Scott Berkun's Blog, page 59

Upcoming speaking events

The spring / summer calendar is shaping up. Here are the public events I'll be speaking at over the next few months:

An Event Apart, Seattle, April 2, 2012
Lexmark (private event), Lexington, Kentucky, May 7, 2012
Society for Technical Communication Summit, Chicago, May 20, 2012
PMI Tel Aviv. Israel – May 30th, 2012
An Event Apart, Boston, June 18-20, 2012
IMA Summit, Washington DC, July 30th, 2012

If you're a local in any of these places, and might have a venue I can speak at while I'm in the neighborhood, let me know.

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Published on March 15, 2012 16:59

Upcoming Speaking events

The spring / summer calendar is shaping up. Here are the public events I'll be speaking at over the next few months:

An Event Apart, Seattle, April 2, 2012
Lexmark (private event), Lexington, Kentucky, May 7, 2012
Society for Technical Communication Summit, Chicago, May 20, 2012
PMI Tel Aviv. Israel – May 30th, 2012
An Event Apart, Boston, June 18-20, 2012
IMA Summit, Washington DC, July 30th, 2012

If you're a local in any of these places, and might have a venue I can speak at while I'm in the neighborhood, let me know.

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Published on March 15, 2012 16:59

Are societies more against individuals than ever?

Imran Farouk, one of my kickstarter supporters for Mindfire, had this request for a blog post:

Q: How has de-individualization impacted society in the recent years and will it grow or can it be stopped?

This is one of those fun but messy questions that is so loaded with assumptions there's no way to answer it without taking it apart first.

Which societies are we talking about? There isn't some annual meeting of nations where they all decide collectively whether this year they're going to be more or less against individuals than last year. Each has its own trajectory and action. Some are more hostile than others, some less. Some are improving, some are getting worse. And some are getting better in some ways, and getting worse in others.

I'd say in general, around the world, freedom has progressed, but not in a straight line and not for everyone. According to wikipedia, in 1972 there were 40 democracies in the world, and 123 in 2007. The use of the word democracy has wide variance, but even so, this suggests the general trend is positive. If people can vote, and their votes influence the government, a certain kind of individualism is allowed.

The next distinction is between society and government. If we are talking government, the question becomes is the government a non-corrupt republic, where the citizens are represented effectively in the government. If everyone votes to elect representatives who limit individual rights, then that is, by proxy, the will of the people. They can choose next time to elect people who extend more rights to individuals or not.

I don't know that a society can be against individuals, since a society is composed of individuals. If they collectively agree to restrict certain behaviors, than the individuals involved are making those choices: how can you be against yourself? All cultures allow and restrict behavior based on their shared values, and one shared value is tolerance (or not) for people who have different values. While I'm be free to a NY Yankee Fan in South Boston, the culture there would likely beat me to a pulp regularly for choosing to express allegiance to that sports tribe openly. Alternatively, if I chose to be a NY Yankee Fan in Jakarta, where few people might know what a Yankee is, I might be free to be as big a fan as I like.

If people aren't free to move to a different society (say, a more or less conservative town in their country) then the question is less about individualism and more about mobility. They are related, as your ability to be an individual depends on your ability to find a town that accepts the you that you want to be, but mobility and individualism are not the same thing.

Freedom of expression is one way to think about individualism. The rights of free press and assembly are two good measures to look at. I couldn't find an index value over time for this, but did find that Reporters without Borders does rank nations annually in their freedom of press (The U.S. ranks 47th this year, Finland #1). However, you could define individualism as property rights or other specific freedoms, which would change what data you'd look at answer the question.

What does individualism mean to you? And how would you measure whether a city or nation is making it easier or harder to be an individual?

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Published on March 08, 2012 15:39

Syallabus for my Creative Thinking Course

I used to teach a class at the University of Washington on Creative Thinking. I'd love to teach it again, but these days I travel too much.

Now and then I get asked for the syllabus. Here it is:

Syllabus for COM 597 – How to Create and Manage Ideas (PDF)

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Published on March 08, 2012 13:51

Quote of the day: Woody Guthrie / Born Naked

Quote of the day:

"I see worlds and worlds of rooms and desks where men and women are gathered around in robes, coats, suits and dresses to say what I shall write speak talk and sing. And they tell me that I am locked and barred from singing the true feelings of my nakedest skin. You are gathered here this morning to burn my finest papers. You are here in this room, at this very hour, to tell me that there is something ugly, vile, vulgar about me somewhere, somehow, some way. I excuse your ignorance. I am not ashamed of me nor ashamed of myself. My body is naked now and it was born naked." —Woody Guthrie

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Published on March 07, 2012 16:13

Mindfire #33 book on Kindle for Philosophy

Thanks to all your support and word spreading, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds is the #33 book on philosophy on Kindle.

Cheers to everyone who has helped make this self-published effort such a success. And for you kickstarter folks, another update is coming soon.

If you haven't checked out the book yet, now is a great time. How high can we help the book go? You can even gift it to a friend who has a kindle: all you need is their email address (Click the give as gift button on the right side of the page for Mindfire).

Free Book Giveaway: the first 20 people who leave a comment saying "My mind is cold, I NEED the Mindfire!" will get a free copy of the kindle edition (sent to the email address in your comment).

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Published on February 29, 2012 08:42

Creative Thinking Hacks: Video

Here's my fast track course on creative thinking. Everything you need to know in about 20 minutes, with some excellent Q&A that follows. Thanks to Creative Mornings and David Conrad of Seattle Creative Mornings.

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Published on February 22, 2012 16:56

Glass & Glass on creativity

Ira Glass, of This American Life, interviewed his cousin, the famous composer Phillip Glass. Here are some excerpts on creativity and process (full interview):

Ira: In 1964 you moved to Paris and studied with Nadia Boulanger. Could I ask you to talk about what she was like?

Phillip: I always get into trouble when I talk about her because she wasn't a very nice person. She was a wonderful teacher. She was the great master of music technique. Of counterpoint, of harmony. And she was extremely… demanding. From the first moment you walked in. For example if you arrived at her class and were a minute late it was better just to go home. Because if you came in late you got such an abuse, you were critcized on every level of your being and character and basically if the Metro were slow that day, you just went home"

I: Do you believe there is a pedagoical efficiency to terror?

P: It was at that moment that I understood what she was teaching me. I realized she was teaching the relationship between technique and style. Lets put the question another way. If you listen to a measure of Rachmonanov and measure of Bach you know which is which. You know immediately. The question is why do you know that? They both are following the same rules… but you have in the course of your listening you have recognized that Rachmononv will always solve a certain problem in specific way. You may not say that to yourself but your ear will tell you that… you're hearing the prediciction of the composer to resolve certain problems in a highly personal way.

How hard is to define your personal way of resolving problems?

In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique — you have to have a place to make the choices from. If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.

Looking at your career, one thing that's striking is the # of colalborators you've worked with.

When you find yourself in a place of total ignorance, that's where you can begin again. Learn again. The difficulty with anybody in any ordinary life is how you continue to learn. Everybody has this problem. We get what we call our training and education at a certain point and we spend the rest of our life changing our gears in the same way… The real issue isn't finding your voice, it's how to get rid of it. It's getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you've got the voice you're kind of stuck with it.

You said to Terry Gross, she asked do you ever try to compose to not sound like you…

I do it all the tme and I fail all the time. I learned that the only hope of shaking free of your own description of music was to place yourself in such an untenable situation that you had to figure out something new. That happened with Ravi Shankar in 1964. And I repeated that experience. I do it whenever I can. It means constantly finding new people to work with. The humbling thing is despite how often I've tried to do it, how rarely I've actually suceeded. It's very humbling actually when you realize how hard it is to break out of your own training. It's very very difficult.

How do you feel about that?

If I look at the body of work, over the last 30 years about 30 CDs… it takes about 10 years because the changes are so incremental.

One of the things that strikes me as a listener about the newer pieces is they seem much more romantic and melodic.

Exactly. It depends where you start. Had I stared with romantic music, I'd end up writing minimalist music. But I started writing romatinc music. Basically what point I started from, I left that point.

You can listen to the full interview here.

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Published on February 20, 2012 09:29

The problem with The New Groupthink

I'm an introvert. I like being an introvert. I'm glad someone is clarifying what introverts are or are not, which is part of what Susan Cain does in her New York Times Article, The rise of the new Groupthink. However she's careless in how she makes her case (even though I agree with some of it).

For starters to say "I'm an intro/extrovert" is an overstatement. We all behave differently in different situations and can be more or less extroverted for many different reasons. Many people think I'm an extrovert because I give lectures, like fun debate over beers, and can be a big part of a conversation or a party. But often I'm not that way, and can sit a corner and happily observe or read for hours. I'm the same person in both cases, just in a different mood, situation or atmosphere. It's a false dichotomy to assume because I am introverted in one situation that I am introverted in all. The main factor is if I'm around people I know and like or not, which speaks volumes about coworkers and shared workspaces.

She writes:

Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

Groupthink is a term coined in 1972 by Irving Janis. He described it as: "A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action".

First, you'll find his definition and Cain's diverge. He focused on crisises caused by groupthink (especially military ones, like Pearl Harbor and The Bay of Pigs Invasion), rather than the passive negative effects it has on a culture at large (which is what Cain is after). But this passive cultural notion is what has become the popular use of the term for a long time.

I don't recall there being a time between 1972 and 2012, or possibly ever, when the culture in the business world had swung heavily towards radical individualism. The was no period of "Solothink", where we went too far towards individual isolated creativity, and are now trending back the other way to a "New Groupthink". Staking claims of big trends is self-aggrandizing and is a good way to get attention for selling books or getting web traffic, but that's about it. Collectivism is a natural consequence of being social creatures that lived for eons in tribes.

Second, lone geniuses have never been "in". Not in science. Not in art. Not anywhere. Lone geniuses have always had a hard time because they were loners, and for any idea to gain traction requires other people to want to listen to you, listening being something we more easily grant to people we know and like. Lone geniuses have always been more prone to being outcasts since great ideas force change, and most cultures, and the powerful people in those cultures, naturally want status quo. The lone geniuses whose names we know had teachers, partners, agents and supporters who made their work known: even the most introverted loner genius we know of was not truly alone.

Cain writes:

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist.In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world's great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as "A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.")

Newton was never hit by an apple, and likely most of the apple story is false. But that's fine, as many people don't know the truth there.

But I couldn't find the Csikszentmihalyi study she mentions (no specific reference is offered). Having read some of his work, I know he has found many creatives show both introverted and extroverted tendencies, just as most people do. But to her main point, she is overstating her claims. It's definitely true some people are more creative when they are alone. But everyone is different. Many great creators were collaborators, and had their most famous ideas in the presence of their partners. For many it's the back and forth of time alone, and time with others, that fuels most creative fires.

She presents another false dichotomy. There is no reason a person can't have both solitude and interaction with others in balance. It's not one or the other, ever. Or even as Alan Cooper has suggested, simply split the difference and work on creative projects in pairs.

She mentions Mr. Wozniak's invention of the Apple computer, and his advice:

"the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team."

This is an anecdote from someone who prefers to work alone. I have no idea how much he has considered other people might be different from him or not, or which artists he's talked to or studied. Artists in unavoidably collaborative fields like music and film would disagree with him.

There is a long and rich history of artists working together in shared spaces. Artist communes, artists retreats, artist studios. Edison's Menlo park lab was filled with people much like Wozniak, and for most of them it was the most productive and creative period of their entire lives. Pick any garage based startup company in the history of Silicon Valley, and you'll find a story of people working together, in confined spaces. I'm sure many of them needed more solitude at times than others, but to cast it as a binary choice, either work alone and be a genius, or work in an office and fail, isn't based on any reasonable accouting of the history of invention or of art.

Anyone can go outside, or for a walk, or find some of their solitude on their own time. Better bosses wisely give employees control over environment (e.g. work from home, which is done by more U.S. employees now than ever before) and hours if it makes them more productive (including creative production), but good bosses of any kind are rare. I wouldn't call this the rise of "The New Bossthink" epidemic, but there are some basic certainties undercutting her core premise.

And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I'm talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has "a room of one's own." During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

It has not "overtaken our workplaces or schools". Throughout the history of the U.S. high school class sizes in major urban areas have likely never averaged less than 20 people in this half century. By sheer logistics of the number of students ,or employees, we have always been housed together in small spaces. She doesn't site her sources for office size, and the trend may be for the worse, but the basic notion we share space with other people is quite stable and old. Colleges, universities, and cities like NYC are so dense with people it's very hard to find solitude relative to most of the planet. But all three are well known environments for creative cultures. Exactly how much solitude qualifies? Is it a coffeeshop? A table at the library? Or is a good pair of headphones, great tunes, and a comfortable chair sufficient for some people to achieve it? Solitude is personal, and that's the problem with all the studies. They try to take an averaging of everyone, but there is no average person.

They might be a minority, but there are many examples of very creative output from companies that work in shared, open spaces. Valve, the game company known for Portal and Half-Life, has teams work in large shared rooms (video of their office here). Menlo park, Google, Facebook, Hewlett Packard, all worked in cramped group spaces, at least at first. Since there are some examples, the physical environment can't be the only variable. What is it about Valve or other successful places that allows them to thrive independent of all the research Cain offers? I have my ideas, but I wish Cain offered hers.

The New Groupthink also shapes some of our most influential religious institutions. Many mega-churches feature extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable activity, from parenting to skateboarding to real estate, and expect worshipers to join in.

Churches and religious institutions are odd examples of independent thinking. People join churches to explicitly participate in group thinking, with shared beliefs and codes. They may be even more tightly controlled today, but the core basis for the church in the first place is a fundamental interest to share well defined and old thoughts/beliefs with others.

It's been a bad month for Brainstorming consultants, as Susan Cain takes a page from Lerhrer, with big swings at Osborn and brainstorming:

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The "evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups," wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. "If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority."

She doesn't site a specific study. At least Lehrer named the authors and the publication year for the studies he based his argument on. If a writer refers to a study, they should be obligated to allow the reader to follow their tracks (A name, a university, a year. Something). If they don't want to bother, than they can offer their own opinion, which would be fine. But to say "decades of research says" and give me no idea which papers in the last decade she is referring to, is problematic. Perhaps her book offers more support.

She ends with a moderate and balanced position which I can agree with:

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

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Published on February 16, 2012 12:24

Quote of the day

Here's a good one from Grohl's Grammy award acceptance speech:

"To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human elements of making music is what's most important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do. It's not about being perfect, it's not about sounding absolutely correct, it's not about what goes on in a computer. It's about what goes on in here (points to heart) and it's about what goes on in here (points to head)."

David Grohl

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Published on February 15, 2012 08:10