes, a waterproof notepad you can put in your shower. I’ve never used one, but I can tell you the science behind why people get ideas in the shower.

Technically we get ideas all the time – that’s what it means to be conscious. It’s quite hard to stop thinking, as anyone who has tried to practice meditation can tell you. Our brains are idea generating machines. Most of our ideas and thoughts might not be Eureka-worthy but that’s more a matter of how we evaluate an idea than whether we have them all the time or not.

More germane to showers, much of who we are is driven by our subconscious, far more than our rational higher brains like to admit. We also know our dreams, which are owned and operated by our subconscious, can be incredibly creative.  It’s our subconscious mind that is the best at finding associations between concepts, something our more logical, and dominant, frontal cortex isn’t very famous for.

The rub is that these busy days in modern times we are bombarded with information, forcing our brains to take more defense postures to the world, and conscious mind dominates. Which means it’s only when we have quiet time, going for a walk, getting some exercise, or taking a shower, that our conscious minds quiet down enough for our subconscious to be heard. And that’s why you get ideas in the shower. You’ll find many creative people have dedicated time for being “idle”. Going for walks, exercising at the gym, or even sitting in a park watching people walk by. Making time to let minds wander is an important part of working with ideas for a living.

Scientist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known for his definitive work on Flow, refers to the time where we allow our subconscious to work as Incubation. This is time away from the work itself where our subconscious minds are free to work on our behalf and deliver ideas back to our conscious minds. It’s a necessary part of the creative process, and it can only happen after we’ve thought enough about a problem to exhaust our more rational explorations and choose to put the challenge aside for a time.

Today we have fewer places in our lives where we are not bombarded by incoming information. For some people it’s yoga, going for a run, or going for a walk that quiets the conscious mind down enough for the sub-conscious to speak up. For other people it’s driving in the car. Everyone’s psychology is different and will relax in different environments, or at different times. The start of being serious about your own creativity is paying attention to when and where you feel creative.

Of course, there are other ways to engage the natural creativity of your subconscious. Taking an improv theater class is all about learning simple games that quiet your conscious brain, and let your creative instincts come through. Waking up early, staying up late, having beers with friends, all shift how your attention works and might provide the best kind of environment for you. Simply changing your habits alone can stimulate new questions and ways of thinking. Lastly, there are drugs and alcohol, substances artists have used for centuries to shift their thinking and allow other parts of the mind to have center stage. Don’t kid yourself: the caffeine in your coffee does all kinds of things to how your brain functions.

But part of the mythology around ideas and showers is somehow a truly great idea will, on its own, make you rich and change the world, a fantasy I can promise has never happened. Ideas are easy to find once you understand the basics of how they work (See ideas are made of other ideas). But it’s always what you do with your ideas after you get them that matters. And perhaps this Aquanote gimmick, which lets you leave the shower with the idea in your hand, isn’t such a silly idea after all.

Want more specific creativity advice? Check out the rest of  the Dance of The Possible.

 

Quote of the month

Posted on in Creative Thinking, quote of the xby Scott Berkun

From an interesting series in The Atlantic on first drafts, and creativity:

After the first pass, the painting is wrong—at least in that it’s not complete yet. Because it’s a face, I can’t leave it turquoise, I can’t leave it purple. I love having rights and wrongs. You have to hang in there until you get it to read correctly. I just work intuitively and start making corrections. The colors combine like words into a sentence, or notes into a chord. Then I’ll rotate the painting so that a different axis is up. That allows me to reanalyze all the shapes and colors. The system seems totally mechanical and so systematized, but in fact the thing about limitations like these is that they free you to be more spontaneous and intuitive. The painting is always in a state of flux.

-Chuck Close, as told to Alex Hoyt for The Atlantic

Theres an interview with Close and singer Paul Simon here.

The series includes short articles on creative process by Paul Simon, Frank Gehry, T.C. Boyle and more.

How To Fix Email: A Radical Proposal

Posted on in Culture, designby Scott Berkun

Professor Beth Kollo has an interesting idea about our email dominated culture, in a post called Recreating Email. What if we changed a basic rule about how it works to give us back more control? Why do we assume it has to work the way it has? She offers:

…email isn’t an ‘it.’ It’s a technological system, built by people, and it can be changed! It can! It can have different kinds of functionality. Someone at some point decided email should be able to be formatted like word processors — so now we have bold,italics, etc. So let’s be creative about what’s possible with email — and what we could make impossible if we wanted.

I dig it. Beth believes, as I do, that technology encodes values.  A speedometer that goes up to 150 when the speed limit is 60 suggests a value different from the values of the law. Just as a 140 character text limit suggests values about what can or should be said. So there are dangerous assumptions are encoded in the design of email, and we might need a redesign to fix them.

Here’s her specific proposal for fixing email:

Here’s how it works: Email servers that service workplaces with actual working hours are configured so that individual users can write as much email as they want, but the server will only deliver email between 8 am and 6 pm. And only Monday through Friday. And not on holidays. That’s the default setting. An individual employee doesn’t configure it to do things this way. It’s the default. This is key. Because defaults telegraph the institution’s expectations. Defaults establish the boundaries of accepted and expected behavior.

So email only gets delivered during work hours. But let’s say I have a couple close colleagues with whom I collaborate, and I want to be able to reach them at any time. In order to do that, I have to ask their permission, a kind of friend request. And they have to agree. It’s a two-way handshake, like a pgp key. And it expires quarterly.

Interesting. I like the idea that there are boundaries for email. But I don’t like that the organization is going to set them for everyone. First, maybe some employees are most productive at night (I often am). The defaults here make it hard for them to be effective. Second, putting rules like these in place makes it easy for other rules to follow (length limits? Emails per day?), and I don’t like the idea of my employer dictating to me, or anyone, how to be effective. I suppose if it’s all optional, and these are just defaults that’s one thing, but IT departments tend to be heavy handed with rules and such.

I’d much rather see organizations evaluating me for my performance, but not restricting me to what means I can use to perform. Perhaps they can offer training, or provide tools I can choose to use like Rescue Time that help me get regular feedback on how I can manage my time, and my email usage.  It’s embarrassing how little Outlook, gmail and Thunderbird do to teach good email and information overload management tactics (they do almost nothing).

But I do like the spirit of Beth’s point: email has a design. How can we change the design of email, and email applications, to better serve us?

New update on the next book

Posted on in Books, Mindfireby Scott Berkun

After a pre-spring hiatus, things are rolling again on book #4.  First update on the book is here, and then weeks ago I let you all vote – here are the results:

As you can see 14% of you chose to take things into your own hands, and offered a write-in vote for the title. Since you took the time, I did read them all and they’re listed here:

  • Big ideas for curious minds
  • Intelligent Provocations: Big ideas for curious minds
  • Idea Inferno
  • Provoke the Mind; Idea Punk; On all Cylinders; Ignite your Mind; Idea Science;
  • Provocative Ideas for Curious Minds
  • The no BS guide to…
  • Making Scott Talk
  • Provocateurs: Reclaiming curiosity
  • Flame On! Ignite Your Mind
  • Intelligent Provocations: How to communicate big ideas to the masses
  • Because! (and other answers)
  • The Power of Serendipity
  • Ponder this: Intelligent provocations for curious
  • Provocative Ideas, Curious Minds
  • Advanced Trolling: Intelligent provocations for curious minds
  • A Mind’s Eye: my thoughts light fires in your cities
  • With Provocation: Challenge Everything
  • Ideas of a curious mind
  • The Berkun Blaze: Hot Ideas to Set Your Mind on Fire
  • Berkun Bag of Big Ideas
  • Fear me?
  • Steal this idea
  • Curious Minds Always Have Big Ideas
  • Its All About the Money
  • Poke your Brain with a Stick
  • Intelligent Provocations: non-polarized explosive thoughts
  • spark to inferno: ideas to set your mind on fire
  • The firebrand for your mind
  • only ok – tried playing off synonym of Confession?
  • Scott Berkun: Intelligent Provocateur
  • In Summation
  • Your Mind on Fire: Big ideas for curious minds
  • ______ : Big ideas for curious minds
  • Arguendo: Intelligence, Provoked
  • Pyrobrainiac: Set your mind on fire
  • Questionable difficulty
  • Provocative Intelligence
  • Minds on Fire: Big ideas to challenge how you think
  • Provocation: Challenging ideas for curious minds

My team of Tim Kordik and Krista Stevens will have another update soon. Stay tuned.

Innovation by Death: A Theory

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

One point from the often referenced, but rarely read, Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn, is true revolutionary progress happens only when a generation dies. That’s right – death drives change. Kuhn mentions this point, but also debates it, and I likely put more faith in it than he did.

Consider how every group of people, from corporations, to universities to families, has a rank of leaders who are the old guard. Having been successful, they have much to lose by adopting change. And even the minority who are hungry and seek change, they are informed by sensibilities of the past, not the future. Their very existence in leadership roles prohibits the next generation, and the ideas of the next generation, from seeing the light of day.  If change is their ultimate goal, it’s likely best served by them quitting and letting the new guard take over.

Kuhn uses examples from of science, and the assumption scientists revel in change. He points out how powerful deans at the great colleges, peer journal reviewers, and the grant providers, all have their guarded theories and philosophies they will defend, literally, to their death. It’s only when the next wave of younger scientists rises into power, and become the new gatekeepers, that philosophical change, and breakthroughs, tend to happen. Or are accepted.

The U.S. Senate, and all governments, are dominated by leaders born decades before the rise, and fall, of fax machines. Obama is the first president in history with an email, and not paper, centric work lifestyle. Many Fortune 500 companies are led by people whose email is printed out for them, or for whom blogs, Facebook and twitter, are, to them, toys for their grand-children.

Anyone born after the rise of the web, or the iPad, has assumptions about the world those born earlier can never have (just as my generation has assumptions about electricity and mobile phones, my parents could never have). This child will never look at a keyboard or a mouse the same way I do. And until she rises into a position of power, power likely yielded to her by the stepping down of an old guard, that worldview will not be in a position to change the world.

In nature, death is the leading cause of life. Everything that lives depends on the death of something in order to grow. When trees fall, some become what are called nurse logs – their decay becomes the basis for the next wave of growth. By falling down and letting light shine through, the future begins.

For managers and leaders of all kinds, perhaps the best way to make progress happen is to get out of the way.

Also see: Innovation by Firing People

 

Quote of the month

Posted on in quote of the x, x of the yby Scott Berkun

“A cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental – came to him by inheritance or gift or crime, that he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires, is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fires, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes”

–          Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-reliance

 

The attack of the design weenie

Posted on in Creative Thinking, designby Scott Berkun

Zeldman wrote, in an excellent post on Vocabulary vs. Storytelling:

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS designing websites and applications, I still don’t think in words like “affordance.” And when my colleagues use a word like that, my mental process still clatters to a halt while I seek its meaning in a dusty corner of my brain…

Should you ask B.B. King if the lick he just played was in Lydian Mode, he could probably answer you after stopping to think about it. But after all these years playing blues guitar, B.B. King doesn’t say to himself, “I’m going to switch to a Lydian scale here,” he just plays blues. Scales and vocabulary are necessary when we are learning the craft behind our art. But the longer we practice, the more intuitive our work becomes. And as it becomes more intuitive, it disconnects further and further from language and constructs.

My singular divergence from his theme is the notion that intuition and language are mutually exclusive. They are more a set of different lenses than competitors, as you see different things depending on which lens you use. Knowledge of theory can inform intuition and vice-versa – a true master  sees value in both, as there are things you can learn from each you can’t learn from the other.

However my primary reason in writing is to call out the class of people in all fields that only feel smart when they are making others feel dumb. I call them weenies, and there are plenty of design and UX weenies out there, just as there are geek weenies, marketing weenies and writing weenies. They’d rather talk than do, which biases them towards unnecessarily sophisticated language.  They make lots of diagrams and offer lots of advice, preferring to be in the abstract than to offer their own specific ideas.

Even in cases where they are great designers, they can fall into weenie mode. Their ego blinds them into thinking their talent gives them the license to bludgeon others with theories and names the other person couldn’t possibly know. And the corollary is they assume anyone who doesn’t know the exactly facts and theories they know couldn’t possibly be a good designer. Task analysis, kerning, information architecture, composition, Paul Rand, contextual inquiry, Dieter Rams… anything said with disdain for those who don’t understand says more about the speaker than the listener.

True designers, or experts of any kind, should be ambassadors for their ideas and their craft. An expert has to know that most of the world is ignorant of their expertise, and the only way for great design, or UX, or whatever, to be more valued in the world is if the experts make the ignorant feel good about learning what they don’t know. Big words and fancy concepts are intimidating by design and any designer who uses them under the guise of teaching / inspiring / motivating should know better. All they are likely doing is intimidating the other person out of the conversation. This strokes a weenie’s ego as they think it’s a victory, but in truth there is no progress.

If you really want to change the world, don’t be a weenie. Be a teacher. Be kind in helping people overcome their ignorance. If you’re so talented, you shouldn’t be surprised or angry at how stupid everyone else is. Make it fun and safe for them to learn. And in your professional circles, don’t bet on vocabulary or name dropping, bet on your ideas. A sketch of a good idea doesn’t need $10 words or 20 layer Venn diagrams to be understood. If you don’t have the confidence to let your ideas stand tall, and you dismiss the discipline of learning to communicate your ideas well, theory and intimidation are not going to save you from yourself.

Q: What UX / design jargon to you think is most abused, unnecessary or counterproductive?

Why you should be weird

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

They told Van Gogh he used too much paint, and Englebart that the mouse was pointless. Galileo and Copernicus were called heretics for seeing the world for what it was. Dylan and Guthrie were told they couldn’t sing and that they had nothing to say. DaVinci’s helicopters and Tesla’s radio waves stayed in notebooks for years, as the ideas were too weird for ordinary minds to understand.

Most great ideas seem weird at first. Our minds are used to the old world, the old judgments and the old reasons. Few have the imagination and self-reliance to see a new world when it’s first shown to us. This doesn’t mean being weird, or having a weird idea guarantees you anything. Most ideas, weird, cool or reasonable, fail to take hold.

Yet it is certain the first time you hear an idea that will eventually change everything it will seem weird to you. And the first time you pitch a great idea, you’ll be told by even smart and successful people, that you and your idea are weird. This is to be expected. Many great ideas need second chances to show how great they are.


(POSTPONED) Speaking at Town Hall Seattle, March 9th

Posted on in On Tour, Seattleby Scott Berkun

Update.2: I’m forced to postpone the lecture. Sorry to do this but unavoidable for personal reasons. The Town folks are cool and we’ll reschedule.

Updated: Only a few days to go – Hope to see you there. Leave a comment – I’ll be buying drinks for a pre-show party. Venue tbd.

For all you locals, I have some great news. It’s been hard to find big public venues to speak at here in Seattle, but I finally scored a big one.

On Wed March 9th, 7:30pm, I’ll be speaking at Town Hall Seattle on Creativity and Innovation. It’s going to be fun, and I’ll be working on new material for the talk. First 50 people who show up will get a free copy of the paperback edition of The Myths of Innovation.

Leave a comment if you’re a fan and you’re coming. I might set up a pre-show happy hour, with drinks on me.

Town Hall Listing here, or go straight to ticketing at brownbag (it’s $5 and goes to supporting Town Hall)

How do creativity and innovation happen?

How do you know if a new idea will succeed or fail? It’s easy (even for experts) to get it wrong, relying too much on wishful thinking and a romanticized understanding of history. Based on the new edition of his bestselling book, The Myths of Innovation, creativity expert Scott Berkun will dissect misguided notions of creativity and provide simple lessons from masters like Picasso, Da Vinci, and Edison, with crossover insights from the latest in art and technology. The first 50 people to attend will get a free copy of The Myths of Innovation. Presented by the Town Hall Center for Civic Life, with Elliott Bay Book Company. Series media sponsorship provided by PubliCola. Series supported by The Boeing Company Charitable Trust and the RealNetworks Foundation.

At Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Avenue, Seattle, WA (map), get tickets

How to torture your project manager

Posted on in Managementby Scott Berkun

If you like your project manager, this is a list of things not to do. Life as a PM is hard as the job is to be in the middle of many people who often don’t have the best communication or relationship skills. This list, which hopefully will make you smile, is inspired by real-life experiences.

  1. Never give specific odds or probabilities. Always make ambiguous commitments like “Probably”, “we may be able to do that” or “it’s possible”.
  2. Once a week, try to do one of: double the scope, slash the schedule in half, invent a new stakeholder.
  3. Break into their schedule spreadsheet at night, and replace all the estimates with random numbers.
  4. Demand everything ASAP, instead of when you need it.
  5. Agree to a decision. Then the next time it’s mentioned, pretended you have no idea what they are talking about.
  6. Take surprise week long vacations.
  7. Do not disagree directly. Wait until you are both in the presence of their boss and intensely disagree then.
  8. Blame them for everything, but never give them any power.
  9. Accept meeting requests immediately, but don’t ever show up.
  10. Avoid short phone conversations in favor of obfuscated 20 email long multi-person threads.

Know of others? Funny or real? Or both? Leave a comment.

How to show time during a presentation

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

João Adolfo Lutz asked me recently about noting time progressed / remaining in slides:

I’d like to know what do you think about printing kind of a “timeline” in the slides, lightening the topic that is being shown at the particularly moment. One teacher of mine says it’s very important for the crowd to know WHERE they are in the presentation, but none of the writers i read about (Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds) spoke about this particular topic.

The short answer is no. A good speaker shouldn’t need them.

Here are five ways to solve this problem. One good, four questionable.

1. The speaker marks time.

Time is important. There is a entire chapter on managing time in Confessions of a Public Speaker.   However it doesn’t have to be in the slides themselves. A good speaker can remind the audience, in passing, when they are 1/3rd and 2/3rds of the way through their presentation. This implicit way is simple and easy.

However, I’ve experimented with different time marker techniques, mostly for Ignite, as the spirit of the format is that you do everything in 15 second units. I think explicitly putting time markers in slides can work if done with care. It’s all too easy to make it a distraction.

2. Gentle boxes – I divided the screen into 20 boxes, each box representing 1/20th of my total time. Each box slowly faded in. The light blue boxes represented 1/5th of the total time. I used no actual slides for the talk itself.

3. Progress bar – many people have done this. For my ignite talk on how to write 1000 words, we made a small progress bar on the bottom of the video, marking time. Its subtle enough not to be a distraction from the main event.

4. Numbers – The simplest way to go is to simply number slides, putting 4/28 in the lower right corner to indicate the 4th slide of 28.  Three problems. First, a slide is not a measure of time. Second small text (e.g. subtle) is hard to read, and defeats the purpose of being a gentle reminder.  Third, unless you have a slide footer, a number floating in space is a visual turd – it spoils basic composition.

5. Vertical bar – I’ve never done this, but I’ve seen it (picture is a quick mockup). You put a visual indicator on the right most part of a slide, that moves down vertically for each slide. This is easier to do in a subtle fashion than numbers, but has the same problem of slides != time, and it has to walk the fine line of being visible, but not distracting. It also causes composition problems.

Summary

Keep it simple. Practice enough to know your basic timings. Then the timeline comes through naturally in the lecture, or because you mention to the crowd when you are 1/3 and 2/3rds done. It’s less work and a better experience.

Have you seen other ways to mark time? I’d love to know about them – please leave a comment.

The top 10 unsolved tech problems? help wanted

Posted on in Cultureby Scott Berkun

Update: here’s a revised list based on all the comments (thanks).

I posted weeks ago asking for suggestions for top problems consumers face with technology that are  so persistent we forget they’re there. Here’s the best of the 40+ comments I received.

  1. Making a 3-way conference call without hanging up on people
  2. Hooking up a laptop to a projector hitch free
  3. Remembering to switch phone mode in a movie theater / airplane flight + remembering to switch it out when it’s over.
  4. Transferring a phone call
  5. Video + whiteboard conferencing for > 2 people
  6. Lack of a universal, no-hassle cord free gadget recharger
  7. Unified / simple manager for all your inboxes (social networks,  instant messaging accounts, twitter, text messaging, voicemail – it should all be managed in one simple way)
  8. Keeping music in sync across all computers and devices
  9. Remembering online passwords (lots of people recommended 1Password)
  10. Using technology to broaden viewpoints, rather than reinforcing narrow world views (ok, that’s a human problem, but still).

Know of a) solutions to these? b) other problems that should be on the list?

Thinking in Desire Paths

Posted on in Creative Thinking, designby Scott Berkun

A failing in all design thinking is faith you can perfectly predict human behavior. Often a wiser strategy is to observe first, try to understand, and only then predict.

There’s an old concept among architects and urban planners called desire paths. If you walk around a college campus, or urban park,  it’s easy to spot the well tread paths between buildings people have made for themselves. These are desire paths, or desire lines. The natural behavior among people shows you where the optimal path should be.

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(Photo by Kate Pugh)

There’s a likely apocryphal story about a college campus that didn’t put any paved paths in until the second year. For the first year they waited to see the paths the students and staff had made, and put the paved paths over them in the second year.

This idea extends beyond courtyards and urban planning. You can think in desire paths for nearly any kind of design problem. Take for example, dialog in film-making. Here’s a story from the making of Scorsese’s GoodFella’s:

According to Pesci, improvisation and ad-libbing came out of rehearsals where Scorsese let the actors do whatever they wanted. He made transcripts of these sessions, took the lines that the actors came up with that he liked best, and put them into a revised script that the cast worked from during principal photography. For example, the scene where Tommy tells a story and Henry is responding to him — the “what’s so funny about me” scene — is based on actual event that happened to Pesci. It was worked on in rehearsals where he and Liotta improvised and Scorsese recorded 4-5 takes, rewrote their dialogue and inserted it into the script.

The idea of prototyping, if done right, allows for many paths to be explored, either by actual users, or even through your own imagination. In the case of Goodfellas, the different possible paths were explored by the actors, and they gravitated towards one that worked well. Scorsese was simply openminded enough to let them explore and again in choosing to use the results. Rather than invent everything out of their own mind, wise creators know a little observation can be an easier way to find the right ideas.

Also see: Flickr photo pool of desire paths

Quote of the week

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

This one seems depressing at first. But I’ve been thinking about it for days, which suggests there are many interesting thoughts in here:

“I once thought that truth was eternal, that when you understood something it was with you forever. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help; it tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by looking like someone else, leaving our own face behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunt us.

It is no mistake that in movies and literature the dead sometimes only know they are dead only after they can no longer see themselves in the mirror; and as I sat there feeling the warmth of the cup against my palm, this small observation seemed like a great revelation to me. I wanted to tell the man I was with about it, but he was involved in his own topic and I did not want to interrupt him, so instead I looked with curiosity toward the window behind him, its night-darkened glass reflecting the whole café, to see if  I could, now, recognize myself.”

-Lucy Grealy , Mirrorings

The backstory to this quote is that Lucy Grealy was disfigured due to illness as a child, and explored issues of identity in many of her writings.

The idea from this quote I’ve been pondering is the nature of truth. I agree with her truth is fleeting, or the sense of truth, and can’t be held onto for long. But different truths have different half-lifes, some last longer than others. I do think there are universal truths, but they can be less interesting than the truths waiting to be discovered about our friends, families, moods, desires, passions and flaws. Everything around us in motion and it follows that truth in most moments is in motion too.

Discovered: The Amazing Dr. Fox Video

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

One famous speech in public speaking history is the Dr. Fox lecture. Researchers hired an actor to pose as an expert, and he gave a meaningless, but complex sounding, jargon filled speech to a group of true experts. The result? The majority of them were fooled into thinking they’d learned something, despite there being no substance to the lecture.

From the researchers:

The authors hypothesized that given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, even experienced educators participating in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer… The authors conclude by emphasizing that student satisfaction with learning may represent little more than the illusion of having learned.

It’s a canonical reference on how vulnerable to B.S. we all can be and how much power a good speaker has, power than be used for good or bad.

The problem is the lecture was impossible to find. During research for Confessions of a Public Speaker (Chapter 8 explores the implications of Dr. Fox for speakers and audiences), I couldn’t find a single person who had seen the video, much less had a copy. Thanks to Mikhail Simkin, it’s now online.

Here is the Dr. Fox video and the paper describing the study (with data).

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