KnowledgeForward

I’d recommend anyone interested in the cultural aspects of attention management to check out the special section in this weeks Economist.  In a bit of sociological research equaled only by Jane Goodall and her chimps, Andreas Kluth, San Francisco correspondent for the Economist, studies digital nomads and describes what makes them tick.  You can hear an interview with Mr. Kluth or check out the first article here, which has links for the rest in the series. Subscription may be required.

Hammers, guns, and Blackberrys are simply tools that surface the desires of the people that wield them, so the series correctly bypasses a discussion of the specific technologies used by digital nomads.  Instead he focuses on a wide array of topics about the culture of digital nomads, the work they do, and why they act as they do. 

The summary article at the start of the issue has a great description of the dangers of continuous availability and partial attention: “the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be).”

About the prevalence of nomadic work among knowledge workers, he writes:

James Ware, a co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative, a small think-tank, says that nomadic work styles are fast becoming the norm for “knowledge workers”. His research shows that in America such people spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafés, public libraries or parks.

The author differentiates nomadism from the archaic “telecommuting”:

Because it still tied workers to a place—the home office—telecommuting implicitly had people “cocooning at home five days a week”, he says. But people do not want that: instead, they want to mingle with others and to collaborate, though not necessarily under fluorescent lights in a cubicle farm an hour’s drive from their homes. The crucial difference between telecommuting and nomadism, he says, is that nomadism combines the autonomy of telecommuting with the mobility that allows a gregarious and flexible work style.

On how to make nomadic work work, he writes:

this requires “management by objectives rather than face time”. Not all workers thrive in such a culture; some prefer the structure of the traditional office. But “anyone who did well at college can work well this way,” he thinks. “The prof said ‘paper by Friday’ but didn’t care where you did it; it’s the same now.

I’ve posited some of my own theories about what drives email addiction, but the author quotes James Katz, a professor at Rutgers University, with another explanation:

This is, first, because of “random reinforcement”, the desultory pattern of rewards that comes with addictive behaviours such as gambling. A CrackBerry winnows through his e-mail throughout the day, knowing full well that most of it is chaff, but cannot help himself because of that occasional grain. The second reason, says Mr Katz, is that most people suffer from the illusion that more information always leads to better decisions, and there is always more information available on our phones and laptops.

On March 31st the WSJ ran an interview with Gary Masada, the CIO of Chevron, where he described information overload as the biggest challenge he faces (page R6, available here for subscribers only).  When the WSJ asked “What is the biggest challenge that you face as a CIO” he said:

Getting our arms around all the information we have.  We’re basically creating the Library of Congress every day or so, which makes finding a piece of information like finding a needle in a haystack.  Only that haystack is growing exponentially.

I’ve said many times before I think the media tends to focus too much on what individuals in a work environment can do about information overload (set aside time each day for emails, block out focused time, etc; see my personal attention management tips here) and doesn’t challenge the couple of folks in an organization that can really do something to make everyone else’s worklife easier and more productive.  These are the CEO, CIO, and IT owners of attentional technologies.

Well, hurrah for the WSJ that asked Chevron’s CIO “From a technical standpoint, what can you do to make this easier?”  Mr. Masada had a great answer:

Our challenge is to find the right search tools to help people find information.  Then there are some things we can do to make the haystack not grow so much.  We can put in place automatic-delete policies and rules that say if something is an important document you’ll retain it in a certain place and you have to tag it.  Technology can be an enabler that helps people do this.  But in the end an individual will have to do it.

Well, the focus on search is a bit narrow.  I think search is an important enabler, but there are many other parts to the puzzle as well (see my EAM conceptual architecture for a more complete picture).  But the rest are wise words to live by.  Some of the relief lies in helping to filter the information so that the amount of information doesn’t grow out of control.  While many have polarized views of technology’s role in alleviating information overload (either “the answer” or “irrelevant since it’s all cultural factors”), Mr. Masada has found the middle ground.  Good technology, applied properly, can be an enabler that allows changes that individual employees want to make or that are driven by changes in culture of the organization as a whole.  But in the end, it’s all up to people to make the change happen.

Case studies were all the rage when I was getting my MBA.  They still are.  Which is great - they are valuable tools for developing intuition, analyzing information, making difficult decisions under uncertainty, and developing social IQ by working in groups.

I recently sat down with a vendor that has updated the old Harvard Business Review case study format by offering online simulations for universities (and executive education).  The information is now accessed online and presented in Excel and adds the extra dimension of being able to pour through a larger number of realistic charts, graphs, and financial reports in Excel and PowerPoint - real tools they’ll use when they graduate.  Rather than a single dump of information and decision point, these simulations run over time with many decision points and involve collaboration as well as competition.  I was quite impressed compared to the old photocopied case studies I used.

But the case studies and the simulations still lay out neat and tidy chunks of information on which to make decisions.  Granted, the information is often incomplete, which is part of the challenge.  But most real-life decision makers would kill to have the information they need so neatly packaged and trimmed for their consumption.  Where are the twenty useless reports that surround every useful one?  Where are the five versions of the report that make finding the single point of truth so elusive?  Why is the information in one handy report instead of spread among three different reports with mismatched categorization and metadata?  I won’t even get into the social element of trying to find the information that is being purposely hidden or twisted by co-workers with incentives to provide inaccurate information.

I’m not just joking about how screwed up the average corporation is.  Information overload is a fact of life in even the best of organizations, making attention management an essential discipline if one desires to be an effective information worker and good managerial decision maker.  Therefore, an additional form of simulation that exercises decision making under an information surplus would be useful for students and even executives to deal with. This is not to say the existing case studies and simulations need to have random noise added to make them more difficult. When working out, it’s good to isolate a muscle group and existing products do that. I’m just saying there’s a new muscle group that could use some examination and exercise: attention management. Learning how to separate the wheat from the chaff when sorting through information is getting tougher as new information channels are introduced and end user publishing causes an exponential increase in content. I believe that business educational institutions do not prepare students to cope with decision making and stream processing (not being given an explicit decision point but noticing a pattern of news or trigger that compels a prudent manager to seize the initiative and proactively take action) in an information overload environment.  Adding this skill to the case study repertoire would provide them a useful skill that crosses all potential industries and disciplines the business graduate is likely to enter.

Here are some ideas for a case study for students (or executive skills class) that exercise attention management skills.  Picture a simulation that runs for eight weeks, the data is accessed online, and the author guarantees the “truth” is there hidden amongst a great deal of noise.

• Dashboard creation:  This case study exercises the ability to select which information to pay attention to from a universe of quantitative and qualitative options.  Have the deliverable of the simulation be creation of a dashboard.  The dashboard can contain exactly 6 charts on it, selected from dozens of reports and near limitless ways to slice the data.  Students can play with different dashboards for the first 4 weeks, but from then on can only look at the information on the dashboard they’ve selected and make decisions off it.  At the end, teams compare the dashboards they selected and the decisions the dashboards led them to take. 
• Stream processing: Simulate a changing situation with potential “red alert” situation (it could be like a stock market with one sector ready to go boom or bust) and allow the students to select up to 3 triggers to set.  After the triggers are selected, the students run blind until their triggers are hit.
• Social networking:  Let the users negotiate a social network by allowing them, one each turn, to send one of a set of canned emails or instant messages to various simulated employees up and down the line that enable them to piece together the situation much in the way that “Clue” does (”The problem is the District Sales Manager in the Great Lakes region with a candlestick …”)
• KPI selection: This case study concentrates on exercising the ability to prioritize the most important quantitative information from a universe of reports.  After a few turns to watch a slew of numbers and reports and what they mean to the business, the students select their 6 key performance indicators and then see who can make the best decisions and the environment changes based on the information they have pre-selected to analyze.

Those are just a few examples to try to make this more concrete.  The real value is gained after the simulation is over and students talk about how they tried to pull important information forward and push unimportant information to the background, how their dashboards and networks worked for them, and what they’d do differently next time.  I don’t design case studies and am sure someone who does could do a better job, but they give an idea of the types of skills that I’d like to see an MBA grad having as they enter a real-life large organization.

An article by Jared Sandberg in the Wall St. Journal (2/19/08 p. B1, Cubicle Culture, “A Modern Conundrum: When Work’s Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions”) described how people have lost the feeling of accomplishment they get from finishing concrete tasks (picture the old crafts like woodworking) and instead hop from spreadsheet to PowerPoint with vague results. 

I found this interesting and connected to my enterprise attention management research, so I followed this article to the accompanying forum to read what people were commenting about this.  The initial burst of responses piled the scorn upon information work with comments such as “Ah yes, there’s nothing quite like surveying one’s cubicle littered with crumpled styrofoam coffee cups and partially emptied cans of Mountain Dew, and reflecting upon the joys of a really well put-together spreadsheet” and “a large silent majority will continue to grind the day away going through the motions of getting something done.”

Then the responses started changing to acknowledge the other side of the coin, that the old days weren’t as golden as they might seem today (back breaking labor, smoke-belching conditions, etc.), there is joy to team accomplishments, some fault lies with management for constantly changing tasks and not describing why a task is important, and some fault lies with ourselves for not looking for completion where it does exist.  Also, one has to look further down the line to see the results of one’s work (i.e., “I do take some satisfaction that every time anyone uses a credit card or gets cash out of an ATM they run a tiny bit of my code”).

Of course, I couldn’t help but throw my $.02 in as well.  My own comments were as follows:

I agree entirely that the nature of information work and collaboration has diminished the pure sense of accomplishment that one used to get from concrete, individually-owned tasks.  A McKinsey study from 2006 demonstrated how modern business is moving to a majority of work being tacit in nature (undefined; no pre-defined process) as opposed to transformational (creating goods out of raw materials) or transactional (following strict processes).

The point about “surrogate measures” is especially key as a coping mechanism.  I believe email is a common surrogate measure.  In http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/email-interruptions-as-avoidance-mechanism-for-cognitive-dissonance/  I wrote that “I have noticed that I often feel the urge to check email when I feel stuck or bogged down in a long-running project I’m doing or complex piece of work.  I think that our need to accomplish tasks - to get things done - is challenged by the increase in information work with undefined goals and processes and that email is being used like a drug to get a hit of accomplishment when one feels he is spinning his wheels. ”

Still, I would not make the leap (as some commenters here do) of saying that because my individual contribution is difficult to measure and the tasks are tacit that the work is therefore meaningless.  There are some meaningless jobs, but it’s not automatic given this criteria.  If eliminating one’s job or company would result in a better situation for all involved, then I’d say it falls into the “better off without it” category.

Over the slow period of the winter holidays I read two books that, despite their titles, come down on the same side of the same subject.  Both “Faster”, by James Gleick, and “In Praise of Slowness”, by Carl Honore are about Western society’s infatuation with speed and how it makes things worse. 

There are two audiences such books preach to.  The first is the type-A sinners who will likely get them as gifts from people who are trying to tell them to slow down.  The second audience is the converted who enjoy hearing from someone who agrees with them or want better ammunition to use in their attempts to proselytize to others.  That said, I’m not one of the two primary targets of these books.  As someone that researches and writes on information overload and attention management, I was interested to see how these books fit into the narrative of information stress being caused by a misplaced desire to keep busy.

The best quote from “Slowness” (which admittedly means the quote that best makes a point I want to make anyways but he words it better) is:

Einstein appreciated the need to marry the two modes of thought: “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.  Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.  Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”  That is why the smartest, most creative people know when to let the mind wander and when to knuckle down to hard work.  In other words, when to be Slow and when to be Fast.

Overall, I found “Slowness” to be more persuasive than “Faster”.  The reason is tone.  “Faster” uses guru grammar.  In guru grammar an author uses “we” and “you” to indicate that the author is explaining you - your true nature that you don’t even realize - to you.  Guru grammar also involves short, breathless sentences that accurately convey how a passionate speaker pounding a point home would speak on stage, but not how most writers write.  For example:

• “Can our bodies take the strain? We suffer anxiety. We suffer stress. And more.” (p. 15)
• “We appreciate speed, as a tool of storytelling or just as a bright challenge to our senses. We admire speed, and always have, as raw virtuoso performance …” (p. 199)
• “Words swim instantly across the network, not caring about the mileage, and we don’t exactly feel information-deprived. We may be drowning, actually. But are we sacrificing longevity to gain glut?” (p.251)

This makes “Faster” read like a guru who is letting you in on the secrets of life.  The result is to instantly force the reader to choose on the spot whether to nod the head in agreement or raise an objection to say “Wait … don’t include me in that! I don’t feel that way” and, thereby, switch to cynic mode. 

Ironically, sometimes I wish the author of “Faster” would make his point faster.  For example, there’s an entire 8 page section on elevators that tries to get across how they are signs of our impatience, “door dwell”, how the “door close button” is usually disabled, etc. 

“Slowness” makes better use of other tenses to persuade.  For example, page 138-139 uses almost all of them.  “When we walk, we are aware of the details around us …”, “Alex Podborski could not agree more … ‘Walking is my chill-out time,’ he says …”, “Before you skip ahead to the next chapter, though, let’s lay to rest a misconception”, “Lifting weights at the conventional speed never did this much for me or anyone else I know.”  The result is to provide a set of anecdotes and quotes that don’t immediately ask for buy-in until their mass wears away at your objections.  It’s a personal preference, but I find this style more concrete, fact-based, and persuasive.  It sounds more like a lawyer making a case than a preacher.

OK, so maybe I’m picky about writing style.  What about the content?  Here again I prefer “Slowness”.  “Faster”’s examples depend more on pop culture and is heavier on the author’s analysis.  “Slowness” relies more on longer-form investigations of particular domains such as the slow food movement and fast driving (where the author admits to getting a speeding ticket while researching the book).  And I like how “Slowness” often reiterates the point that fast is not always bad. There are times to be fast, but one should be conscious about when they could benefit from being slower and make more explicit decisions about when to hurry and when to slow down.

I was reading an article in last week’s Economist (Clinical depression | Something in the way he moves) when the behavior they described sounded vaguely familiar:

Dr Yamamoto collected the data for his own particular power-law curves by fitting his experimental subjects—about half of whom were healthy, and half of whom had been diagnosed as having clinical (or “major”) depression—with accelerometers. These devices measure how often someone changes his rate of movement by recording each time his acceleration exceeds a certain threshold.

The basic results confirmed a known feature of depressed people. The normal daily rhythm that would lead to a high, steady number of counts during daylight hours and low counts during the night was replaced by occasional bursts of activity. The surprise came when the team started plotting their results out on graphs.

The curves produced by plotting the lengths of low-activity periods against their frequency were strikingly different in healthy and depressed people. This reflects not inactivity by the depressed (though they were, indeed, less active) but a difference in the way that the healthy and the depressed spread their resting periods over the day. Depressed people experience longer resting periods more frequently and shorter ones less frequently than healthy people do.

Hmmm. People who show no movement for most of the day except for brief bursts of activity … sounds like me and every other information worker I know! While I might consider a day where I write 10 pages of a report and handle 75 emails as very productive, I’m sure an accelerometer (I’m assuming from the name it measures acceleration, not flailing fingers) would say I hadn’t moved for hours. My long bouts of inactivity would be punctuated by a flurry of activity in the morning and mid-evening (hopefully with some tennis or a bike ride), another bout of inactivity (as I hit the computer for a few more hours of work or reading), dinnertime activity (lots of acceleration if I’m cooking, which often includes a mad dash to unplug the smoke alarm), then rest again.

So does that mean the activity patterns of information workers mirror those of clinically depressed people? I doubt it. It’s probably a coincidence that wouldn’t be borne out by measuring brain activity (which has also been shown to reflect clinical depression). Maybe the study accounted for this, but I can’t tell since my searching wasn’t able to uncover the original article. Still, I’ve been looking for an excuse to get me out of my seat more during the day and this might be just the ticket.