New York Times on Multitasking
March 27, 2007 at 11:16 pm | In Attention Management, interruption science | No CommentsIf you haven’t seen the New York Time articles article called “Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic” (available here), I recommend you take a look. It deals with attention mostly from a multitasking point of view and mentions several interesting research projects about the ability of the human brain to multi-task.
“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”
I feel it falls for a few common fallacies though. For example, when it says that multitasking is a bad thing and quotes René Marois of Vanderbilt University as saying “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.” That may be true, but it is also true that a core limitation is an inability to concentrate hard on one thing for long periods of time (for most people). Air traffic controllers, for example, are often forced to take breaks to keep them alert. So there is some idea spot on this continuum between having your tasks interrupted constantly and concentrating on the same task for hours on end. Personally, I take breaks when I feel myself starting to rehash the same thoughts or slowing down a bit and purposely switch to another task for a little while to keep myself fresh.
Another fallicy is that it quotes the same Basex study I commented on previously, but with a little more information. It says the study did include recovery time which is good. But interruptions were as defined by the person being surveyed or interviewed, which still discounts the possible positive impact of interruptions and doesn’t count them as a closed loop with both the interrupter and interruptee.
In summary, I think the article is right on target when it says “In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.”
Bridges
March 26, 2007 at 7:49 am | In virtual worlds | No CommentsIt’s always fun to see the footprints that the virtual world leaves in the real one. Friendships, marriages, selling of virtual objects for real money, and virtual-to-real money conversions offer us bridges between reality as we know it and fantasy, which make them endlessly fascinating.
Now another of these bridges has been found – the electrical footprint of the servers involved in maintaining these avatars. In an Institute of the Future blog posting called “Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians” they quote Nick Carr as saying that the wattage consumed per avatar is about the same as a Brazilian. While this was widely quoted, it was deflated in a commentary at the Guardian’s web site that correctly says it’s unfair to assume the end user’s computers are used solely for Second Life and that most users have multiple avatars on each PC. He comes up with about a third of a Brazilian. Again, it’s not the number that’s of interest as much as the bridge that can turn something from a virtual world into an actual, measurable impact in this one.
Dilbert on E-mail Overload
March 22, 2007 at 5:23 pm | In Attention Management, communication | No CommentsToday’s thought provoker though comes from Dilbert:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070321.html
In case you can’t see the picture, it’s a riff on e-mail free Fridays, a phenomenon more popular in the press than in corporate America. It seems the idea is to reduce dependency on e-mail and/or e-mail overload by banning it once a week. If done once, I could see it as an interesting experiment to re-familiarize people who have forgotten how to use any other communication method with alternatives (face-to-face communication and phones no doubt). But there’s no reason Friday’s emails are any less important than any other days. And the examples I’ve seen in real life generally involve quite a few loopholes (clients, partners, emergencies, etc.).
If organizations feel e-mail is being overused I would prefer to see carrots to encourage better alternatives rather than sticks. Instead of instituting e-mail free Fridays, organizations can take tougher, but ultimately more useful steps to improve communications (from the presentation I’m giving in Las Vegas in May):
- Encourage or force usage of unfamiliar tools. Establish patterns of behavior by selecting ways to push usage of underused tools (place registration for the golf outing on the intranet if people aren’t using the intranet for example)
- Make sure the tools are as accessible as possible. Built into standard builds, links from the desktop, contextual access, provide clients for other devices as needed
- Be the first to say “gimme a call”. Create collaborative discussions after responses go 3 iterations or more than a page.
I don’t see e-mail free Fridays as anything more than a gimmick or band-aid for dysfunctional corporate culture. But meeting-free Mondays is something I’d definitely back!
Why Do We Communicate or Collaborate?
March 20, 2007 at 10:59 am | In collaboration, communication | No CommentsI performed an interesting experiment the other day. In preparing for a presentation on which communication and collaboration tools should be used in different cases, I decided to explore why businesspeople communicate. I’m not sure if I’m a representative sample of this audience, but I was conveniently available. I randomly trolled my emails (sent and received) and came up with a set of purposes that seems to encompass all the emails I send and receive from a business point of view (might have to alter this for personal use). They include:
- File
- CYA
- Connect
- Validate
- Inform
- Confirm
- Feed back
- Negotiate
- Author
- Brainstorm
- Swarm
Email seems to be involved from CYA to Negotiate. IM has a narrower scope, gong from connect to confirm. Collaborative workspaces span a broad range that includes filing and everything from connect to feed back.
Connect and validate encompass the touchy-feely part of this spectrum and encompass most of the communications that involve simple reaching out (”Just wanted to touch base and say hello”=connect) or pat someone on the back (”Hang in there! You’re doing a great job”=validate).
I’d be interested to hear from readers of this blog to see if there are communications or collaboration that involves technology and doesn’t fit into one of these categories.
In response to “Overload, Shmoverload”
March 16, 2007 at 9:05 am | In Attention Management | 2 CommentsInformation overload sees to be polarized into two camps: one that says it’s a serious problem and another that says it’s just something we need to adapt to. I think I’m more of a centrist. I can appreciate the arguments of both camps, but a lot of the discrepancy seems to come down to fuzzy language and assumptions. The “too much information is bad” camp seems to be talking about useless information. The “just go with the flow” camp seems to assume there’s useful information mixed in with the useless stuff.
Stowe Boyd is in the “go with the flow” camp. In a blog posting entitled Overload, Shmoverload he summarized points from a presentation he gave. You can see the presentation slides at his site, but he summarized his talking points and I found them interesting, but didn’t always agree. Here are some of his bullets labelled as “SB” (the ones I don’t mention I mostly agreed with) and my corresponding thoughts (”CR”).
Stowe Boyd: We don’t really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted …It may the several related cognitive centers, but at any rate, modern psychology/cognitive science hasn’t figured it out.
Craig Roth: He guessed right! I recommend anyone interested in the psychological aspects of attention look at Posner and Petersen’s paper (Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 1990. 13:25-42, “The Attention System of the Human Brain”). Their study of the how the brain processes attention found that the brain uses a network of anatomical areas. “The attention system of the brain is anatomically separate from the data processing systems … It interacts with other parts of the brain, but maintains its own identity.” It also found that separate subsystems are involved in maintaining attention, just as in the decentralized architecture model described previously. “It is neither the property of a single center, nor a general function of the brain operating as a whole … divide the attention system into subsystems that perform different but interrelated functions. (a) orienting to sensory events; (b) detecting signals for focal (conscious) processing; (c) maintaining a vigilant or alert state.”
SB: We are switching to a time in which the dominant mode will be flow, not focus.
CR: I’m not in the camp that says the huge amount of information now available is “bad”. I agree that we will adapt. But I don’t think a move away from focus is what will happen either. How did we adapt when the number of TV channels we received jumped from 3 to 150? We’ve learned to pick out (“focus on”) the programs we want to see and ignore the rest. Trying to absorb even a small portion of the flow of cable channels out there would render one senseless in short order.
SB: How do jugglers juggle? They don’t focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling. Unfocus.
CR: I think there’s a lesson here, but “unfocus” isn’t it. If you want to learn how to juggle, I don’t think unfocusing on what you’re doing will get you there. I think practicing a real lot until it’s pure motor memory is how you’d do it. I think the way jugglers juggle is to get their juggling down so well that they can do it without thinking. I’m guessing – I don’t juggle. But I do play guitar and I know that you have to get a song down pat before you can start watching the rest of the band and the audience and having fun with it. That doesn’t help much for enterprise attention management though since, as boring as being present in a conference call may be, I don’t think autonomic responses will help much.
SB: The New Balancing Act: “For the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult — if not impossible — to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps”
CR: Good point. Narrowing your focus isn’t the way to be more valuable to your organization or achieve your information worker goals. To me, having feelers in the environment and good mechanisms for pulling the more important messages forward and pushing others further back (what I call “attentional technologies and capabilities”) is the key.
Attention Management for Weight Loss!
March 15, 2007 at 10:41 am | In Attention Management, Fun | 4 CommentsWhile I’ve been clear to point out my view that attention in an attention management sense should not equate to action (for example, as “pay attention to your schoolwork” means “do your schoolwork”). But I do think there is an interesting phenomenon where attention leads to action at a subliminal level.
A great example is weight loss. The Wall St. Journal (1/16/07) had an article called “Latest Weight-Loss Advice: Slow Down and Pay Attention” which said “There’s a lot of evidence that simply changing your habits and attention level while eating can make a difference in the quantity of food you ingest”. The more distracted people are when they eat, the more they eat.
There’s an interesting book called “The Inner Game of Tennis” by W. Timothy Gallwey. Forget the title – it’s not really about tennis. It’s a tennis instruction book that only spends about 1 page on technique. The thesis of the book (in my view) is that people have internal mechanisms that correct behavior and affect action as long as attention is paid to an activity (the brain is actively focusing on what is going on, processing it, building an internal database of what is happening in various situations). One need not mentally recite advice about how to swing up at the ball, follow through, etc. Just being an active but non-judgemental observer can have tremendous effect. To quote a statement from Gallwey that appeared in Amazon.com “”No matter what a person’s complaint when he has a lesson with me, I have found the most beneficial first step,” he stressed, “is to encourage him to see and feel what he is doing–that is, to increase his awareness of what actually is.” “
Most of what I talk about with Enterprise Attention Management is of a more explicit variety – by pulling more important messages forward and paying attention to them, the information worker can take optimal action. But it is interesting to note the more subtle ways in which this happens. A mantra of Total Quality Management is that monitoring and measurement encourages optimization and change. As the Wall St. Journal article and Gallwey book show, this mechanism is even ingrained in our psyche.
Davenport and Beck’s Book “The Attention Economy”
March 13, 2007 at 9:45 am | In Attention Management, Book Review | No CommentsI’m not prone to doing book reviews in my blog, but as someone who researches attention management in the workplace (Enterprise Attention Management or EAM as I call it), I wanted to point people to Davenport and Beck’s book “The Attention Economy”. It is a seminal work in this field and there are things that resonated with me as well as some things that missed their mark.
Things I liked about Davenport and Beck’s book “The Attention Economy”
- Their thesis – that there is an attention economy – is a solid one that people and organizations have to wake up to. This is the best foundation setting you will find on how our attention is being stretched thin, the costs that implies, and ways of framing the problem.
- Davenport and Beck use the same words I do to describe AM as a “lens” with which to view a number of issues. This is a subtlety often lost as venture capitalists and vendors look for a new market. AM is not a discrete thing you can buy into easily.
- The authors correctly point out how managing a complex set of rules for any technology will fail because people don’t want to have to pay that much attention to their attention management!
Things I didn’t like about Davenport and Beck’s book “The Attention Economy”
- Using a definition of attention that includes action (p20 ends the definition with “… and then we decide whether to act”) is grammatically acceptable, but dilutes the topic and reduces its prescriptive ability. At that point organizational structure (chapter 10) and executive visioning (chapter 8 ) are all about attention management. A corollary of this is when they frame the problem as getting and keeping attention (p84). Simply rephrasing insights from other disciplines without adding value (for example, on p 155 when it says “Some strategy choices (phrased in attention-oriented terms) include … should we focus on growth within our existing business, or diversification?”) provides a consistent narrative, but without additional explanatory power. I feel that using Attention as a proxy for action pulls in an inordinate number of existing disciplines (corporate strategy, organizational strategy, advertising), but fails to add value to them through new insights. This dilutes the prescriptive value of the Attention Management concept. On the contrary, limiting the issue to “how to focus attention” rather than including “what should one focus attention on” is a narrower, more insightful, and ultimately more actionable approach.
- The value of the content of the message is drowned out by the focus on how to get people’s attention. After all, being right with this message helps get attention the next time you send a message. There is one small nod to the idea that having great content or a great product matters. The rest is about how to yell louder and shake people awake.
- The introduction of “organizational ADD” (p7, 85) may be irresistible, but gets off on the wrong path as I’ve mentioned before in this blog. First, it attaches a controversial subject with a budding new field of study. ADHD is a term that itself begs questions about who is the sufferer (the child? The teacher? The parent? Can you have a disorder that only affects others?), normalcy (what is the normal attention span of a child? Is it what we adults say it should be or is it determined in an empirical way?), and absolutism (does one have it or not, like a virus, or is having ADHD a continuum?). It also contains a rich set of cultural connotations that, combined with the questions I mentioned, becomes counterproductive when applied to attention management. Second, real ADHD refers to unintentional task switching while most of AM refers to intentional behavior. Third, it seems the 4 symptoms described are for individuals in a work environment, not organizations. “Organizational ADD” sounds like it should refer to the more interesting topic of organizations that can’t focus on any project or initiative for long and dysfunctionally jump between priorities (which, incidentally, is covered in “The Passive Aggressive Organization” article in Harvard Business Review).
The KM Business Case: Assessing the situation
March 12, 2007 at 4:32 pm | In business case, knowledge management | 3 CommentsWhen talking to clients about business cases for portal, content management, collaboration, or intranets I have found that they jump too quickly into their spreadsheets or lists of benefits. Before jumping into the number crunching, it’s worth taking a step back to look at what is really being asked for. The intention of this list is to help business case authors to be aware of the catches and pitfalls, to know the questions to ask of their peers and financial folks, and to lay out the territory so they can avoid unnecessary work and find the path of least resistance to gaining approval.
Some questions to ask to assess the situation before diving into the business case:
Why me? Did every initiative have to have a business case? Did e-mail?
Business Case vs. Business Plan: Are you producing a business case (presented to a decision maker who will judge whether to proceed with the direction recommended in the plan) or a business plan (done after a business case is accepted and contains all sorts of things the judge probably does not need to know such as the phasing and schedule, staffing plan, and project plan)?
Business case vs. ROI: A business case is not necessarily numerical. Providing a spreadsheet when the boss expected a textual business case can sink your project, or at least waste a lot of time.
ROI, NPV, IRR, payback, TTV: If you’re doing quantitative analysis, do you have a choice of method? Are the time period and discount rate specified? If not, this just becomes an exercise in picking the most favorable parameters you can get away with.
Conceptual vs. Concrete: How fuzzy (“collaboration in the workplace”) or concrete (a specific product) is your initiative? Do you have the option of how to scope it? Business cases can be at many different levels: Technology, program/project, Organizational, and Conceptual
Project vs. infrastructure: A project has a discrete beginning, middle, and end. Infrastructure is ongoing. Quantitative analysis such as ROI was made for discrete projects and is difficult to apply to infrastructure where one does not know exactly all the ways in which the enabling infrastructure will be used. Also, the infrastructure simply makes other assets more efficient (people, systems), rather than directly providing benefit itself, so determining what percentage of improvement is due to the boost provided by the infrastructure is like trying to determine how many milliseconds faster a runner is because of the vitamins she is taking. One common way around this problem is to “projectize” the infrastructure: to take one major and immediate way in which the infrastructure will be used and justify its entire cost based on that project, treating the rest as free icing on the cake (“And we’ll get to use it for other things too …”).
Hard vs. soft: You can think of both costs and benefits as being on a hardness scale like the 1-10 one used in the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness. Provable, measurable impact to a company’s profit through increase of revenue or decrease of expenses, accurately attributable to a direct cause, is a diamond (10). And it’s equally rare and valuable. On the other hand, “It will save every salesperson 5 minutes per day” is talc (1). Simple, easy, and soft. Helping to decrease printing expenses by providing information online is maybe Orthoclase Feldspar (6. OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia). No non-investment business could function if it required a rating of 10 on benefits and costs for everything it did. Some faith (faith = (10 - hardness rating) * 10%) is generally involved.
Net benefit vs. status quo: Generally the status quo – the current state cost of doing nothing and proceeding as always without the infrastructure project – is incorrectly assumed to have a cost and benefit of $0. This math ignores the possibility that the status quo itself may have costs and benefits, particularly if the environment is changing in some way.
Prioritization vs. financial testing: The effect of the project on the time and money of the company and attention of your team and those touched by the project (including the end users) needs to be prioritized against other potential projects. On occasion, KM project owners jump through many financial hurdles only to find their project rejected anyways since other projects were deemed more important or worthy of the effort.
Lottery vs. followup: Is the business case treated as a lottery where winning results in a pile of cash showing up at the door? Or does the eye of the finance department continue to watch you after you win approval? You should have to show you actually used the resources allocated for the project in question and got the benefits you promised.
Some Clarifications to Posting on Interruptions
March 8, 2007 at 5:03 pm | In Attention Management, interruption science | No CommentsI’d like to add a few clarifications to my previous posting on interruptions.
- Interruptions cannot be assumed to be bad. To determine the cost you have to ask the value of each interruption
- Any survey of interruptions needs to level set on the term and clearly state the definition they picked when quoting results. Some might consider any phone call with valuable information as an interaction rather than an interruption and not even count it, where others may count everything
- Interruptions must be viewed as a complete system that includes the interrupter and the interruptee (if that is indeed a word). The net value of the interruption (cost/value to interrupter + cost/value to interruptee) is what matters, not just the cost to one party
- Calculations must include the time it takes to resume the interrupted task, not just the time of the interruption
I’m not saying the study I was commented on violated these. The methodology wasn’t stated in the document I read so I can’t be sure. I’d assume someone who went to all the trouble to measure that many interruptions would have thought of these rules, but I would have appreciated them being stated when quoting the statistics. And the number seems awfully high to be treating interruptions as a system and as having possible value.
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