Tiago Forte's Blog, page 41

MESA Part 5: The Future of Work That MESA Envisions

MESA Co. considers their method not just a problem-solving tool, but an entirely new way of working. As their ambitions have grown, they’ve begun looking toward a future in which this way of conducting work is nothing more than common sense.

In this article, I’ll outline a vision for what the future of work might look like if MESA has its way.

The era of the briefing is over

Central to the work of so many creative agencies and consulting firms is “the brief.” It is the starting point of every gig. The bible that guides the project to completion. But MESA believes that the era of briefs is over, for several reasons

First, because the assumption underlying briefs has become outdated: that a problem can be fully communicated in a written document. In fact, there is no way for the problem owner to ever convey everything they know. They don’t even know everything they know. So how can you?

Second, because briefs are a formal, bureaucratic process designed to satisfy the needs of administrators, not doers. No one ever writes “I don’t know” in a brief. They fill in some kind of answer, or more commonly, omit that section altogether. It is much easier, on the other hand, to say “I don’t know” in a group setting. This “not knowing” is the opening a maker needs to start exploring. Filling out forms only postpones the learning.

And third, because briefs do not get people excited to work on a project. Especially when working across silos or companies, it is critical to get everyone excited and eager to jump in. Handing them a long, dry document is just about the worst way to do so. MESA doesn’t allow clients to give participants a brief at any point. It would defeat the very energy they are trying to create.

What will replace the venerable brief? A mission. But it’s not enough to just change what you call it. A mission brings with it a certain context. Missions are completed by small, dedicated teams focusing completely on an objective. Missions strive for important and strategic outcomes under uncertain circumstances. There is an element of risk in completing a mission.

The future of work that MESA envisions is one in which boring briefs are replaced by challenging, but meaningful missions targeting the world’s most pressing issues.

We believe in doing

One of MESA’s favorite slogans is “We believe in doing.” The subtext continues, “…rather than debating.” This imperative runs deep in their culture – that it is doing that produces progress, not talking.

Their standard of success is not any of the typical ones used by most agencies or consultants: meeting the deadline, on-time and on-budget performance, customer satisfaction, or complying with the letter of the brief. A successful MESA is one in which the prototype becomes real.

It is a punishing standard, since so much of what makes a prototype into a real product is outside MESA’s control. No agency would touch such a metric with a ten-foot pole. But it is essential to MESA’s outlook on what they are working for: something real in the hands of real people, not a prototype on a shelf. Large companies now have the talent to do the hard thinking. What they hire MESA for is to help them take the next step into action.

Founder and CEO Bárbara explains that, without holding themselves to such a standard, it would be too easy to fall back into the “workshop world.” She recounts that out of 140 MESAs, there are only 7 that didn’t produce a successful prototype. She counts these as failures, even though the client got value from the experience.

The future of work that MESA envisions is one in which consultants, contractors, agencies, and even employees take responsibility for the ultimate results of their work, instead of just fulfilling their own narrow duties.

Social responsibility will be part of every product

Looking at MESA Co’s client list sometimes inspires a raised eyebrow – they work frequently with companies like Coca-Cola, Dow Agro, Nestle, and McDonald’s that have been criticized in an era of corporate responsibility.

MESA Co’s mindset is one of positive engagement. By working closely with these companies, they have found that they are able to shift how the company thinks about their impact on the world. When first formulating the mission and inviting external participants, it quickly becomes clear that the product has to have a connection to a worthy cause or important problem. Otherwise, experts and makers just won’t be interested in helping. The MESA process reveals that making socially responsible products is not just a marketing strategy anymore. It is essential for attracting the best talent.

This is a different approach to corporate responsibility. Instead of shaming or isolating companies and their products, they are invited to excel and to innovate beyond the constraints that currently lead them into questionable behavior. This makes them the source and the owner of their corporate responsibility, instead of just minimally complying.

The future of work that MESA envisions is one in which companies do good while doing well, not because it looks good, but because it delivers the best possible results.

The conviction of the maker

We are living in the midst of the “Maker Movement.” Around the globe, garage hobbyists and weekend warriors are making software, hardware, and content for side income, for fun and learning, or to solve a problem in their community

But in the future, everyone will need to have the attitude of a maker. They’ll need to know how to make things of high quality, even if that’s just a webpage, a text document, or a well-crafted email. They will need to have ownership over what they make, advocating for it in their organizations. They will need a spirit of curiosity and constant learning, to stay abreast of the changes rocking every profession and industry.

As Bárbara Soalheiro says, “Part of what we do is trying to understand how things are made. And that breaks this idea that there is a certain path that you have to follow. Participants get a better understanding that it can be easier than they thought, more in their hands than they thought. They get a better understanding that everything there is has been created. And if everything there is, is created, then I can create something that is completely new. Or that someone hasn’t told me to do before.”

Makers know how things work, or they know how to figure it out. They know that anything can be hacked. They understand that anything can be modified, enhanced, or adapted if you open the cover and tweak things. This “hacker” mindset is often totally foreign to people working in large companies, who are used to relying on a process for everything they need. Working with the MESA Co. staff and external experts and makers, they quickly learn that there is no prescribed path you have to follow to make most things. If you leave out what isn’t essential, you can often create a prototype in a matter of hours that gives you most of the learnings of the full-fledged version.

Working on concrete, functional prototypes has a final benefit: it is very clear what everyone needs to do after the MESA ends. There is a jerry-rigged but coherent thing sitting on someone’s desk, not just a pile of “takeaways” to decipher. In some cases, this prototype can be taken directly into production, instead of spending months in deliberations.

The future of work that MESA envisions is one in which people work out of personal conviction, not obligation. This conviction comes from personal involvement in the nitty gritty details, and seeing how every detail determines the final impact on someone with a need.

The power of feminine leadership

It’s hard to ignore that MESA is a company founded and led almost exclusively by women. Although this was not an explicit intention, it also wasn’t an accident.

Bárbara explains the connection to MESA’s founding metaphor: “A MESA is always better when it closely resembles one of those long lunches, where you enjoy yourself, but also have a conversation and argue. There’s something powerful in receiving someone well, in taking care of whoever shows up. And that seems very feminine to me.

One of the key roles in every MESA is “Experience Leader.” This person takes care of every little detail, from the place settings to the interior decoration to the food. The job of the Experience Leader is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable and at home. And this role has always been filled by a woman.

Contrasting feminine leadership with the masculine version that is so often the default, Bárbara says, “I think men really feel a pressure to be at the center of attention…Women tend to be more comfortable with the number 2 position. And there’s something very cool about that, in being okay with doing good work alongside someone you consider incredible…It would be a problem if everyone had to always be #1.”

For MESA Co., feminine leadership is about realizing that the more people shine, the better the MESA will be. It is about realizing that it doesn’t take away your power to give power to others. Power is multiplicative – the more you give away, the more you have. The MESA experience naturally tends to loosen the grip that people have on protecting their egos.

As Bárbara puts it, “It is about involving them in the situation that we all need to do this, we only have a couple of days, so you don’t really have time to bullshit, to be very ego-centric. It was very interesting when we started working with companies, bringing decisionmakers like presidents, owners of companies to the table, how the format didn’t allow them the space for their egos…That causes people to finally understand what collaboration is about. It is not about being nice, it is not about doing good to the world, it is about finding the perfect match between your self-motivation and a collective, shared motivation.”

The future of work that MESA envisions is one in which the viewpoints and the opinions of a talented group of professionals can become subsumed into a collective mission. Not against their will, and not forever, but occasionally, in service of a mission that is greater than any single person.

Transformation

The MESA Co. team doesn’t often talk about it, but there is a transformation that happens in the week, sometimes and for some people.

Creative, talented people, sequestered in a room and pushed to the edge of their capabilities, find themselves amazed at how much can be accomplished in how little time. For the first time, they see something through from beginning to end, and show it to the world as their own creation.

Bárbara describes this epiphany: “It is the same feeling you get from when you bake a cake for the first time. The cake wasn’t there. You just have flour, eggs, and sugar. And then you take it out of the oven and then it’s a cake. If you have ever baked a cake, you know that feeling. It is really powerful.”

The transformation is conceiving of oneself as a creator. As the source of everything that could be. The future of work that MESA envisions is a future of our own creation.

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The Ecommerce Influence Podcast: Why You Should Stop Organizing And Build A Second Brain

I recently recorded an interview with Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell of Ecommerce Influencers, in which we talked about how capturing and saving knowledge can enhance everything from employee onboarding to marketing to gaining perspective on life.

Listen below or click here for show notes and a full transcript:

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

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MESA Part 4: The Origins of MESA

The MESA Method is full of firmly held beliefs and sharp distinctions. To understand why they’re so important, you have to understand where they came from. I recently sat down with Bárbara Soalheiro, the founder and CEO of MESA Co., and Lígia Giatti, her number 2, to try and understand the origins of this new way of working.

The journalistic instinct

Bárbara traces the beginnings of MESA all the way back to her first job. After graduating from college, she entered the New Talents program at Editora Abril, the biggest publishing house in Latin America. She worked on a magazine called Superinteressante (meaning “Superinteresting”), which involved diving deep into topics such as mental health or prostitution or alternative medicine for 3 to 4 months at a time, before turning it into a feature piece.

This was the beginning of her fascination with immersive deep dives into interesting topics.

By the time she was 26, Bárbara became the youngest ever editor-in-chief at Editora Abril. She was charged with a major restructuring of the teen brand Capricho, which included a magazine, a website, a range of licensed products, and events. Her approach was a radical change from the magazine’s past: to treat young girls and their concerns as legitimate and worthy of attention, instead of as trivial and silly.

In 2006 they launched a new edition, and the only story related to beauty was a serious inquiry into why frizzy hair was automatically assumed to be bad. Bárbara recalls thinking hard about why the magazine had been such an important part of her teenage years. She realized that it was the one place that took her concerns seriously. She remarks, “Hair is actually the most important problem in the life of a 13-year old girl!”

Working at these magazines formed the foundation of Bárbara’s career and professional outlook. Her experience as a journalist taught her how to seek out the best person to help her answer a question or solve a problem. It gave her experience in creating products targeted to a very specific audience. And critically, to deliver those tangible products on a regular basis.

Learning by doing

In 2008, Bárbara was invited to work at Fabrica, the communications research center for the Italian clothing brand Benetton in Treviso.  There Bárbarta became editor-in-chief of Colors, a magazine founded in 1991 by photographer Oliviero Toscani and art director Tibor Kalman to “show the world to the world.” The magazine looks at social issues around the world through the lens of first-person interviews and attention-grabbing photography.

Colors gave Bárbara’s her first in-depth experience with technology. She worked on the digital transformation of the magazine, turning their website into an early collaborative platform and launching one of the first ever augmented reality issues in the world.

Working on these projects, Bárbara fell in love with an open-ended, improvisational style of working that favored learning by doing. She says: “At Fabrica, this really unique place which I’m really in love with, I had the happiest two years of my life. It was working in an environment that was super chaotic, dramatic and intense. There were no rules. There isn’t a really clear idea why you are there. Some people hate it. It made some people leave because they couldn’t function in an environment like that. But it gave me the opportunity to just do whatever I wanted. And by doing whatever I wanted, to learn how to do it.”

Entering the world of advertising

Returning to Brazil in 2010, Bárbara took on the role of Creative Director at Cubocc, a digital ad agency in São Paulo. She found the transition from journalism to advertising jarring: “Advertising in an agency is a completely different thing and it didn’t make much sense to me, a journalist. One thing I really didn’t get was why I had to solve a problem for Google without people from Google. I used to think: no one knows more about this than my client, why can’t I sit with him and work? It seemed not very smart to me.”

It was during her brief tenure at Cubocc that the idea of MESA was born. She used as her starting point the atmosphere she wanted to create – home-cooked dinners with family and friends seated around a table. She recalls: “It is really important to me, this idea of sharing the same table. So MESA is born from that: sharing the same table, and picking carefully the people who are sitting around this table. And we will make sure that in every group there are all these skills we need to deliver that specific project. And, we make sure that the people come from as different backgrounds as possible. That automatically makes the experience really interesting for everyone.”

In a 74-page Google Doc called “The school,” Bárbara poured out her core beliefs about the best way to work in creative fields, which had emerged from her experience as a journalist, researcher, editor-in-chief, and creative director:

It’s no use waiting for certainty

People want one more study or one more survey to confirm that they are going the right direction. But nothing is 100% certain today. Everything is changing rapidly, and we need to learn to take action anyway.

Making decisions is essential

Decisive decisions carry a team forward. But it takes courage to make a decision when you’re not certain it’s the right one. But if you can’t operate from this place of vulnerability, you’re going to feel ever more vulnerable in this world.

Listen before talking

Thinking you already know the answer is one of the greatest impediments to learning. The best results come from those who are the most open to new ideas.

The problem is always about the whole business

Large organizations tend to treat problems as isolated to one specific division or area. But the greatest problems touch every part of a business. Sometimes the solution can be found in marketing, but sometimes you have to change the product, or make a change in the logistics. Every problem should be treated holistically.

You MUST work with the problem owner

It doesn’t work to “outsource” problems to someone else. The person who is closest to the problem and owns it must be deeply involved in the creation of the solution. If the problem owner can’t participate, there is no MESA.

To work is to create

To work is to create things, which is one of the most fundamental human needs. As such, work should be treated with a certain respect. But often it becomes so procedural and so rote, that people lose touch with the final product or impact it will have.

Independent MESAs

Using these beliefs as a foundation, the first MESAs were “independent,” in that they weren’t delivered for a corporate client. Bárbara viewed the experience initially as a form of professional education, teaching real-world skills through doing, rather than theory.

She started by inviting well-known professionals to “take the head of the table,” including people like Perry Chen, the founder of Kickstarter; advertising expert and serial entrepreneur Cindy Gallop; and “human cyborg” Neil Harbisson. Together they chose a mission that connected to or advanced the work of these headliner names, which is what drew them. Participants paid for the chance to work up close with these thought leaders.

Bárbara explains her thinking: “The first idea was that when you hear someone speak – in a TED conference, for example – you get very inspired. But it’s only when you work with that person – see how he/she makes decisions, how they solved unexpected problems, where they invest energy and where they don’t – that you really learn from them. And when you are a professional with 5 or 10 years experience what you need isn’t inspiration, but this kind of learning.”

MESA started out as a “school for professionals,” where a team of participants would pay to work with someone known for their creativity, experience, or unique perspective. Unlike any other form of professional learning, the team had to deliver something tangible at the end of 5 or 6 days. Bárbara tested this educational format with 7 MESAs over 16 months, slowly working up the courage and the credibility to pitch it to a paying client.

In 2013, MESA Co. began running MESAs for paying corporate clients. Bárbara hired her first co-leader, Lígia Giatti, who is now her right-hand woman and head of U.S. operations. Together they’ve delivered 140 MESAs for more than 30 clients in 8 countries, for companies like Google, Fiat, Samsung, Nestle, and Coca-Cola.

Never use the word “collaboration”

Over this period of testing and refining the MESA method, new beliefs and principles slowly came to the surface.

During the preparation for one early MESA, Bárbara overheard a member of their small team inviting an external participant to “take part in a collaborative process.” A lightning bolt shot through her – she knew it was wrong, but couldn’t immediately explain why.

The reason soon became clear, and has become one of MESA’s core beliefs: to never use the word “collaboration,” because it invites people to work without responsibility. In the experience of MESA Co., using that word creates an environment where no one is responsible for anything in particular. People will “collaborate” to produce a mediocre, middle-of-the-road solution, which usually isn’t one they are truly proud of.

Bárbara cites as an example working with Fernando Meirelles, the respected Brazilian director of such films as City of God. She needed him to show up at the table as nothing less than “someone who knows how to tell stories with moving pictures that reach millions of people.” He needed to own and to advance that responsibility with all his enthusiasm and energy. Bárbara explains, “If you give someone a territory, they will hold that territory and you will have excellent results.”

It is this belief that inspires many aspects of the “MESA experience.” Invitations are made not to “participate,” but to take direct ownership of a specific ”pillar of knowledge.” Each pillar is essential to the fulfillment of the mission, and unique to that person’s expertise. Even the venue and the place settings are designed to impart a sense of gravity and importance. Every participant must feel that they are there for a reason.

Bárbara explains, “We want the best each person has to offer – when the leader uses the word collaboration, it blocks them from understanding why they need each person…This will make it more likely that you’ll have people you don’t need.”

Results over process

Other core beliefs developed in response to what MESA calls the “Workshop World.” These are default attitudes that have taken root among facilitators over the years, and have become ingrained and unquestioned.

In one early MESA that did not fulfill its mission, Bárbara noticed that the Leader had told participants repeatedly to “trust the process.” She realized that this had caused them to lose focus on the final result, to proceed blindly in the face of evidence that no progress was being made.

She tells people today to NOT trust the process. She explains that “When you emphasize the process, you get something in the middle ground, and the middle ground is never excellent.” The focus should instead be on the final result, and whatever it takes to produce it.

Bárbara cites the example of a MESA in which the participants were 11 year-olds. The initial idea was to have them create a collaborative art project, which would become the homepage of the client company. But then they realized that most kids aren’t good at drawing. They had to make a decision: trust the process and put up with whatever it produces, or change the process in order to produce the best possible results?

They chose the results, and adapted the MESA process to produce it. A professional illustrator was hired to turn the best of the drawings into a homepage that met a high standard of excellence. Although there was some disappointment on the part of the kids, in the end everyone could be proud of the solution they contributed to, even if indirectly.

Lígia explains it this way: “Trusting the process has people think more about the process they’ll be participating in, and less about the result.” And a MESA Leader is focused above all else on the result.

The bigger the challenge, the better the MESA

In more recent years, a few lingering questions about when and where the MESA Method applies have been resolved through experience.

For example, “How big of a challenge can a MESA be used for?” After numerous experiments with a wide range of clients, MESA Co. have concluded that it isn’t the size of the challenge that determines the feasibility. Because the most talented people are driven by the greatest challenges, in Bárbara’s words, “The more difficult the challenge we get, the better the MESA is.”

What does need to be calibrated is the mission and the prototype. The Leader and her team needs to determine what the team can make in a 5-7 day timeframe that will help unlock the problem. This is a question of experience and judgment, to thread the needle between feasibility and ambition.

Bárbara cites a MESA with the Italian automaker Fiat as an example. The problem was, “How can you create a connected car when everyone has a better system in their pocket?” She knew that everyone who had anything to do with cars was thinking hard about this problem. It is an enormous challenge, and MESA Co. had to think of a prototype that would meaningfully advance a solution in just a week.

Following her instincts as a journalist, Bárbara reached for the most talented person she could find: a well-known and respected car designer working in Tokyo on one of the world’s biggest brands. He had never heard of MESA and didn’t know what to expect, but the pitch was irresistible: to fly to Brazil for a week to work directly with the decision makers at Fiat, along with 15 people with all the relevant skills and knowledge he would need.

They knew they couldn’t prototype a car in 5 days, but they could prototype an online store selling connected car accessories. Such a storefront could be created in hours, and would allow for enough learning to forge a path forward for the company.

Anyone can take part in a MESA

Another lingering question was, “Who can participate in and benefit from a MESA?” Internally, the team used the example of a dentist as someone who probably wouldn’t work very well in such a free-form environment.

That is, until they actually had a dentist take part in one. The “cyborg artist and transpecies activist” Neil Harbisson led an independent MESA, and chose as his mission creating a “telepathic tooth” that would allow him to communicate with others subvocally.

They decided that they needed a dentist to advise on the feasibility and health implications of the implant. He turned out to be an enthusiastic and critical contributor, helping develop a hardware prototype that could be tested within one week. Bárbara reports that he had a transformational experience, and has become one of their most ardent supporters.

A new view of diversity

One question I had for Bárbara about the multidisciplinary team that makes up a MESA was, “How do you mitigate the friction between different disciplines?” Working across so many different fields sounds great in theory, but I wanted to know how such a diverse team could work together effectively.

It turns out that it is this very friction that is essential to MESA’s success. Finding themselves in a room of non-specialists, each participant is forced to put aside the jargon, shortcuts, and conventions that are commonly used in their profession, but that can often hide what needs to be revealed. They have to set aside the built-in assumptions of their discipline, introducing what they know in a new way.

One of MESA Co’s most loyal clients is Coca-Cola, and they have done numerous MESAs together. Each and every time, their employees are asked to introduce themselves and their product anew. “But everyone knows what Coke is…” they say, but it is in these re-explanations that new insights are found. Instead of assuming that “everyone knows,” they have to explain it as if no one does.

“Having diversity forces you to go back to the essentials,” Bárbara explains. Each participant begins to see the people around the table as resources, instead of hidebound specialists. This view of diversity is not about keeping up appearances or meeting an artificial quota. It is about producing the best possible results, The MESA team has found again and again that the greater the diversity of the team, the more relevant the solution is to the world. The diversity of the team needs to match the complexity of the challenge.

Five people with the same knowledge and same experience arguing around a table simply do not produce breakthroughs. It is the sixth person, with their new angle and new lens, that can see what no one else can see. This leads Lígia to identify diversity as key to the speed and effectiveness of a MESA: “I don’t believe you can reach the result in 5 days without a diverse group.”

The MESA Method of today is the product of a long journey, including both breakthroughs and breakdowns. It borrows from journalism, advertising, research, branding, and technology to accomplish the seemingly impossible: to “conceive, develop, and prototype something in less than 7 days.”

This requires recruiting the most talented people in the world. As Bárbara describes it, “We look for people who are running some of the most innovative and forward thinking businesses of our time. Real doers who can share their mistakes and learnings and, therefore, accelerate decision-making. We are not talking about a specific pool of professionals that we fish from. We are talking about finding the best person – whoever they are, wherever they are – for that specific challenge. In that sense, MESAs resemble good journalism: go and find who can countbest help you.”

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The 60 Inventions that Shaped Information Technology

This is a summary of my tweetstorm on the history of information technology, drawn from the excellent book Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages by Alex Wright. I mean “information technology” in the broadest possible sense – the methods and tools we use to manage information in all its forms.

1/ This is a tweetstorm of the major milestones & inventions in the history of information technology. From the best book I’ve found on the subject, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright. Affiliate link: amzn.to/2qy1THY

2/ There’s two major dualities that Wright identifies weaving through this history: between hierarchies & networks, each one disrupting and then giving rise to the other; and oral vs written culture, each one setting the stage for innovations in the other

3/ Invention #1: Symbolic thought. Seems to have arisen in humans about 45k years ago, during period of rapid climate change. One theory says that scarce resources required humans to form tighter groups for cooperation & competition. Symbolic thought arose to manage social dynamics

4/ #2: Social networks. Social imitation & exchange allowed humans to manage higher orders of information, by pooling sensory data and allowing individuals to draw on collective experience for survival and problem-solving

5/ #3 Ethnobiographical hierarchies: the basic structure of a family was the earliest template for classifying anything. Anthropologist Cecil Brown studied preliterate cultures and found “universal tendency to divide knowledge of plants/animals into five or six nested categories”

6/ Preliterate cultures also all tend to treat mid-level of hierarchy as the “true name” of something. I.e. a “rose” is more a rose than a “plant.” This psychologically primary category is echoed today as we know plants/animals by their genus, which is in the middle of the hierarchy

7/ #4 Beads and pendants: first symbolic objects adopted by Ice Age peoples. Made of stone, shells, ivory, this “ornamental tech” allowed them to imbue objects with emotion, status, significance, allowing them to forge wider social networks of trust

[image of history of beads]

8/ #5 Bullae (tokens): first written notations, invented in Uruk in ancient Sumer around 5000 BC. Shaped as disks, cones, spheres, tetrahedrons, ovoids, cylinders, triangles, or animal heads, each token represented some form of commercial transaction

[image error]

A bulla (or clay envelope) and its contents on display at the Louvre. Uruk period (4000 BC–3100 BC).

9/ This was first instance of long-running pattern: new forms of information technology first arise for commercial purposes. Writing first emerged as “craft literacy,” later extending to other more creative forms

10/ #6 Writing media (clay tablets, papyrus, engraved bronze/copper): growing volume of transactions required more scalable medium, for government archives, laws, decrees, property records, contracts, treaties, chronicles of battles, etc.

11/ Very beginnings of literature started here, as battles often contained as much fiction as fact. Commercial writing gave rise to astronomy, prophesies, & scientific observations, with first formal writing programs to teach scribes

12/ #7 Document index: oldest index, a tablet with a list of other tablets, found in Ebla, Syria dating to 2300 BC. They don’t seem to be in any discernible order though

[image error]

One of the Ebla tablets

13/ #8 Document abstract: like a proto-catalog, with keywords for previewing the content of tablets, and call numbers to help find them, found in Hittite settlement of Hattusas near modern Ankara

[image error]

Treaty of Kadesh tablet, one of the oldest known international peace treaties between the Hittites and the Egyptians under Ramesses II, in 1259 or 1258 BC. Part of royal cuneiform archives known as the Bogazkoy archives

14/ #9 Bilingual standard: Babylon was first culture to have two languages – one for daily vernacular and another (Sumerian) for exalted written text. Like Medieval Europe (with Latin and vernacular), this allowed early formation of wide scholarly networks beyond local languages

15/ #10 Library: Assyrian King Ashurbanipal formed first library in 7th century BC in Mesopotamia. Confiscated every tablet in every temple and home in the entire kingdom to do it, stamping every one with name of scribe and king

[image error]

Tablet containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet 11 depicting the Deluge), now part of the holdings of the British Museum

16/ This first library established traditions of associating library with worship of deity, following stated acquisition guidelines, & dedicated multi-lingual staff. Earliest libraries were vessels of political power, cementing royal authority & intellectual capital

17/ Other early libraries formed in China in 1400 BC, in Egypt at Thebes in 1225 BC, and India in 1000 BC. They each followed pattern of writing allowing agricultural settlements to become nation states, and then empires, with great flowering of literature

18/ Emperor Shi Huangdi of China burned every book in kingdom in 213 BC, priceless trove of early Confucian and Taoist texts known as the Heavenly Archives (whose most famous curator was Lao Tzu). Planted seed for great ancient Chinese classification system the Seven Epitomes

[image error]

Killing the Scholars and Burning the Books (18th century Chinese painting)

19/ #11 Phonetic writing: reemerging Greek civilization borrowed phonetic script from Phoenicians, with letters signifying sounds instead of ideas. Drastically simplified reading and writing, by using only 24 symbols

[image error]

The Phoenician phonetic alphabet

20/ #12 Theoretic thought: ancient Greeks were first to make the leap from mythic to “theoretic” thought, i.e. ability to reflect on thought process itself. Objectivity allowed them to compare, assess, excavate new layers of text through analysis

21/ #13 Formal biological taxonomy: Aristotle developed fascination with categorization in 4th century BC Athens, proposing comprehensive taxonomy of natural world that distinguished mammals, vertebrates, & introduced binomial naming (genus + species)

22/ Aristotle also introduced metaphysics into classification, distinguishing between matter & form (individual instances vs ideal forms) to claim that all phenomena could be described in terms of substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, & passion

23/ Aristotle envisioned what we would call a web of semantic relationships: causality, equivalence, identity, similarity, family, inside of, bigger than, and earlier than. His Great Chain of Being cosmic hierarchy would remain standard for 2k years until modern Linnaean system

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1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana

24/ #14 Universal public library: Great Library at Alexandria, established 300 BC, was first with ambition to classify all world’s knowledge. With 700k items at peak, it was largest library for 1k years afterward

25/ Scholarly environment with wide colonnades, open spaces for strolling and talking. Ptolemy offered big incentives for scholars to study there, including room & board, generous tax-free salary, lifetime employment

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Artist’s depiction of the Library of Alexandria

26/ #15 Library acquisition backlog: Alexandria library’s acquisition policy was “acquire everything,” and any ship docking at harbor had written works confiscated & added to library. Vast warehouse stored incoming items

27/ #16 Systematic abstraction of meta-data: by Alexandria librarian Zenodotus, rudimentary scheme that assigned books to different rooms by subject. Small tags attached to each scroll described the work’s title, author, and subject

28/ #17 Bibliography: poet and librarian Callimachus was the first to create a separate catalog of the collection, a comprehensive bibliography by author known as the Pinakes. It filled 120 scrolls despite him only finishing 20%

29/ #18 Bicameral collection: Julius Caesar decreed that great library be built just before his death in 44 BC. Statesman Pollio ran with it and built first great Roman public library with support of Catullus, Horace, Virgil

30/ Rome established tradition of dividing library collections into two parts: in this case, Latin and Greek (later, would become Christian and pagan works). Libraries were open to public, had reading rooms, and some allowed private borrowing

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Artist’s depiction of a Roman library

31/ #19 Salons: Rome established early intellectual salons, where literary, social, political groups could gather to discuss things. Librarians (procurators) had dedicated staff and enjoyed high prestige in society

32/ #20 Books (finally!): 12-foot long papyrus scrolls were unwieldy and had to be read linearly. Codex book, named for attempts to “codify” Roman law, started replacing scrolls. Leafed pages in thick hard covers enabled random access, portability, and durability

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The Codex Siniaticus is the oldest known complete text of the Bible, from ca. 350 AD. This copy was discovered in 1844 at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai

33/ #21 Mass production: Roman nobleman Cassiodorus fled siege of Rome and established literary oasis at family estate in Calabria. He established a monastery called a “Vivarium” that would actively produce books, not just archive them

34/ Vivarium became most prolific center of book production in Europe, introducing new faster binding techniques & mechanical lighting to be able to work into the night. These books were duplicated precisely & became canonical texts throughout Christendom

35/ In his work “Foundations of Divine and Secular Literature,” Cassiodorus proposed unified organizational scheme for scriptural AND secular texts, eventually adopted by the Vatican. Actually became precedent for treating secular works on equal footing with religious ones

36/ Cassiodorus also pioneered annotation of texts (marginalia) and specialized, lower-level organizational schemes for specific genres

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Vivarium from the Bamberg manuscript of the Institutiones

37/ #22 Manuscript templates: Charlemagne secularized scribal trade by forbidding priests from conducting business transactions. He invited renowned scholar from York named Alcuin to establish great imperial library

38/ Alcuin established a central repository for distributing template manuscripts, making them easier to copy and distribute across the growing empire. He also introduced streamlined script, Carolingian minuscule, which our typefaces are a direct descendant of

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Charlemagne receives Alcuin, 780. Artist: Schnetz, Jean-Victor (1787-1870)

39/ #23 Manuscript preservation: during European dark ages, libraries shifted away from brute accumulation to preservation of knowledge. Reproducing codex books required several skilled workers: skinner, parchment maker, beekeeper (for wax tablets), painter, book binder, & scribe

40/ #24 Private collections: monasteries maintained their own small, idiosyncratic collections, with the armarius in charge of them second only to the abbott in rank. Books were very valuable and kept under lock and key

41/ #25 Scholarly networks: monastic librarians began consulting popular biographical works as guides to growing their collections, which laid foundation for scholarly networks as they coordinated their collections, used similar structures, and borrowed hard-to-find works

42/ #26 Modern catalog: in 1170 first known “scrutinium” emerged, a catalog of monastery’s collection of books. 1495 catalog of the Carthusian cloister Salvatorberg in Erfurt stands as the largest known catalog of the late Middle Ages

43/ #27 Cross-cultural translation & preservation: Muslim world was unlikely haven of written knowledge, since Arabs were oral, tribal culture and Muhammad couldn’t read. But Baghdad had at least 36 libraries, with more than 100 book dealers before falling to Mongols in 1258

44/ In 1004 AD, caliph al-Hakim opened House of Wisdom in Cairo, said to contain 1.6 million books. It was open to the public and books were free to copy, in contrast to jealously guarded European collections

45/ Muslim world preserved a lot of European/Greek thought during Dark Ages: when emperor Justinian closed great school at Athens, 7 prominent teachers went into exile in Persia, which became a repository of Greek philosophy, poetry, science

46/ Arabs conquered Persia and translated these texts. This fueled 500 years of regional dominance and technological progress that made Europe seem like a cultural backwoods

47/ Arabian intellectual heritage seeped back into Europe through southern Italy and Spain, before Mongol invasions left most great Muslim libraries in ashes. This seeded European Renaissance

48/ #28 Illuminated manuscript: transplantation of written culture to warring, feudal, shamanistic tribes of Ireland kicked off by St. Patrick was extraordinarily successful. Irish were first people to be introduced to writing via the book, giving them non-linear way of reading

49/ Ireland became literary R&D center, populated by innovative scribes protected from chaos of dark ages. Within 100 yrs they were producing beautiful manuscripts with provocative illustrations that became gold standard for Europe

50/ Anti-hierarchical, individualistic Celtic ethos infiltrated back to Continental Europe, bringing them lavish illustrations, marginalia, & layered type styles. Irish scribes were proto-multimedia bloggers, fusing words & images in non-linear, colorful, individualistic works

51/ #29 Punch-transfer technique: Medieval Europe saw invention of first semi-mass production of books. Punch-transfer technique “pricked” an overlaying page that served as a kind of stencil. Powder dusted through the holes of the stencil were used by illustrator as a guide

52/ This allowed rise of such secular best-sellers as physiologus (or bestiary), with simple verse descriptions of animals + colorful illustrations. First editions were Biblical but over time became like a proto-encyclopedia, documenting many species and spreading all over Europe

53/ #30 Universities: books began to find audience among emerging bourgeoisie, who were educated at secular universities. Secular book industry began to take shape, with scholars, students, booksellers, professional copyists, and “stationers” fueling book trade

54/ Universities turned out graduates, who sought new types of popular texts written in vernacular: travel journals, poems, romances, lives of saints, and Book of Hours. Christopher Columbus’ travels in the Americas was a best-seller

55/ #31 Paper!: fueled preliminary information explosion, replacing parchment and vellum with pulp-based product. Cost of materials plunged and editions of books became cheaper, driving adoption

56/ #32 Wood block printing: precursor to printing press, allowed reproduction of books at a faster, cheaper pace. Set the stage for Gutenberg

57/ #33 Curators: in Rome, Pope Sixtus IV initiated great expansion of Vatican Library, establishing role of scriptores (curators of the collection). Vatican Library catalog of 1475 provides unique glimpse into evolving organization of knowledge

58/ #34: Printing press: initially enthusiastically embraced by monks, who saw it as more efficient way of spreading the gospel. Wealthy man acted like venture capitalists, funding establishment of new presses as far away as Paris, Lyons, and Seville

59/ #35 Roman typefaces: scholastic books were printed in black gothic letters. Vernacular works used bastarda gothic. New “littera antique” typeface took hold among humanists, the ancestor of today’s familiar roman typefaces

60/ New standardized roman typefaces extinguished idiosyncratic, local styles that characterized illuminated manuscripts. This was a rejection of medieval scholasticism in favor of secular wisdom of the ancients

61/ #36 Standardized book conventions: books started becoming a commodity, leading to more standardization in title/chapter pages & colophons. Roman type became equivalent of ASCII type today: a universally recognized standard that sped the flow of information across a distant network

62/ Secular book trade took off, with demand for calendars, almanacs, and classical works along with religious texts. By 1500 printing presses had already produced 8 millions books, and 200 million by end of 16th century

63/ #37 Textual communities: spread of documents and literacy led to formation of textual communities based around written works, especially anti-establishment works. Movable type granted authority to a text, which could now be interpreted by anyone, not just scholarly elite

64/ #38 Broadsheet: falling prices and mass production allowed reformists to print broadsheets, posters announcing meetings, and post all over town. Allowed growth of underground movements without support of church and state

65/ In general, printing press unleashed enormous violence as linear, left-brained way of thinking came into conflict with traditional, oral/visual right-brain culture. Spread of printing coincided almost perfectly with witch burning

66/ #39 Art of memory: first practiced by Simonides, Greek poet who in 5th century BC described method for improving memory by visualizing a series of loci (places) in a particular order, then associating a meaningful image with each place

67/ Aristotle advanced it in “On memory and recollection”, describing memorization as a visual practice that invoked “inner eye” of memory to summon phantasmata (images) stored in the “sensitive soul” and making them available to the “intellectual soul” of the logical mind

68/ Thomas Aquinas resurrected Aristotle’s work and turned it into practice for scholastic monks to memorize long Biblical passages, celebrating it as a remedy for the frailties of the human mind

69/ Art of memory later became seen as symbol of superstitious and backward medieval times, criticized by prominent thinkers like Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, Cornelius Agrippa, and Michel de Montaigne as being rote memorization without true learning

70/ #40 Scientific method: Francis Bacon published Novum Organum in 1620, departing from scholastic beliefs in esoteric practices and disembodied ideals, and proposing a completely new approach to scholarship based on empiricism

71/ His scientific method relied on induction (reasoning from direct observation) plus system of scholarly collaboration as a cumulative enterprise. Hierarchies of meaning would be constructed bottom-up through trial and error, seeking useful knowledge instead of ultimate truth

72/ #41 Encyclopedias: arose to help readers make sense of exploding volume of information. Earliest example is by English playwright Thomas Heywood, who published proto-encyclopedia containing all his knowledge of women without any explicit structure

73/ Diderot later created history’s greatest encyclopedia, adopting Bacon’s classifications to gather massive collection of 72,000 articles written by 160 eminent contributors (including notables like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon)

74/ Diderot took unprecedented step of capturing folk knowledge from common tradespeople, including everyday topics like cloth dying, metalwork, and glassware, with entries accompanied by detailed illustrations explaining the intricacies of the trades

75/ This had revolutionary implications, by granting craft knowledge equal status with high culture of statecraft, scholarship, religion. So much so that Revolutionary French court spared his son-in-law’s life when they heard he was related to Diderot

76/ #42 Modern biological taxonomy: in 1735 young botanist Carolus Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, proposing universal classification of all life to replace local, idiosyncratic systems that made it impossible for scientist’s to build on each other’s work

77/ Linnaeus proposed nested hierarchy, consisting of top-level kingdoms, which in turn were divided into classes, orders, families, genera, and species. Ultimately encompassed 7,700 plant and 4,400 animal species

78/ His key breakthrough was borrowing from existing folk taxonomies, which always had 5-6 levels of hierarchy, with the “true name” located approximately in the middle. Linnaean system also preserves the genus at the mid-level as the animal’s most commonly used name

79/ Linnaean system succeeded because it was simple, had precise rules, was easy to systematize, and supported division of scientific labor. In contrast with Buffon’s competing theory, which was more accurate in allowing for evolution of species, but not easy to use

80/ #43 Scientific library classification: by 1814 Thomas Jefferson’s private library was 6,500 volumes, one of largest in the world, which used Bacon’s hierarchical classifications: Memory (history), Reason (philosophy), and Imagination (fine arts)

81/ Jefferson’s embrace of Linnaean taxonomy and Baconian empiricism set the stage for information architecture of young U.S., influencing many private libraries and Library of Congress

82/ #44 Subject-based catalog: in 1831 British Museum hired Anthony Panizzi as its new assistant keeper of printed books as it experienced rapid growth: 5 visitors/month in 1759 vs. 180/day a century later. Printed catalog had grown from 7 volumes in 1810 to 48 in 1831

83/ They thought they gave him a rote task of reorganizing catalog, but he instead proposed revolutionary scheme: a catalog organized by SUBJECT. This had been done before, but not on this scale

84/ Panizzi created tiered subject headings covering every possible subject, including 91 rules that would become foundation for Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, still in widespread use today. Populist spirit of this more accessible catalogue opened up libraries to the public

85/ #45 Multidimensional subject-based classification: American cataloger Charles Ammi Cutter added multiple dimensions to subject cataloguing, recognizing that many patrons came to library with only a vague question in mind, & needed help finding a book to answer it

86/ Cutter’s Expansive Classification System introduced elaborate multi-tiered subject scheme describing works by author, title, subject (early meta-data). Alphanumeric call numbers described general to specific topics, and card catalog was introduced to be able to carry around

87/ #46 Dewey decimal system: American librarian Dewey standardized not only call numbers, but all parts of library operations, introducing interchangeable parts, standardized practices, and limiting power of librarians

88/ Dewey decimal system has proven remarkably resilient, surviving numerous revisions and transition to digital card catalogs. Often criticized for oversimplifying categories, it won because of its simplicity and usability

89/ #47 Faceted classification: in 1930s visionary Indian librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan proposed entirely new approach to cataloguing, using descriptions based on multivalent characteristics of each work, rather than single top-down deterministic list of subjects

90/ Any document could be broken down in terms of five facets: personality, matter, energy, space, and time. These facets could then be combined and interpolated to describe any piece of information in almost endlessly reconfigurable ways

91/ Faceted classification was highly influential as an ideal system, but complexity made it hard to implement, though Library of Congress Subject Headings support a limited implementation. UC Berkeley’s Flamenco multimedia database was another real-world implementation

92/ Faceted classification strongly influenced computer science, because it lends itself so well to relational databases. Has influenced web-based applications where iterative querying is the norm

93/ #48 Specialized libraries: libraries focused on specific fields (newspapers, business, biology, etc.) began to appear. These librarians saw themselves not just as book curators but as active participants in organizational ecologies of information, liberating information from books

94/ Documentalist movement recast role of librarians as producers of intellectual capital, what today we would call “knowledge workers.” They put more emphasis on managing internal info (Internal reports, employee correspondence, laboratory test results, technical reports)

95/ In 1883 Cutter wrote essay “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983,” imagining library in 100 years. He envisioned readers sitting at desks with “a little keyboard” through which they could connect with a central electronic catalog, ordering books by punching in a call number

96/ He even foresaw networks of libraries connected by a “fonographic foil” that would enable them to communicate telegraphically, accessing each other’s collections so readily that “all the libraries in the country … are practically one library.” He was less than a decade off

97/ #49 Semantic webs: Paul Otlet was bibliographer, pacifist, and entrepreneur, and also the internet’s forgotten forefather. In 1934, years before Bush, Engelbart, or Nelson, he envisioned a new kind of networked, multimedia-rich information space

98/ Users would access databases of recorded information from great distances by means of an “electric telescope,” retrieving facsimile images to be projected remotely on a flat screen

99/ Scholar’s workstation would be a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read, and write their way through a vast mechanical database

100/ This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between them, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book”

101/ He adopted the word “links” to describe these relationships, and the word “web” for their overall structure. His big insight was that organizational schemes only guided people to an individual book—but no further

102/ His Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) sought to map relationships between IDEAS, not just books. It was first attempt at a web of semantic relationships, instead of a specialized classification system that ignored the importance of a subject’s connections

103/ Otlet’s Traité de Documentation argued that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional things, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, as well as other readers, writers, and topics

104/ Otlet’s vision suggests an intellectual environment illuminated by both objective classification and the direct influence of readers and writers: a system simultaneously ordered and self-organizing and endlessly reconfigurable by the individual reader

105/ #50 Memex: Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think,” describing a scholar’s workstation, which provided access to large collections of documents stored on microfilm, allowing users to read, write, annotate documents, forge “associative trails” between them

106/ Bush was prolific inventor and engineer, and saw libraries as one of the great unsolved technical challenges of the age. He was worried that growing influence of corporations was neglecting role of human-centered, individualistic computing he envisioned

107/ He began work on Rapid Selector (a rapid microfilm selector with built-in indexing) in mid-1930s for Kodak and NCR, but it was plagued by technical problems and slow speed. The technology wasn’t ready

108/ Bush: “Specialization becomes increasingly necessary for genuine progress, and efforts to bridge between disciplines correspondingly superficial. Still we adhere to methods of revealing, transmitting, & reviewing results which are generations old”

109/ Bush tried again with his Comparator, a fully functioning info-retrieval system custom built for the Navy during World War II. Had moderate success with large organizations that had to manage large collections of info: FBI (fingerprints), Patent & Trademark office, and Library of Congress

110/ The tech worked, but the major limitation was the manual, human-centric indexing process. Bush developed an antipathy for manual indexing and for librarians, which set the stage for the Memex

111/ Here is the most famous passage in his essay “As We May Think,” which inspired generations of computer scientists, describing a research tool that allowed links (“associations”) to be formed into a superstructure which others could draw from and build upon:

“ Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them , ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior. The historian with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciplines the entire scaffolding by which they were erected . Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores and consults the record of the race.”

112/ Memex sought to liberate ideas from books, breaking down hierarchical index of subjects introduced by Panizzi & Cutter that had made libraries so welcoming to novices, but required enormous cognitive overhead for a scholar to navigate effectively

113/ He sought to replace “selection by indexing,” which always required an external reference that made moving between ideas cumbersome, to “selection by association,” where links flowed directly from one idea to another

114/ In 1958 Bush wrote “Memex II,” never published in his lifetime, looking toward a future of “biological memory crystals,” networking large collections of data, remote access, and even extra-sensory perception and symbiosis between computers and the human brain

115/ #51 Citation ranking: in 1950s, young library science student Eugene Garfield was inspired by Bush’s essay to develop citation ranking, a tool for assessing the impact of scholarly articles by tracking the frequency of bibliographic citations

116/ The more citations an academic paper received, the higher its “influence ranking,” which in turn lent more weight to whatever documents it cited. It effectively circumvented manual indexing in favor of organic, crowdsourced, bottom-up approach

117/ #52 Interactive hypertext system: Andries van Dam led research team at Brown University in 1960s which produced first working prototype of an interactive hypertext system on a commercially available mainframe, the IBM 360/50

118/ File Retrieval and Editing SyStem (FRESS) was multi-user, device-independent, and supported online collaborative work, writing process, and document production. Had bidirectional links, macros, both display and keyword metadata

119/ Users could assign free-form keywords (today known as “tagging”), allowing users to create their own idiosyncratic meta structure for documents. Brown offered experimental courses using FRESS among students, early example of online discussions in threaded comments

120/ #53 Centralized hypertext environment: led by Norm Meyrowitz and Nicole Yankelovich, a team at brown built on FRESS to create IRIS Intermedia, the most fully fledged hypertext environment to emerge before the Web (and whose capabilities have yet to be equaled by the Web)

121/ Users could create collections of interlinked original materials online, i.e. a “web” of knowledge about any topic. IRIS stored all links in a central database, which ensured integrity of links but had trouble scaling (which the Web solved by making links unidirectional)

122/ Intermedia pioneered email with hyperlinks, collaborative authoring tools, and live objects that could be updated dynamically across multiple applications. It was still focused on research, as every document could be read and edited

123/ Hypertext movement laid many of the foundations for modern Web, by replacing centralized, linear thinking about information with decentralized, multi-linear nodes, links, and networks. This democratized texts, putting marginal works on a level playing field with privileged ones

124/ #54 Campus information system: Gopher was developed at University of Minnesota by Mark McCahill and Farhad Anklesaria. Functioned as a campus-wide, distributed menu system. Enabled content owners to publish content in a unified browsing environment

125/ Resources were stored locally, or on a remote network, a proto-Web. By 1993 a thriving internet subculture was growing on college campuses, where people had tasted potential of networked information

126/ #55 Modern computer interface: American engineer and inventor Doug Engelbart was inspired by Bush’s essay to explore information-retrieval systems, eventually inventing the mouse, the graphical user interface, collaborative groupware, word processors

127/ In 1962 he described a new vision for machine-assisted intelligence: “By ‘augmenting human intellect,’ we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems”

128/ He envisioned “a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids”

129/ It was a deeply human-centric view of computing, and relied on breaking down knowledge into “atomized nuggets” that could be reconstituted in endless possible configurations

130/ Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, had him showing a working prototype of a modern computer interface to 1,000 attendees, many of whom would go on to found tech companies inspired by this vision

131/ #56 Xanadu: young Harvard sociology student Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext” in a 1965 paper: “nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen”

132/ Nelson called himself a “systems humanist,” waging a lifelong battle against technocrats and corporate influence on computing, wanting to make computers accessible to everyone, not just “back office programmers”

133/ He famously said that “Everything is intertwingled,” and wanted to use computers to share not just text but visceral and sensory experiences. His Xanadu supported enormous range of tasks: word processing, file mgmt, email, & meta-documents

134/ 20 years before the Web emerged into popular consciousness, Nelson described a staggeringly bold vision:

“[A] world wide network, intended to generate hundreds of millions of users simultaneously for the corpus of the world’s stored writings, graphics and data.… The Xanadu system provides a universal data structure to which all other data structures will be mapped … a fast linking electronic repository for the storage and publication of text, graphics and other digital information ; permitting promiscuous linkage and windowing among all materials; with special features for alternative versions, historical backtrack and arbitrary collaging.”

135/ Nelson’s 1981 book Literary Machines provided direct inspiration for World Wide Web. Although Xanadu never really took off, it provided essential blueprint for the modern web browser – a small local program interacting with remote servers to fetch data

136/ #57 World Wide Web: young researcher Tim Berners-Lee released a new software tool developed at CERN laboratory in 1980, but it was completely lost in a calamitous hard drive crash. Luckily, he started from scratch again and on the second try came up with the World Wide Web

137/ Released as World Wide Web in 1989, it was a tremendously democratizing technology that made power of computing and networking available to all. Though it focused on consumption & fell short of the two-way authoring environment envisioned by Nelson, and Berners-Lee himself

138/ #58 TCP/IP: distributed networking protocol developed as part of ARPANET project, funded by U.S. Defense Dept, by pioneering engineers Vinton G. Cerf & Robert B. Kahn. Ultimately formed backbone of global internet as part of Internet Protocol Suite

139/ #59 Google: search engine and company founded by Larry Page & Sergey Brin, who extrapolated Garfield’s work on citation ranking to all web pages, not just academic papers. Their paper introduced Pagerank algorithm as a scalable way of indexing the exploding web

140/ #60 Windows-style graphical desktop: several of Engelbart’s associates left SRI to join Palo Alto Research Center, eventually developing windows-style graphical desktop, bitmap displays, Ethernet protocol, WYSIWYG text editing, laser printer, Alto personal computer

141/ A young Steve Jobs borrowed many ideas from Xerox PARC when he visited, which found their way into the Macintosh, which would also provide conceptual foundation for Microsoft Windows, the very machines we are using to read and write these tweets

142/ Good job making it this far! As your reward, here are my full notes on the book this content is taken from, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright

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Interview with David Nebinski on the Portfolio Career Podcast

Listen to my recent interview on the Portfolio Career podcast, where we talk about my Full-Stack Freelancer Model and the emerging trend of people creating portfolios of multiple income streams, instead of a single monolithic job:

Here’s the episode from the podcast website:

EPISODE SUMMARY

This conversation is with Tiago Forte. Tiago is a thought leader and practitioner in this emerging portfolio career sector. His viral blog post titled “The Rise of The Full-Stack Freelancer” had a big impact on me and many others. He recommends everyone to package their key learnings into products and digital assets as much possible, especially when leaving a job. He believes his true and somewhat evergreen job is a life-long learner. And to do so, he creates products and services from what he has learned. We talk about him leaving San Francisco to primarily explore his productivity methods as a digital nomad and try something new. And his online course, Building A Second Brain, that he is turning into a book for people dramatically enhance a meta-skill, knowledge management. There is A LOT here to build and grow your Portfolio Career. Tune in and let’s have some fun!

EPISODE NOTES

Quotes -“I think most that is going to change in the future.. is that you won’t have to choose one thing. You will be able to have this entire portfolio that is mixing and matching, and balancing… very much like an investment portfolio -“I see myself as a learner…I learn for a living…. And the way I fund my learning is by packaging up what I have learned into products” -“You can handle anything as long as your mind is free and clear” -“The ability to make things will be fundamental to your identity, your reputation online, fundamental to entrepreneurship, to freelancing…” -“Think in terms of chunks” -“Every 6-18 months since then, I change what I am doing pretty dramatically”

Resources –https://www.fortelabs.co/ –The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer blog post –Building A Second Brain –Tiago’s twitter @fortelabs

ABOUT THE SHOW

Are you struggling to create a career that you love? Do you wonder if you could hold multiple jobs and projects at once? A Portfolio Career is here to answer your questions. David Nebinski talks with people who have designed Portfolio Career that allows for growth, resiliency, and happiness. Tune in to learn how to create a Portfolio Career of your own. Let’s have some fun!

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The post Interview with David Nebinski on the Portfolio Career Podcast appeared first on Praxis.

PARA for Teams

Guest post by Nat Eliason

I took Tiago’s Building a Second Brain (BASB) and Getting Stuff Done Like a Boss (GSDLAB) courses in the fall of 2017.

At the time, I was a solo operator working on my blog and doing some marketing consulting, and the strategies worked perfectly.

But over the next year, I went from working on my own to running a marketing agency with five full-time employees plus fifty contractors. On top of that, I had to manage my agency’s work, my blog, my podcast, my personal life, as well as agency sub-projects like our tea company and writer matchmaking service.

As the scope of my team’s work grew, the Evernote-heavy BASB format I loved started to break down. Evernote is great at many things, but collaboration is not one of them. Things, too, the preferred task manager in BASB and GSDLAB, doesn’t work with teams, and it was becoming more and more obvious that I needed to change my PARA implementation to fit working on a team.

Specifically, I needed to figure out a way to:

Maintain a bird’s-eye view of all my active projects
Track and prioritize my projects and goals
Collaborate with my team on those projects
Make relevant information easily findable for the team

For anyone else who loved BASB and Tiago’s work but has struggled to implement them for their team, hopefully this will be useful. It’s still very much a work in progress and it’s being constantly refined, but here’s what’s worked for us.

I’m also going to attempt to explain it in the way Tiago does his PARA implementation, starting from the task level and working our way up.

PARA as an Organizational Philosophy

The first step to getting PARA and BASB to work for a team is loosening the strictness. Having a strict organizational style works well when it’s just you, but when you need team members to also work with your organizational method, strictness becomes an impediment to adoption.

You want some order, but not so much that it gets in the way. And from what I’ve noticed, that strictness can get looser as you move up the PARA hierarchy.

What you don’t want to lose is the underlying organizational philosophy of PARA, which I’ve interpreted as:

Active projects should have their relevant information and tasks in one place.
Projects should be contained within Areas when possible.
Areas, too, should have all their relevant information in one place.
Separate your active information (Projects & Areas) and inactive (Resources).
Archive anything inactive, or no longer interesting.

You could implement this across any combination of tools, but after trying out a few different ones what we found worked best was using a combination of Asana and Google Drive.

I also still use Evernote personally, and there are a few tools on the sides that help make this process easier, but almost everything lives in Asana and Google Drive.

The Projects Layer

All of our active projects start out in Asana. Sometimes, the projects are very specific and fit the PARA definition of a “Project”, like this one for launching The Writer Finder:

[image error]

And then other times, the projects are more like Areas since they’re ongoing and don’t have a specific end date, like the Cup & Leaf editorial calendar:

[image error]

You could think of each article as its own little project. When you open an article task you can see all the steps that lead to its completion:

[image error]

So in this case, the editorial calendar board is the Area containing all of these article Projects.

Again, the terminology isn’t hugely important, it’s the underlying philosophy you want. Each Project should have all of its relevant tasks within it (whether that Project needs its own Asana board or just a task/card). And ideally, it should have all of the relevant information as well.

We do that through rich descriptions within each task. For an article Project, we’ll have all the images, docs, and other links included right in the task:

[image error]

And for a bigger Project that needs its own Asana board, we’ll make each task within it richly detailed as well:

[image error]

In this case, I’ve linked to a specific email in Front where someone sent me feedback on the site. By clicking that link, I can quickly open the email back up to implement their feedback, similar to Tiago’s inbox zero strategy.

This rich-task strategy for organizing information, similar to the strategy of containing Project information in Evernote folders, does 90% of the work. Someone who has never looked at our Google Drive can easily navigate to the documents they need to complete a Project just from the rich tasks.

Occasionally we’ll also need some Area-level information to reference, which we also do within the Asana boards. In the editorial calendar example, we’ll link to the spreadsheet where we’re organizing the broader strategy within the board description:

[image error]

If you’re not familiar with Asana this might be going way over your head, but the principles can be copied over to any team collaboration tool:

Create clear steps (tasks and subtasks) for each Project
Assign each step to one person with a specific due date.
Include all relevant Project information within the tasks so there’s no hunting.

Outside of Asana, the other place I’ll implement the Projects layer is in Drive. My top level looks like the typical PARA implementation:

[image error]Then within Projects, I have folders for any Project that doesn’t fit within an existing Area. Within Areas, I have folders for all of our clients and on-going focuses (like Cup & Leaf), and as Projects turn into Areas (like The Writer Finder will) it’ll get moved into the Areas folder.

The big difference here from normal PARA though is that I don’t follow the Drive organization very strictly, and I don’t expect my team to either. Everything is organized in Asana so that we don’t need to, and as long as we know the name of the folder we’re looking for (or it’s linked) then it doesn’t really matter where that folder is.

The Areas Layer

There isn’t much else to say about the Areas layer beyond what we covered in the Projects section. Areas are just the containers you put your Projects in, whether that’s in Asana as boards, or in Drive as Folders.

It’s easy enough to do this in Asana, but Drive is where it can get messy. You need to make an effort to file all of your documents in the right place so that other people on your team can find them without everyone constantly asking each other where something is.

Rich tasks like we talked about in the Projects layer helps a lot, but so does having sensible Area folders in Drive. The one difference here from normal PARA is that I will do nested Areas.

So for example, Clients is an Area, but each client is also an Area. The top-layer within Areas looks like normal PARA:

[image error]

But then within an Area, there might be a mix of Areas and Projects:

[image error]

With the number of different Areas and Projects you might have going on in your company, a two-tiered Area hierarchy makes life much easier (and organized). You can imagine how cluttered my Areas folder would get if all of these (and all of the other sub-areas) were in the top-level folder. Plus having Cup & Leaf Projects and Areas in two separate sections (the top-level Projects and Areas folders) would make finding things messy.

Two levels has been enough so far, but in the future it might make sense to go down to three. Each business Area could have its own PARA breakdown, which would make sense when you reach a certain critical mass of information and moving pieces.

The key, I think, is to keep the flexibility that Tiago talks about in BASB. The system should work for you, not you for it.

The Resources Layer

Our resources layer is entirely in Google Drive, and mostly contains templates, standard operating procedures (SOPs), data, and designs.

[image error]

We end up using a lot of templates in our business, and having a dedicated folder in our Resources folder makes it easy to keep them all in one place. The same goes for SOPs: when we find something we can systematize, we like to write it up and hand it off to a contractor, so having all of those in one place too makes things easy.

Aside from that, we have a shared “education” folder with access to a bunch of different online courses (and our Progressively Summarized notes on them), we have some of our past client results, our brand designs, and everything else that doesn’t quite fit in an active Project or Area.

On a personal level, I also use Evernote for my own collection of Resources. If I’m reading something and take notes on it, or find an interesting site, or want to jot down notes for an article, I’ll typically do that in Evernote. I try to keep it exclusively personal-project-related, though, and keep everything team related in Drive.

The Archive Layer

The archive layer is the simplest: whenever something stops being relevant, it either goes into the Archive folder in Drive, or gets archived in Asana.

Archiving projects in Asana is particularly useful since they can end up being useful templates for projects in the future, so we tend to keep them in the archived area instead of deleting them. This can make some of our Teams cluttered, but since archived projects are hidden by default, you don’t normally see them.

Two Finer Details

There are a few other details that help make this system work well.

No Email

We never use email internally, instead doing everything in Slack. If someone sends us something important over email, we turn that into Asana tasks and Drive documents, and will talk about the email in Slack if we need to discuss it.

This makes sure that no documents, notes, or discussions get lost in our emails, and that we never have to go to Gmail to search for something a client said or one of us said to each other. It’s all right where we need it.

Front again makes this easy since it integrates with Slack letting you forward an entire email conversation into Slack to discuss it there, here’s what it looks like:

[image error]

And like I mentioned before, I can easily turn emails into Asana tasks:

[image error]

The High-Level View

Since I have so many different types of projects going on at once, some of them within Growth Machine and some not, I keep a separate high-level view in a spreadsheet that makes it easier to keep my goals and the projects I’m working on in check.

I discussed it in more depth in my article on how I stay productive, but it lets me easily set monthly, weekly, and daily goals, and tie them back to my yearly goals.

[image error]

I’ll also link the daily, weekly, or monthly goal to the corresponding Asana board when it’s relevant, just to make it easier to move from my spreadsheet to the relevant parts of Asana.

This part isn’t necessary, but it definitely helps with keeping track of everything you have going on if you have a bunch of different projects you need to stay on top of.

The big difference between the spreadsheet and Asana is that the spreadsheet is all the projects I personally am working on, while Asana is all the projects the company is working on. Not all company projects involve me, so they don’t need to be on the spreadsheet.

Implementing it Yourself

This is very much tailored to what’s worked for me and my business, so I don’t recommend you try to copy and paste it into your life.

But the underlying philosophy that guides it, PARA and how you can extend it to teams, should work for most small businesses that want to easily collaborate and stay productive. It’s fairly tool-agnostic and will work well for remote and co-located teams alike.

If you get too hung up on trying to force yourself into a rigid system, it’s unlikely to work well for you and will implode when you try to add other people.

Instead, experiment with it, tweak it, and adjust it to become a natural part of how you operate your business.

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MESA Part 3: The Art of Unlocking People’s Creative Potential

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In Part 2, I laid out what I believe are the 10 principles that MESA Co. uses to fine-tune the working environment.

But what are they fine-tuning the environment for? Unlocking people’s creative potential.

The open secret of MESA (and other Accelerated Work Experiences) is that, beyond the rules and guidelines and structures, their true purpose is to unlock people’s potential to achieve more than they imagined was possible. And critically, to unleash that potential in the direction of a single, focused mission for 5 days.

This isn’t easy when working with a diverse group of people, most of whom have never worked together. About half of the 12-16 participants are external to the client organization, split evenly between “experts” (subject matter experts in topics relevant to the problem) and “makers” (designers, coders, video makers, illustrators, or others with specialized skills).

How do you get 12-16 people from a wide variety of backgrounds to all commit to one mission for 5 days?

With a precise mix of three ingredients: full commitment, limited collaboration, and intensity. Full commitment provides the raw energy, limited collaboration provides the channel, and intensity focuses it on tangible results.

Full commitment

The selling point for full commitment is different for each of the groups present.

For experts and makers, who are being hired as contractors, a big selling point for a MESA is that there is zero pre-work or post-work. There are no pre-planning calls, followup meetings, feature requests, or client presentations once the 5 days are finished. All that’s asked of them is to be present. This is so rare and cherished in the life of a freelancer, that they tend to jump at the opportunity.

For participants who work full time at organizations or for other reasons can’t join long-term projects, a strictly fixed timeline allows them to know exactly how much time is required. The sprint format allows more people to work on external projects  besides self-employed freelancers.

For employees of the client organization, their commitment comes from the chance to work on a unique project that takes them far beyond their normal routine. They are often very grateful to have the chance to work with experienced experts and makers. They gain experience working in a faster-paced, more improvisational way than they’re used to at a large company.

Beyond these considerations, one of the key jobs of the MESA team is to choose a framing that attracts people to the problem, instead of making it a chore. They will often invite experts and makers with a personal or professional connection to the problem, such as inviting an influencer who advocates for healthy eating to a MESA about changing baby food recipes, or a sustainability advocate to a MESA about making product packaging more eco-friendly.

Limited collaboration

Bárbara Soalheiro, the founder of MESA, often says that “collaboration is an invitation to work without responsibility.” Although the MESA Method is obviously highly collaborative, she is pointing to the lack of individual responsibility that often accompanies so-called “collaborations.”

How do you get each participant to take ownership of their knowledge and skills, and advocate for their point of view? By assigning each person a “pillar of knowledge.”

A big part of the preparation by the MESA team is to break down the problem into “pillars of knowledge,” each one representing a key capability they believe will be needed. This might include “an expert in global supply chains for eco-friendly products,” or “a specialist in the production of affordable baby foods.” These pillars are often framed as intersections or combinations of traditionally defined specialties.

There is usually only one expert invited for each pillar, which means they are the sole representative for that domain. And this person is always a “doer” – someone who has produced real results in this area, not just studied it or talked about it. This kind of individual assignment produces a remarkable level of ownership that is missing from collaborative projects where no one is responsible for anything in particular.

Intensity

Once the environment has been optimized for productivity, everyone is totally committed, and an appropriate level of collaboration has been established, it’s time for intensity. Like a laser that only activates when all the parameters are just right, this is the point where MESA really begins to shine.

What allows for such intensity is that all the necessary knowledge and skills to make progress are present, all in one place and all at one time. 5 days might not seem like a lot of time, but if you think about it, that’s 40 continuous hours spent on one mission, by one group of people. It might take months in the “real world” to reach 40 hours of time spent on a problem. And that will likely occur as a long series of 2-hour stints, which don’t build the same momentum or conviction as one focused bout.

The Problem Owner has no reason to delay a choice – there will never be a better time or place to make the decisive decisions that determine the fate of their project. With all the conversations and objections and concerns and reservations out on the table, with everyone on the same page, with every facet and angle considered, the only thing left to do is to act.

And act they do.

Unlike other workshops or meetings, the goal of a MESA is not “alignment,” “learnings,” or “clarity.” The goal is to deliver published results. The end result of a MESA is to deliver a working prototype that embodies all the constraints (budget, time, brand image, etc.) the organization is facing, and all the decisions made during the week.

Prototypes

The prototype is, in many ways, the most important and unique element of the MESA Method. Without a tangible working prototype delivered on the final day, the week amounts to a very exhausting brainstorming session.

Getting a bunch of smart people together, it’s very easy to spend endless hours debating. People like to talk as a way of postponing a decision, but that doesn’t make the decision any easier. Switching people from criticizing to making turns off the fault-finding lens, and activates the solution-finding lens. Debates focus on specific, visible features of the prototype, instead of abstract concepts that everyone interprets differently.

The goals of the prototype are many-fold:

To see if the solution will work, or is just a pipe dream
To make better decisions, by grounding them in reality
To build a common vocabulary, which requires specificity
To lock in the most important strategic decisions, and embody them in something practical
To demonstrate the solution, instead of describing it
To make people fight for and challenge the solution, instead of arriving at a lukewarm consensus that no one feels particularly proud of

There are a number of guidelines that MESA Co. has developed to fulfill on all these goals. For example:

The prototype should be as high fidelity as possible (i.e. as close to a real working product as possible), including functional back-ends whenever feasible
Stay away from “could be” or “might be” – make firm decisions, make tradeoffs, kill options
Don’t do user testing (which only leads to diverging opinions and delays the timeline) – trust that the experts, makers, and client employees know their audience and their market, and launch the prototype as-is to accelerate the learning process

The entire prototyping process is massively convergent, raising concerns and either addressing them or eliminating them at a furious pace. It takes a high-fidelity prototype to force the real issues to the surface: can we actually build a product using technology this sophisticated? Can we actually build this new sales channel without damaging existing ones? Will our executives appreciate the importance of this message for our customers?

I believe that the trends of just the last few years have made high-fidelity prototyping possible. Developers can spin up cloud computing instances in minutes with free trials. Designers can use front-end web frameworks to build full-featured web applications in hours. The modularization and SaaS-ification of everything has drastically shortened the time horizon required to build things. That horizon has shrunk to fit within a single week.

Some examples of what these prototypes look like include:

A retail stand for smartphones that translated what was on the screen into various visual, audio, and tactile experiences, adopted almost as-is by a major consumer electronics brand in their stores
A beautifully shot video introducing a new ad campaign and strategic direction for a major international food brand, with a final product that adopted almost all of the major elements of the prototype video
A new recipe for more eco-friendly baby food, produced in an actual commercial kitchen during the MESA week, which strongly influenced the final product
A completely new sales channel for a major makeup brand that might have directly threatened their primary channel; a quick launch and test showed that it complemented, instead of threatened, their existing channels

There seems to be a kind of inversion at work as the horizon of action shrinks ever smaller. The movement around human-centered design in recent years has introduced us to “user testing” as a crucial part of product development. But in many cases user testing has just added a whole new layer of bureaucracy and delay. It has in some cases made us distrust our intuition and our insights, in favor of “validated learning.”

Perhaps we’ve reached an inflection point, in that we can reach consensus and produce a prototype so quickly, that we can use it as the point of reference for our user testing. Instead of starting from “everything is possible,” and taking months to slowly converge on something tangible, we start with something tangible that takes into account the real constraints that we know the organization will have to face no matter what.

What if instead of seeing user testing as an initial, anticipatory phase of product development, we saw product development as an initial, anticipatory phase of user testing? Maybe “making” could become so compact and efficient that we could make three things in the time it used to take to plan for one.

But this new approach is not just another bureaucratic process to institute. Because a MESA is not a predictable event that can be optimized. It relies on the spontaneity and improvisation of a diverse mix of people. It seems to allow for, if not call for, heroic feats of sacrifice. It is an eminently human phenomenon. The most complex problems have a life of their own, and perhaps they can only be addressed with an equally complex group of humans.

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Desktop Zero: An Experiment on Clearing My Digital Workspace

I performed a little experiment this month, to test my hypothesis that a number of useful files accumulate on the desktop and are worth saving for the long term.

The experiment was simple:

I allowed files and folders to accumulate on my desktop from October 1st to 30th, without organizing or filing any of them
On Oct. 30 I went through them and analyzed their contents to see whether the files were of long-term value

[image error]

Oh god no

Here are the results:

156 files and 5 folders accumulated, with a total size of 2.2 gigabytes
File types included:

5 folders (from images I exported from slide presentations, since it creates a new folder with each export)
2 design files
Text expander snippets file
1 audio file
5 html files
135 image files
1 slide presentation
1 video file
9 PDFs
1 text file (because virtually all text I store directly in Evernote)


It took me 23 minutes to file all 161 items in my P.A.R.A. system in Evernote and my Documents folder (which syncs automatically with Google Drive).

[image error]

How I arrange my windows for filing

As I filed each item, I added them to a list sorted by low, medium, and high value.

Low value

These items were low value mostly because I had other places I could find them if needed, such as my email, source files, websites, or cloud storage. They made up about 75% of the items, and I deleted them immediately in large groups using command-shift-click to select multiple items, and command-delete to send them to the trash.

Contents:

PDF of academic paper I read and took notes on (already added as an attachment to an Evernote note)
Screenshots of PDF diagrams (already added to notes)
Images from online articles (already used)
Screenshots used for troubleshooting/email explanations (can find in email if needed)
Slide images/screenshots for book manuscript (added to Google Doc)
Screenshots taken for social media/blog posts (already published)
Photos for online photo galleries (already published)

Medium value

These items could probably be found elsewhere, but they were relatively important and I might need to reference them again. They made up most of the remaining items, and I filed them in my P.A.R.A. system, mostly under Areas.

Contents:

Signed change of address form for tax prep service
3 401k plan documents
ETF form for life insurance payments
Video + audio of recorded interviews (always good to save in case they disappear from online hosting)
Photos gathered and organized for blog post (which I may need to use again for followup articles)
PDF about info overload someone sent me (which I’d like to read)

High value

These two items either related to active projects that I needed to take action on (banner image) or took some effort to produce (Facebook data archive); I put some extra thought into how I labeled and filed them, one in a project and another in an area.

Contents:

Banner image for promoting upcoming workshop (reminding me to promote it)
Facebook data archive export (downloaded to create a photo album of my 6 years in the Bay Area, and saved as a backup)

Takeaways

I’ve always made a habit of clearing my desktop and downloads folder on a weekly basis, since they are like the “inboxes” to my digital life. Because most files downloaded from websites, saved by software programs, or exported from source files tend to be saved here by default, a diverse mix of digital assets tends to accumulate quickly.

I think there are three primary benefits to doing this, and the actual storage of the file is the least important one:

Reminds me of actions I need to take
Keeps my workspace clear for incoming inputs
Saves files for future reference

Only a tiny percentage of accumulated files remind me to take an action, since I’m pretty good at capturing open loops before this point. But even that tiny percentage can yield large benefits. In this case, I am flying to São Paulo in a few days to deliver a full-day workshop, and remembering to promote it to my audience could have a significant impact on its success.

Just as importantly, I noticed that having so many files lurking in the background produced a kind of psychological noise. Even though I rarely saw them behind the application windows, the effect was similar to having a messy desk. Often I went looking for a file I had saved to the desktop, and had to wade through the morass to do so.

My conclusion is that it is absolutely worth clearing your desktop and download folders on a semi-regular basis. A great way to do this is to make it part of a Weekly Review, so that you’re doing it in big batches, which saves time.

[image error]

Aaaaah….like a cool glass of water in the desert

Downloads folder

For good measure, here’s the same experiment conducted for my downloads folder over the same time period.

Results:

49 files and 12 folders accumulated, with a total size of 5.5 gigabytes
File types included:

12 folders
7 spreadsheet files
2 disk images
3 ePub files (exported as part of my editing process)
16 images
4 videos
11 PDFs
5 zip archives
1 aborted video call download


It took me 13 minutes to file all 62 items in my P.A.R.A. system in Evernote and my Documents folder

And here is how I rated their value:

High value:

Personal tax returns
Quarterly business financial statements


Medium value:

Completed W9 form for virtual assistant


Low value

Slide images for book manuscript (already added)
Photos downloaded for Facebook album (already saved in Google Photos)
Spreadsheet of business expenses (already categorized and sent to bookeeper)
Videos for blog (already uploaded to Vimeo, and backed up via Google Drive)
Videos for book feedback (already reviewed)
Blank W9
Blank change of address form
PDFs made as bonus downloads (already uploaded to Google Drive)
Icons used in blog posts or slides



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Just-in-Time PM #21: Workflow Strategies

Now it’s time to look at the JIT Project Manager’s toolkit. How do we put these ideas into practice in our day to day work?

Through Workflow Strategies, a set of practical techniques for executing modern projects. Here is the full list, according to whether they work better for small or large-scale projects, and what kind of situation they are best suited for.

Capture
Organize
Share


Scale
Planning
Offloading
Tracking
Metadata
Linking
Searching
Adapting
Structuring


Small
Archipelago of Ideas
Color Commentary
Meta-Plan
Naming Conventions
Interlinking Notes
Advanced Search
Dial Down the Scope
Sentence Hacking


Large
Headings First
Status Summary
Temporary Tags
Tag Hierarchy
Table of Contents
Brainsweep
Context Switch
Function Follows Form

We are now in the crucial execution stage, where all our previous efforts at capturing, summarizing, and organizing packets of knowledge will pay off. It is in this final stage that we see whether the intermediate packets we’ve created end up being valuable.

Execution is also the most ambiguous stage, because people’s individual circumstances tend to diverge quite a bit. Whether you are an accountant or an airline pilot makes a big difference when it comes to applying what you know.

That’s why Workflow Strategies are less of a process, and more like a toolkit. The 16 individual strategies are each designed for a particular situation or problem to be solved. In the same way that different tools in your tool chest are suited for different jobs.

These Workflow Strategies are designed to help us execute our projects more effectively. They are standardized procedures that help us move faster, save our progress, and produce work of higher quality. They rely on having clearly summarized packets of knowledge (through Progressive Summarization) organized according to actionability (with P.A.R.A.), allowing us to combine those packets into valuable deliverables right at the moment they’re needed.

Here are the 16 Workflow Strategies we’ll cover in this chapter:

Archipelago of Ideas
Headings First
Color Commentary
Status Summary
Meta-Plan
Temporary Tags
Naming Conventions
Tag Hierarchy
Interlinking Notes
Table of Contents
Advanced Search
Brainsweep
Dial Down the Scope
Context Switch
Sentence Hacking
Function Follows Form

In this article I’ll provide a brief overview of each strategy, with further guidelines and examples in the next article.

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MESA Part 2: The 10 Principles of Work Sprints

In Part 1, I described the basics of the team-based work sprint methodology known as MESA. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at the underlying principles that tie together MESA and other kinds of Accelerated Work Experiences (AWEs).

MESA’s 3 Core Principles

The team at MESA Co. has identified three principles they believe lie at the heart of their method: vulnerability, intention, and presence.

Vulnerability appears when the Leader takes the head of the table, stepping into a role that is part master of ceremonies, part inspirational visionary, part herder of cats, and part group therapist. If vulnerability is the courage to be seen when you have no control over the outcome, then the job of MESA Leader squarely fits.

Intention is all about knowing exactly why you’re doing something. Every pen and paper clip is set on the table with intention, each one subtly communicating, “We put this much intention into each pen – will you be as intentional about the work you do here?”

Presence is perhaps the most fundamental of the three. It includes doing just one thing at a time, and doing it well. But it goes far beyond focus. Being present as a Leader means making your personality 100% available to the people you are working with. It requires pulling all the various selves from the past and future, to reside in the here and now where discomfort, but also opportunity, reigns.

The 10 Principles of Sprints

As important as these three principles are, I believe they are only the tip of the iceberg of what is happening during a MESA. By exploring the others, I believe we can start to reveal what different kinds of Accelerated Work Experiences (AWEs) have in common.

These principles come in pairs, each balancing the other. The job of the Leader is to choose which one manifests at any given moment.

Indulgence vs. minimalism

There is undoubtedly a “WOW Factor” that is an important part of the MESA experience. The venues are often jaw-dropping, creating an atmosphere of indulgence and luxury so different from the bland offices or cramped cafes where so much of modern work is performed.

But this indulgence is counterbalanced against a stark, practical minimalism. The experience design team repeats “only the essentials” like a mantra, looking for any opportunity to strip away what isn’t needed. They will remove paintings from the walls if they are distracting, or count the number of pages in the notebooks to ensure there is no excess.

Obsession vs. improvisation

There is an unmistakable attitude of obsession in everything that MESA Co. does. From the precision of the place settings, to the unyielding commitment to tangible results, it is a culture that leaves room for the perfectionism of the creative people who participate as experts and makers. They are encouraged to fulfill the high standards that they often don’t have the chance to reach doing commercial work.

But the drive for excellence is balanced against a willingness to improvise at a moment’s notice. Leaders are even discouraged from researching too much about the client or their problem beforehand, because their learning in real time is an opportunity for everyone to learn along with them. Especially after Day 2, improvisation to changing circumstances is the art of leading a MESA.

Conflict vs. conviction

The MESA approach to conflict is very different from what I’ve witnessed in most corporate environments. Everyone is encouraged to “bring everything to the table,” especially their reservations and concerns about the progress of the MESA. There are no side conversations, no backchannels, and no hidden agendas entertained. The whole point of bringing everyone together in one place is to force the problems to emerge out into the open, where they can be addressed.

But it is towards the end of the MESA that the purpose of this conflict becomes clear. It is only by getting everyone’s doubts and fears out into the open, and showing them that they’ll be seen and heard, that you have the opportunity to build real conviction. Not just consensus, but a conviction that they know exactly what to do when they get home. The Problem Owner must go through every up and down of the experience to have the confidence to stand in front of an audience during the final presentation and say, “This is the solution I believe in.” Not because it went through many months of analysis, but because it emerged from a meeting of great minds working at their full capacity.

Pleasure vs. responsibility

One of MESA Co’s strongest beliefs is that work is inherently pleasurable. They don’t believe in adding games and gimmicks to make work “engaging.” Instead, they amplify natural rewards: the camaraderie of working late into the night with peers you respect, the satisfaction of seeing something you created immediately put to use, and the pure euphoria of completing the mission on the last day, with no follow up work required. MESA Co. sometimes speaks of their job as “seducing” participants into giving them their best work.

This seduction is balanced against responsibility. The role of the Leader is quite different from a typical facilitator on this point. The Leader is “110% responsible” for the results of the MESA, in the words of founder Bárbara Soalheiro. She insists that the Leader must be committed to greatness, not just delivering something to specifications. She is fond of telling people NOT to “trust the process,” because that just invites blind faith. Instead of trusting the process, the Leader has to make a decision that will produce results.

Thinking vs. doing

The MESA experience is extremely intellectually challenging. As a participant, you are expected to integrate new knowledge and turn it into action at a stunning pace. The problems that are worthy of a MESA are often thorny and multidimensional. They often involve shaping complex systems impacting many thousands of people. Thinking through the implications is essential.

But thinking also has its limits. While in debate mode, people’s minds are set to criticize. And they can always find something to critique. By switching everyone into maker mode any time progress bogs down, suddenly their minds begin looking for solutions. By asking them to demonstrate instead of elaborate, any decisions that are made are more grounded in reality.

Tuning the environment

Each of the pairs of principles above is like a dial on a control panel, allowing the MESA Leader to fine tune how the group is working.  By holding time as the only fixed constraint, explicitly meeting the needs of everyone present, and placing them all around the same table with access to the same information, the playing field is leveled.

On this level playing field, it is the responsibility and the burden of the MESA Leader to allow everyone to do the best work of their lives.

In Part 3, I’ll look at other key elements of the MESA method, and how they help unlock the creative potential of the people who participate.

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