Scott Berkun's Blog, page 67

How to discuss politics with friends, version 1

My good friends Royal Winchester, Rob Lefferts and I like to talk about things. Eventually we realized there were  some things, mostly political, we were afraid to talk about since they're often polarizing topics that make everyone involved hate each other. Since we like each other, we wanted to avoid that. By going meta, which we are fond of doing, we came up with the following rules, which can help friends talk about contentious issues with each other:

We have bad data. Confirmation bias is the tendency we all have to find one piece of data that supports something we already believe and then stop looking for data. We say "I studied this thoroughly", when really all we did was find one supporting source, something the web makes possible for any claim or belief.  This bias even influences the sources we pick for news and the articles we choose to read, making us blind to the diversity of opinions and data out there. Objectively, we know we don't know everything, but we easily convince ourselves we've been objective when arguing. Everyone should admit they don't have all the data, and the data they do have is  biased because they had a belief before they started looking for data.
We don't really care – if we did,  we'd do something more than argue. Most Americans do almost nothing to support the causes they are willing to argue with for hours with their friends. If you really feel so passionately about whatever this topic is, what are you doing for that cause? If you do little or nothing, step down from your high horse, please. If we really cared, we could at least agree to invest the time to read the other sides data, and then get together to review. That takes commitment, but if there is no commitment, why are we arguing so passionately?
We're arguing about being right. Often with friends there is more ego in the room than people admit. Once things get heated, no one wants to say "I'm wrong" or "That's a good point" or "Maybe I need to rethink my position". If you note from the beginning that everyone wants to be right, it helps diffuse that motive, increasing the possibility people might actually listen to each other. A truly wise person is capable of growing. They can incorporate new ideas into their thinking and change their mind. Wise people are more interesting to talk to, compared to people who endlessly, and thoughtlessly, defend the same position their entire life.
There are smart people on both sides. For highly contentious issues (abortion, religion, taxes, war,etc.), there are smart people on both sides. To portray one point of view as obvious is denial, and to make ad-hominem attacks on people with opposing views denies the complexity of the issue involved. Smart people can be wrong of course, but that doesn't mean the way they're wrong is as trivial to avoid as you assume, or that their ethics and morals are less noble than yours.
What would convince you that you are wrong? If you have no answer to this question, you haven't thought very hard about your position. There must be some set of new facts or conditions in the world that would make you take a different point of view, even if they are unlikely or improbable.  It's not much fun to talk to people who have complete certainty that they're right about everything.

What do you think? We eventually came up with a version 2, which I'll share in a few days.

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The new book: Mindfire. What is it?

One challenge I have is I'm passionate about many things. I've written three successful books, on three very different subjects. Yet I get labeled "The project management guy" or "the innovation dude" or the "public speaking expert", as for many people each individual book is their lens on who I am. This is good. At least I'm seen as an expert on something.

But my ambition is to have the skills as a writer to make any topic interesting. And that's where the new book, Mindfire: Big ideas for Curious Minds, comes in. I've asked for your input on it a few times for things like the cover and the title, but here's more detail.

The book is a collection of 30 of my best essays, articles and posts. It's curated, edited and designed to provide a fun, challenging, but also wide-ranging reading experience. It's the kind of book I could give to anyone, of any age or profession, who is curious about the world, and have them find in the book many things fires up that curiosity and passion for life. That's the goal at any rate.

For you die-hard fans who have been reading here since 2003, the contents of book will be familiar to you. But for most it will be great way to experience the best of what I've written so far in my career, or to revisit favorite essays presented in a different context. I think it will be fun for people who like how I think about management or creativity to see that very same mind applied to more diverse and personal topics. Or an easy way to help me find a new fan, by giving this super accessible book to someone who has never heard of me before.

I'll be blogging more about the book over the next few weeks, including what I've learned about the self-publishing process. Stay tuned. I'm excited and I hope you are too.

If you want to make sure not to miss the book when it's out – sign up for the mailing list.

 

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Help me Teach Seattle How to Drive

Next week I'll be speaking at Seattle Ignite 15 on August 20th. My topic? Teaching Seattle how to drive.

I was born and raised in NYC and despite living in Seattle for almost 15 years, I've still never gotten used to bad driving habits I see all the time.  From the snowpocolypse, to four way stops where no one goes, to camping the left lane, it seems we struggle with the basics of urban driving.

If you live in Seattle, what do you think the biggest deficiencies are in how your fellow citizens drive? If you could get everyone to start, or stop, doing something on the road, what would it be? Leave a comment.

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Bruce Springsteen on Creativity

I'm a Springsteen fan, and like most fans, Born in the USA is my least favorite album (and the song itself is more interesting as an acoustic blues number).  Its the rest of his early catalog that I connect with, and its impressive range of songwriting from orchestral rock  (Born to Run), to poetic and powerful folk (Nebraska). When I failed out of college and was stuck in Queens for a year, it was a mix tape of Springsteen songs I'd listen to every day in the car as I drove to work that got me through.

Recently I watched The Promise: the  making of Darkness on The Edge of Town, one of his earlier albums. This documentary was recently released in a special remastered boxed set, with a copy of his song writing notebook (pictured above). The documentary is done right, with lots of Springsteen discussing his creative process. I've excerpted some of highlights:

About Darkness on the Edge of Town:

"I think it's an honest record, and that's basically what I was trying to make… A reckoning with the adult world. [It's about] a life of limitations and compromises. But also a life of resilience and commitment to life, to the breath in your lungs.

Darkness is a meditation on where are you going to stand? With who? Not forsaking your own inner life force. How do you  hold on to those things? How do you do justice and honor those things?

Whats the part of life you need to compromise? Whats the part of life where you can't compromise, where you'll lose yourself if you do? What is sin in a good life? How do you carry your sins?"

On Success and being great:

The success brought me an audience, it also separated me from all the things I've been trying to make my connections to my whole  life. And it frightened me because I understood that what I have of value [is] at my core and that core was rooted in the  place I'd grown up, the people I'd known, the experiences I had. If  I move away from those things… to go about your life as you desire, without connection… that's where a lot of the people I admired drifted away from the essential things that made them great. More than rich, more than famous, more than happy, I wanted to be great"

On matching the ideas in his head with reality:

"I fantasized these huge sounds, but they were always bigger in my head… the thing I didn't understand was the fundamental equation… there's only so much sonic range. We just assumed everything could sound huge."

On production:

"Bruce would write 5 songs to get 1 song" – Clarence Clemens

"There was a lot of multiversions of all kinds of things. We were always pulling things apart. I had a big junkyard of stuff as the year went by. If something wasn't complete I just pulled out the parts I liked, like taking the parts you need from one car and you put it in the other car so that car runs."

On the power of pop songs:

Part of what pop and rock promised was the never ending now. No, it's about living now. Right now. You need to be alive right now. For those 3 minutes it was all on. All of a sudden you were lifted up to a higher place of living and experiencing and there was this beautiful and ever present now.

On learning how to write:

I go back to most of my writing before greetings and most of it seems terrible to me. Your writing lots of bad words and bad verses.. You're artistic instinct is what you're going on, your artistic intelligence hasn't been developed yet. Hopefully that increases and develops.. At the time I'm going on instinct, and that's a wide open game. I'm following all kinds of paths and all kinds of roads, and I'm going is "that doesn't feel right" that doesn't feel right, that's how I'm judging.

On the magic of performing and making:

"You pull something that doesn't exist out of the air. It doesn't exist… on any given night when your standing there in front of you audience. Nothing exists in that space until you go 1,2,3,4 VOOM.  You and the audience together manifest an entire world. An entire set of values. An entire way of thinking about your life and the world around you. An entire set of possibilities. That can never be taken away."

I also rediscovered Springsteen's interview on Charlie Rose, where he also discusses his creative process.

On working habits around writing:

I wish I did [write every day]. I've gone for a long period of time without writing… because I didn't have an idea. Or whatever is in there is sort of gestating. Its hard to believe, but I think that I've gone long periods of time w/o doing much writing. I've gone thru difficult periods of forcing myself to write. I think what happens is you move in and out of different veins.. you're mining, and you hit a vein, and then you go with that, and then it dries up.

On where his song writing ability comes from:

There were a lot of teachers. I didn't think I had a great talent, I thought I'd be someone who had to work harder than the next guy. And when I was a kid I did work harder, I'd be in my room 8 hours, 6 hours [playing guitar]. At the dance I'd be the guy watching the guitar player all night long.

I felt like It was something I was going to have work at very hard to do well. And the rest is a certain amount of psychology that comes with what kind of person are you.

Are you a watcher?  Are you somebody who jumps in and is active right away or do you watch? Do you stand back and observe? My nature was always to stand back and watch the way things interrelate. What was going on around me. I was too frightened to join, I didn't know how to join in. Observation is a large part of my psychology.

And that has a lot to do with people who go on to write, or take their own thoughts and formulate them in to some thing. Result of a variety of dysfunctions that you've managed to channel into some positive and creative rather than destructive. It came out of that need to sort myself out… So part of it was natural, and part of it I worked really hard at.

 

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How to use bad data for good

There are ways to intentionally use bad data to discover important things.

In a comment from Richard I. Garber on my post about maps and trusting technology, comes this bit of wisdom:

Sometimes the map might be wrong on purpose. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh I noticed that the city map from Gulf Oil always contained a fictitious road connection in Schenley Park between Schenley Drive and the middle of a horseshoe bend on E. Circuit Road. It probably was one of a set of errors for letting them detect if someone had copied their map.

Back when I was a student the printed directory for Carnegie Mellon University used to contain a set of phony names with real addresses, and phony addresses with real names. Those features were for detecting who was reselling it as a commercial mailing list. One of my friends was renamed Wadza Duckworth, and another had his computer science department address relisted as being an always-locked storage closet within a room in Wean Hall. Any time those ringers got mail the sender got a cease and desist letter from an attorney.

Which reminds me of the story of green M&Ms. There's a popular story, perhaps true maybe not, about various stars like J-Lo or Mariah Carrey that they ask for crazy things in their contracts, like only having green M&Ms in their dressing room. That story, if it's false, is likely a mutant version of a different M&M story tied to the band  Van Halen, that is true.

In their prime, Van Hallen put on massive and complex light shows at their concerts. They had complicated stage equipment and their contracts with the arenas they played in on each tour stated very specific requirements. To help them see how well their technical specifications were followed, they added a clause that no brown M&Ms should appear in their dressing room. It was an easy way to test if the entire contract had been read. Upon entering the dressing room and discovering a brown M&M, they'd know instantly that they should check every detail of their tech requirements (Story verified on Snopes).

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Missing maps and the fragility of technology

Recently Tim O'Reilly wrote about how using maps on his phone, and assuming they'd work where he was going, got him into trouble on a recent road trip:

It was a beautiful late spring day towards the end of May, hot even, so the last thing I was thinking about was the possibility that Sierra passes might still be closed. So I was quite surprised to find a sign that the road ahead was closed in 5 miles. I'd have to turn around and retrace my path for over 80 miles.

Now right away, I felt rather betrayed by Google Maps. (Bing Maps was no better.) After all, if the relatively small number of Sierra passes are closed for extended periods of time, how hard would it be to detect that fact and automatically deliver only a working route? Instead, Google provided only a small disclaimer (and one that appears only just before the failed step in the route), that the road ahead "might" be closed. Unless I read the entire list of directions carefully, I wouldn't see the warning till just about the point where I saw it on a road sign! (read full article here)

There's an old story in here about the double edged sword of technology. I left the following comment:

In Plato's Phaedrus, there's a story about King Thamus debating the pros and cons of writing *as a technology* – he feels people will remember less and therefore think less, and the downsides of writing outweigh the benefits.

Its inescapable that each layer of technology we use demands a quiet trade of convenience for dependence, and we're unlikely to notice until its too late to recover. Printed maps work great too until you realize the map is simply wrong (it happens), or doesn't provide enough detail to be of use. All technologies have limits, you just don't notice them unless you're poking at the boundaries of things.

The sensible survivalists talk about contingency – anything you depend on should be within your power to obtain through multiple means. And it seems that's good advice for anyone traveling. Most people who get into trouble when venturing forth are underprepared – what's fascinating is how the convenience of technology has made us comfortable doing many things without any preparation at all.

There's a  similar article about tourists getting into trouble in Death Valley because of GPS.

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Video: My lecture on future of Vaccines

Last month I spoke at Crucell, one of the leading organizations in the world for inventing vaccines.  I gave a short talk on the future and past of innovation in science.   You can also read an interview I did with Giuseppe Marzio, their director of Innovation.

If you want hard core immunology, with cool CGI animations of how vaccines work, check out the Crucell YouTube channel.

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The unavoidable power of compromise

Anyone who makes progress in this world makes compromises.

In the case of the U.S. Government, every gear and cog in the system is based on negotiation. Power is divided into three rings, each ring given a degree of power over the others. Why? To force compromise. Inside Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, each has the power to reject new laws. Why? To force compromise. Even the executive branch has its power muted by many other forces the population likes to pretend aren't there. It's much simpler to point to a singular parental figure, than admit that despite the president's power, he is merely an important cog in a huge, complex system of debates, partnerships, rivalries, and deals (or bribes), with many influential players involved in anything that happens, or does not happen.

One  foundation of the entire system is that longevity comes from continual compromise, based on what the population supports. No one ever gets their way without a bargain. Nothing ever happens without some price or consequence. It is not a system designed for innovation, instead it's designed to slow change  until enough support exists to motivate people to overcome their self-interests. This is part of the design of democracies and republics of all kinds. It was true during the American Revolutionary war, it was true among the Founder Fathers, it was in the air at the writing of the Deceleration of Independence and the Constitution, and was true on every single day since then. The chaos you see in today's crisis has more to do with the fact you are paying close attention as of late, rather than a shift in the longstanding nature of government itself.

John F. Kennedy wrote a book called Profiles in Courage, about senators who stood on principle against their peers. They achieved important legislation, but were not reelected despite how right they were (retrospectively) in their stands. This is not a failure of government, it's another form of compromise. Arguably one that has been lost in the dominance of career politicians who put their longevity in office above all things.

These brave people were willing to sacrifice their political careers for an ideal, something any politician is free to do at any time. Most of us make the opposite kind of choice every day. We compromise our principles to keep a fancy job, or stay in a marriage, or stay in our parents-in-laws' good graces. And since so few of us are willing to make the sacrifices to retain perfect ideals in our own lives, why do we expect more from politicians? They say what they need to to get elected, but to be effective in any way in office demands compromise.

The only people who take true hard lines in this world are the spectators. Fundamentalism of most kinds is the mark of someone on the sidelines. People unwilling to compromise can never take the first step towards power, since they fail to see that all things, including the traditions they see so permanent and immovable, were themselves products of compromises made long before they were born. And it's their own ignorance they are fighting against, not anything of meaning in this world.

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How do you invent vaccines? An interview

Last month I had the honor of being the opening speaker at an event at Crucell, an organization that finds new vaccines for diseases (with an impressive history).   I'm no expert on such things, but I've learned much just by visiting their new office in San Diego.  It's thrilling to speak at different organizations – it reawakens my curiosity, and reminds me there's always another perspective on how ideas work. Plus  I get to meet smart people I'd never meet if I stayed in the same old circles.

My host at this event was Giuseppe Marzio, the Director of Innovation for Crucell.  I asked him if he'd let me interview him, and he kindly obliged.

SB: Do you think creativity is a part of the scientific process? How are scientists trained to come up with ideas?

GM: A large dose of creativity is the key ingredient in every scientific project. Scientists love open issues, unanswered questions, problems awaiting a solution. You observe something you don't understand, that does not fit in the theory, that you can't explain. Why did we not observe this before, how can that be, what can we do to test our hypothesis. Ideas, anybody? Until you understand the mechanism, you know the answer, you solve the problem. Only to find out this leads to new questions.

There is no official training for scientific creativity. Scientists learn from other scientists, mentors, colleagues. We study how others solved similar problem in the past. And there is a very strong selection. Only the very best solutions to the most elusive problems get published in the top journals, thus attracting the attention of the international scientific community. We all like attention, don't we. Publish or perish, as we say.

As director of innovation, what do you do to help create a safe environment for experimentation at Crucell?

Innovation is not an issue, is never an issue. We all are able to generate the most creative ideas. The question is, Do we dare? We don't need more innovation, we need less resistance. Our own, internal resistance, that sometime blocks you, and prevents you from asking that crazy question at a meeting. Missed opportunity for you, for the company, for the world that might be desperately awaiting your idea. And external resistance, when your colleagues, your boss, the whole organization does not seem to understand the greatness of your idea.

My job is to help people overcome their resistance. I help create a work environment where people can meet, have coffee and discuss their latest ideas without feeling they should be doing "real work". I introduce collaboration tools that facilitate the exchange of ideas. I connect people with other people who might understand their idea, fund their idea, make a project of their idea. I help them present their vision in a way that will inspire other people. It is all about people.

What techniques for idea generation and development are commonly used? Do you have brainstorming meetings? Whiteboards in every office, like many tech companies do?

Brainstorming sessions, whiteboards, idea generation meetings are all useful and fine, and we do all of it. But the best ideas materialize almost invariantly when we ask a bunch of people with very different backgrounds to look at the same problem. And we give them time and resources to find their own answers to the problem. That's why we strive to have very mixed teams working together. Not always the fastest track, very often the most interesting.

Many corporations that invest in innovation refer to their creative groups as labs, which is clearly a reference to science laboratories. Since you actually work in a lab, what do you think of this comparison? What could most business executives learn from actually visiting a real science lab?

Lab or laboratory derives from the Latin word labor, which means 1. work, production but also 2. preoccupation, absorption of the mind. Both aspects of the word are very relevant, and there a two lessons two be learned here.

First, you need to work hard in science if you want to succeed. Very hard. Doing innovative research means trying many different approaches, changing experimental settings, writing papers, over and over again. And for one successful idea, experiment, paper, there are dozens that did not make it. Or did not make it first.

And second, you must be able to be totally focused on your idea. Scientists can do that, get completely absorbed by their new hot idea. And while we are at it, it is not just work; it is the way we think, act, and live. Finding the answer then is all that matters. You've got to get personal if you want to find important answers.

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The videos from the event, including my opening talk, can be found on Youtube.

 

 

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Don't Punish Everyone For One Person's Mistake

There are plenty of connections to be made here for parents, legislators, regulators, friends, neighbors, managers and of course business people of all kinds.

Hat tip: Ma.tt

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