Tiago Forte's Blog, page 44

Why I’m Moving to Mexico

My partner Lauren and I are moving to Mexico City later this year. This post explains why, both to clarify for myself, and to be able to share with others.

We’ve been able to identify 5 reasons for why we’re moving. I’ll elaborate on them below, from most to least important.

1. It’s time for a change

This is the simplest, and most important reason. It’s a feeling in my bones, that a season of our lives is coming to a close.

We arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area within a month of each other, and it’s been 6 of the most incredible years I could have ever imagined. But I notice time passing faster than ever. Life seems less rich, and I can feel the comfort and complacency settling in like a dense fog.

A rough calculation indicates I’ve lived in 5 other cities since leaving home, averaging just over a year each. Not that I have a batting average to maintain, but the current stretch is far beyond my norm. I came to the Bay Area to establish my career, but now that Forte Labs is mostly an online business, it doesn’t make sense to stay.

2. I miss living abroad

We’ve both realized that our happiest times in life were abroad. The formula seems to be living abroad + challenging circumstances + important work.

I’ve done this twice – teaching English in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and serving in the Peace Corps in Eastern Ukraine. As difficult as those conditions were, I remember mostly a deep sense of purpose and belonging in a closely knit group. 

I don’t think difficult living conditions are necessary for happiness. They’re just good at forcing bonding, which is the most desirable thing, and the most difficult to achieve, especially past one’s 20s. For this reason, we’re making a commitment to stay put for at least a year so we can integrate with a local community. I’ve heard from digital nomad friends that this is the greatest challenge. We’re also going to join local interest groups and take classes, starting with Landmark’s Team, Management, and Leadership Program starting in November.

3. I want to experiment with remote work

Remote work seems to hold so much promise for so many pressing issues we’re facing. From housing costs, to long commutes, to income inequality, to closing the digital divide, the ability to have a successful career without living in one of a handful of urban centers could be transformational.

It’s become clear that an individual can have a thriving career working remotely. Even distributed teams have become commonplace. But I want to know if remote work could be not only a cost-cutting measure, but a competitive advantage. Could we find a way to make remote work not a tolerable Plan B, but the preferred way of building a company?

We have a remote team now that has the potential to reinvent how distributed teams work asynchronously, across borders and time zones. I truly believe the productivity methods we are developing have the potential to unlock the benefits of remote work for millions of people. But we need to figure it out for ourselves first.

Moving there is also in line with Lauren’s interests and career ambitions, which is a wonderful stroke of luck.

4. Mexico City is perfect

The choice of location took all of 5 minutes. Mexico City is a cosmopolitan, historic capital full of charming neighborhoods, delicious food, stunning museums, and world-famous arts and culture.

The logistics work beautifully too. It is just a few hours from most U.S. cities, in the same time zone, and one-way flights to visit our families in Southern California are as cheap as $90. The city has plenty of coworking spaces, is easy to get around on foot and via public transportation, and the cost of living is approximately ⅓ of what we are currently paying. Many of our friends and family want to visit there, and we’ll be happy to host them.

What we are most excited for is the people. Lauren is Mexican-American, and is looking forward to getting to know the Mexican side of her family better. I’ve always been fascinated by Mexican culture and people, and can’t wait to improve my Spanish and make new friends. Everyone in the tech and startup community seems to know each other, and I’ve already gotten referrals to cool people I should meet.

5. It’s a good experiment

Mexico City is actually quite a safe choice for us. We both speak Spanish and have lived for long stretches in Latin America in the past.

Our initial year abroad will be a test to see if we could make it work long term. I’ll need to make sure that I can continue to build the business, since that’s my top priority. Lauren will need to see if she can advance her career while working remotely. If all goes well, we’ll think about trying other cities or countries further outside our comfort zone.

I’ll continue posting about our experience here as we make decisions and start to pack, leading up to our departure at the end of September. I appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me as we take on the digital nomad lifestyle.

And feel free to send along any recommendations on things to do in Mexico!

Tiago

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.

The post Why I’m Moving to Mexico appeared first on Praxis.

The Future of Ebooks

I’ve published a few ebooks over the past year, and have plans for a couple more before the end of the year. In contrast to fears about the “end of reading,” my self-publishing experiences have led me to believe that we’re in the midst of a transformational revolution in reading.

But it remains to be seen whether ebooks in particular will fulfill their potential in the digital age, or remain a mediocre one-time experiment. In this article I’ll examine the promise and potential of the modern ebook to try and see where we’re headed.

Context over content

The first trend that’s becoming increasingly clear is that content is a commodity. With ever-greater volumes of every kind of writing – articles, social media posts, blog posts – being created every year, with instantaneous global distribution via the internet, any business model based on content scarcity will no longer work.

As the emphasis shifts to discoverability amidst an endless sea of content, the focus for both publishers and consumers is moving to the context surrounding the book.

[image error]

The context of a book – the metadata that describes what it is, what it’s related to, what others are saying about it, what it means, how it’s structured, how it was conceived, and countless other characteristics – has become paramount. Because without metadata, a book is invisible.

In the physical world, a lot of this context came “built in.” Bookstores, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers provided commentary and direction to help us find what we were looking for. The tiniest details of a book’s size, shape, cover design, title, inside flaps, and placement in the store gave us rich contextual clues.

But in the digital world, a lot of that is stripped away. There is no chance that you will serendipitously come across a book on the shelf, in the aisles, or at a coffee shop being read by someone else. You can be looking over someone’s shoulder as they read their Kindle and still have no idea what they’re reading! The signposts and markers of what is worthy of our attention have instead been funneled through personalized algorithms online. But algorithms cannot capture every possibility of what we might benefit from reading.

The challenge of digitizing books has never been the text conversion process. That is trivial. The hard part is rebuilding the socio-cultural context that used to so strongly shape our reading habits. Online marketing funnels, recommendations from friends, top seller lists, and other promotional tools have arisen to meet this need, but they don’t quite integrate into our daily lives as seamlessly.

Looking at new media and social networks, we get a strong picture of what context-first content looks like. Fledgling media startups start with context, asking where and why and how a person might want to consume media, and then they walk backward from that to create the perfect product and environment for it.

Snapchat developed disappearing selfie videos to meet the needs of teens seeking low-cost self-expression, while retaining their privacy. The recently announced IGTV is specifically designed for long-form, vertical video, capitalizing on the ease of hitting “record” on smartphones, while still giving video producers exposure through the Instagram network of 1 billion users.

While old-school publishers think of the internet as a new means of distributing the same old text containers, and software as a way to drive down costs, startups are building new kinds of content that couldn’t previously be conceived of. For them, text is one possible output of a channel, not the input.

What might it look like to create ebooks that focus primarily on adding context around the content? Here’s some of my favorite ideas I’ve come across:

Show a heat map of the text, going beyond Kindle’s “most popular” passages to show the most hated, the most disagreed with, the most impactful, and other filters
Allow readers to curate whose highlights they see: their friends, their neighbors, their colleagues, or influencers they follow in the relevant field
Reveal data about the behavior of other readers (not just average reading time): How far does the average person get before giving up? How many notes do they take on each chapter? How many passages do they highlight? Which chapters do they come back to reference the most? Which passages are copied the most? How many people have followed each link?
Enable deep linking into specific chapters, passages, or sentences, allowing visitors to see a short preview of the pages before and after, and purchase the book if they want to read more (this preview feature is akin to Amazon’s Look Inside, but without linking)
Make the references and bibliography more interactive, allowing sorting by importance, relevance, date created, or other criteria for those seeking to dive deeper
Reveal the writing process, including early sketches, a changelog, or editor’s notes, for those interested in exploring how the book was created
Create tagging systems, either for idiosyncratic individual use or collective collaboration, to allow humans reading the text to add labels and hooks of semantic meaning for themselves and others

Digitizing text created great abundance. It is metadata, and the sorting, filtering, and searching it enables, that will help us make sense of it all. Metadata is the lens that makes our choices about what to read meaningful.

Service over product

If you zoom out from the ideas above, a new definition of “publisher” starts to come into focus. Publishers are no longer product companies. They are service companies. What matters is not the container wrapped around a bunch of exclusive text, but the service wrapped around the container. Context is paramount, but it takes a lot of work to organize and deliver it in a user-friendly way.

[image error]

This is happening across the media landscape. Take iTunes as an example. If content was truly differentiated, the amount you paid would vary a lot based on quality. But it doesn’t. Every song costs 99 cents. The only reason people would pay the same amount of money for goods of vastly different quality is if it isn’t the product that matters, but the service that iTunes provides: on-demand listening across different devices.

The Kindle store has grown to dominate the ebook publishing market by offering a similar service: on-demand reading on any device. You don’t have to worry about where to buy it, how to get it, or where to store it. It’s essentially streaming for books, even if you never sign up for Kindle Unlimited, their all-you-can-eat service. The book is called when summoned, and Amazon takes a minimum 30% cut to ensure the stream never gets interrupted.

What are the services that readers want around their books? They want convenience, specificity, discoverability, ease of access, and connection. In a world where e-reading devices are ubiquitous, e-reading software is free, storage is plentiful and virtual, and any kind of content can be distributed everywhere at the push of a button, it is these value-added services that will define what is worth paying for.

Publishers need to realize they are no longer in the content production business. They are in the content solutions business. Their books need to become part of a value chain that solves their customers’ problems. Because what people ultimately want is not a book. They want an answer, a pathway, or a spark of insight that leads them to an outcome.

This implies a 180-degree pivot in how they treat their content. Instead of locking down written works with expensive and complicated DRM, publishers should adopt open, accessible, interoperable standards. They should use as much of the content as possible to build up context, and then use that context to promote discovery. Instead of competing on cost in a market that has zero costs, they should actively encourage every kind of reuse of their intellectual property.

The publishers that win in the digital age will be those that offer metadata and tools that help their readers manage the true enemy of reading: the curse of abundance.

Creation over consumption

Underlying both of the trends above is a deeper one: people are moving from passively consuming content, to interacting with and creating it.

It now feels strange to many of us to sit on the couch and watch a TV show from beginning to end. What feels natural is to have our phone in front of us, posting on social media, commenting on others’ posts, and looking up actors, characters, and explainers.

In a way, this has always been true. Books have always called out to be annotated, marked up, underlined, dog-eared, summarized, cross-referenced, shared, loaned, and talked about. From the very beginning, books were social objects, pulling into place around themselves everything from book fairs, to book clubs, to writer’s circles, to conversations around the water cooler.

What’s changed is that all that marginalia – the bookmarks, notes, highlights, progress markers, reviews, comments, discussions – once hidden amidst the pages on each of our private bookshelves, has been published and networked online as digital artifacts. They reflect an individual’s preferences and intentions and take significant human attention to produce, which makes them valuable. In isolation, they are valuable to ourselves and perhaps our closest friends. At scale, the patterns they contain hold immense value as signals of insight, quality, and buying behavior.

Readers today expect to be able to “look under the hood” of a piece of content they’re consuming. They expect to be able to leave impressions on the medium, pushing and pulling and capturing the parts that resonate the most. For the works we fall in love with, we want to see how the sausage is made, so to speak, like watching the outtakes or director’s commentary for a movie.

Forward-looking publishers will begin to provide richer forms of interaction:

Export individual metadata, like highlights and notes (going beyond the rudimentary export options currently offered by Kindle and iBooks to include images, different formats, and different destinations)
Forking or editing the story (like video games or “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories)
Add their own interpretation or expression (like adult coloring books, which have soared in popularity in the last few years)
Mix and match pieces of content to create their own works (like Instagram Stories, or textbooks that allow professors to curate exactly the sections and chapters they want, to be printed on demand)
Centralize discussions around the book (on Amazon or Goodreads even), with strong tools for surfacing the most useful or insightful comments and reviews
Make ebook formats more HTML-compatible (EPUB, the most common format, is already just a specialized type of webpage), which would allow multimedia embedding and other sophisticated user interface features
Include appendices or links to primary source material, deep dives on ancillary topics, and bonus extras like interviews or study guides, either free or paid

This level of interactivity might seem challenging, but it’s been done before. ChessBase is a database and book engine used by serious chess players around the world. Both ebooks (by multiple publishers) and mobile apps integrate directly with the database, which contains thousands of historical and modern games that can be searched and replayed. It includes a chess-playing engine so players can “step into” famous matches, allowing them to test their skills against the likes of Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov. It goes even beyond that, allowing players to author their own ebooks in EPUB and MOBI, including things like chess positions and tactics puzzles, from within the same interface.

Although there is clearly quite a bit more to ChessBase than an ebook, it points a potential way forward: ebooks as just one entry point into an ecosystem of content, services, apps, trainings, communities, and other products.

Streams over containers

What is at the heart of our desire to create is connection. As sublime as the creative process can be, what we’re truly after is what it evokes: surprise, delight, gratitude, insight, revelation. A reaction of any kind, really.

This too has always been part of the experience of reading. There is something special about meeting someone who has read the same book as you. You have something in common, something shared. The most mundane aspects of publishing, like taking pre-orders or posting a review, become special moments of contribution and belonging for the community that has gathered around an author.

[image error]

Finding and downloading a book is easy, but getting it attention is harder than ever. This means that the network around a book will grow in importance, because without it, the book will never be discovered. And there’s no reason that this network should limit itself to “post-publication.” In fact, there is no such thing as “post” anymore. A book is a continual process of research and refinement, and readers have been injected much earlier into that process than ever before.

Books have been crowdsourced and crowdfunded, collaboratively edited, published one chapter at a time, and made into interactive webpages. The book is really just an excuse to form a community, which provides not only a pre-qualified market of committed readers, but a tribe of evangelists and promoters in the all-important channel of word-of-mouth.

It has become clear that the book is more of a social artifact than ever. The point-in-time contents inside a black-box container has been unfurled into a stream, an ever-changing conversation around the book, what it means, and why it matters. Time itself starts to become an essential ingredient in the writing – when and how often you engage influences your experience as much as the text itself.

Like Wikipedia, what’s most interesting is not the article itself, but the talk page, where the community hashes out its priorities and conflicts. The work’s authority comes from its responsiveness and shared intent, not its preciousness.

Imagine a future where instead of lending someone a book, you lend them your bookmarks – the notes, annotations, and references you’ve added. What you are really sharing is a collective conversation, the cumulative strata of many layers of marginalia built up through the skillful application of attention.

By connecting these small, local networks forming around each book, we could eventually create a single networked literature. Such a macronetwork would allow us to trace the source of any idea, concept, or influence through time. As Kevin Kelly puts its, “we’ll come to understand that no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works.”

Ebooks as digital artifacts

Streams are powerful, but they underestimate the value that humans place on tangible artifacts.

This is true more broadly of all things digital. As everything gets turned into a streamable, on demand monthly subscription, we are beginning to realize that the “things” we once surrounded ourselves with served purposes beyond pure utility.

As more and more of our lives take place online, there’s a growing disparity between our experiences, and the records of those experiences. The “souvenirs” that naturally accumulate in the real world aren’t guaranteed in the digital world. Data gets lost, devices get stolen, and photos and songs get trapped in obsolete formats. These souvenirs once functioned as touchstones, memory aides, and visual quantifiers, reminding us serendipitously who we are and where we’ve been.

The blessing of digital reading is also its curse – it is traceless. What came of those hours of precious attention we spent immersed in the mind of another? What did we take away from the experience, besides a warm fuzzy feeling of edutainment?

The hunger for artifacts will ensure that printed books continue to survive far into the future, and other more whimsical efforts like Bookcubes can help fill in the gaps. But the more fundamental need to take away something tangible from the experience of reading is one of the things driving the return of commonplace books – personal, curated collections of facts, insights, musings, quotes, and research originally invented in 19th century Europe, as a way to deal with the information explosion of the Industrial Era.

[image error]

Lewis Carroll’s commonplace book, showing his musings on ciphers and detailed handwritten charts exploring labryinths

My online course Building a Second Brain is about how to create a “digital commonplace book,” meeting the need described by Craig Mod:

“There is a gaping opportunity to consolidate our myriad marginalia into an even more robust commonplace book. One searchable, always accessible, easily shared and embedded amongst the digital text we consume. An evocation — the application of heat to the secret lemon juice letter — of our shared telepathy.”

The book will endure

Considering all these major changes, I believe that books will endure. Publishing isn’t unprofitable; it’s unprofitable to use expensive workflows for a single use and a single format.

The field of technical writing has long offered a solution: single-source databases with multiple output capability. This is exactly how the internet works: Yelp keeps all its data in a database, whose contents can be served up to any number of devices in just the right size and shape desired. The risk of not publishing content in open, accessible formats will grow as the number of opportunities for reuse grows.

Kevin Kelly defines the book nicely: “A book is a self-contained story, argument or body of knowledge that takes more than an hour to read. A book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.”

This definition starts to boil it down to its essence: a book is now best understood as a concentrated unit of attention.

Facts are useful, ideas are interesting, and arguments are important, but only a story is unforgettable, life-changing even. Only stories reach through to our empathy and our humanity, allowing us to walk a little in someone else’s shoes. To the extent that the grand challenges of our time require us to come to mutual understanding, and I believe they absolutely do, the book will endure as the minimum amount of concentrated attention required to become immersed in a story.

What a book transmits is not just information, but imagination. By crystallizing our ideas in the form of text, they take on a form that can survive years, decades, even centuries. Books free us from the bounds of time, like interstellar spaceships prepared to travel light years to find a suitable home.

I drew heavily on these sources for this article, but the ideas got too intermixed and intermingled to cite directly in the text:

Embracing the digital book, Craig Mod


The Technium: What Books Will Become


Why Information Grows tweetstorm

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing, by Craig Mod
Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto: A Collection of Essays from the Bleeding Edge of Publishing

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.

The post The Future of Ebooks appeared first on Praxis.

Introducing Tangle: A Connected Notebook

Note from Tiago: I recently met up with the Tangle team in San Francisco, and was intrigued by the new note-taking app they were building, which is partly inspired by my ideas on Praxis. I asked them to introduce their product and how they think about knowledge management from a product development perspective. Sign up here for early access to their prototype, and enter your email address here to receive future updates.

Do your notes generate ideas?

There is a connectivity problem with today’s digital notebooks.

As Tiago explains in P.A.R.A. III: Building an Idea Generator, organizational methods for retrieving ideas from note-taking applications rely on imposing structure. A structure is necessary because of the hierarchical nature of knowledge management software, namely note-taking apps. Maintaining the proper hierarchy is burdensome, yet failure to do so reduces, if not eliminates, your notes’ future value. Impose too much order, however, and you’ll reduce the opportunity for the serendipitous connections that make you creative and help generate new ideas.

Tiago and his team identified this problem and took action. They developed RandomNote, an application that adds randomness into your workflow by retrieving, as its name suggests, a random note from Evernote when you click it.

The app “allows notes in different notebooks to encounter each other,” helping to shine light on unidentified connections and revealing new ideas. RandomNote is a great hack for those moments you feel “stuck” on something.

RandomNote is undoubtedly an effective tool, but look closer and you’ll find it suggests much larger questions about current note-taking software. Why should we rely solely on serendipity and luck to inspire connections and resurface old thoughts? What if we could make connection more purposeful? We are building Tangle to do just that.

Tangle is a complete overhaul of traditional note-taking technology that puts principles of discoverability and connectivity first. To accomplish this, we have rethought the data structure of current digital note-taking tools. Instead of using a hierarchical structure, Tangle uses one built for connection: a graph.

The graph database enables Tangle to be a connection-first notebook that elevates idea generation and enhances the creative process.

What is a graph?

Graphs are great for modeling data that have many relationships. Graphs contain two types of data: nodes and edges. A node is something like a person, company, or city. Nodes are described with properties and labels, and they are relatable in some way to another node. Edges represent those relationships. They are described with unique properties.

> Nodes are things that are relatable. Edges are relationships between them.

Take the following example:

Two Giraffes, Edward and Norton, are friends. Both Edward and Norton eats the fruit, apricots.

[image error]

 

This sentence is a domain in which we have Giraffe nodes, “Edward” and “Norton”, a fruit node, “apricot”, and the relationships between them, “friends” and “enjoy eating.” By taking this statement, and identifying the relevant components, one can begin to build a model.

But why can’t we just use a normal database to do this?

The core reason is that traditional SQL and other noSQL databases cannot scale effectively to handle these kinds of relationships. When traversing thousands of relationships, SQL databases must do something called foreign key lookups. These lookups require the database to go to an index, which is essentially a file stored somewhere in your database. You can imagine that on average, this SQL operation takes X milliseconds when following a single relationship. If you want to traverse 10,000 relationships, it would take X*10,000 milliseconds. This is not ideal for data with a lot of relationships.

Native graph databases like Neo4j use a technique called index-free adjacency to solve this problem. Neo4j stores references to other records as pointers from a starting record, rather than in an index of foreign keys located in a database. When performing deep traversals on large datasets in a graph, problems that previously took hours can take milliseconds. This is profound, and its enabling us to power a model of connection at breakneck speed. If you’d like to learn more, check out this Neo4j article that dives deeper into the power of graph databases.

The note-graph

Tangle uses the power of the graph database to enable real-time connections between your notes. You could not use a SQL data structure and hope to achieve the same level of performance. What we end up with is something more akin to a note-graph than a traditional notebook.

Because Tangle’s graph stores the relationships between your notes, we are able to abstract away any need for manual organization. Anytime you capture a thought or take a note in Tangle, it automatically shows you the connections to any of your related content. You do no work to surface these connections; Tangle takes care of it for you instantly.

I’ll walk you through what this looks like in practice with a couple GIFs. In the first one below, I have a new note open, or what we call a “collection.” The collection, on the left, is a collection of related notes and thoughts I have captured — as you can tell by the title, this one is about the World Cup. As I capture different thoughts about the games, players, and my sadness at the United States’ failure to qualify, related captures I have written previously start to pop up.

[image error]

Tangle allows me to visualize the graph of that content too. I click “visualize” and the graph appears. Each node relates to a capture, and each edge represents a common relationship between those nodes. I enter a new capture and it appears in the graph immediately, snapping into place based on entity matching. As the graph forms, my new capture is also connected with old related notes as well.

[image error]

How does this work? Tangle analyzes the text using natural language processing — a type of machine learning that enables computers to understand language. In milliseconds, Tangle absorbs the content and traverses the graph, looking for other notes to which the original might have a connection.

The environment Tangle creates is connection-first. It’s goal is to surface your related content when it might be useful to you. We believe that this opens up a new paradigm of enhanced creativity and productivity. No need to spend time on strict organizational structures to get the most out of your notes, no workflow disruption searching for notes you have already taken, and no more time-sink researching something online that might be hidden in your folder structure.

So what’s next?

We are currently hard at work improving Tangle and are looking for feedback. If you are someone at the intersection of knowledge management and technology (and like trying new tech) we would love for you to participate in our alpha release. There is still time — we will be launching to select users over the next few weeks. Want to be one of them? Sign up here!  

The Tangle team also distributes a weekly newsletter providing development updates, KM blog posts, as well as other inspiring content from around the web. Click here to keep in touch with us!  

Lastly, if you’d like to get in touch directly, please feel free to email info@usetangle.com with any questions, comments, suggestions, or any bit of general feedback. We are open to it.  

Thanks for reading and thank you to the Praxis team for letting us share Tangle with you.

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.

The post Introducing Tangle: A Connected Notebook appeared first on Praxis.

Second Brain Case Study: Progressive Summarization in the Intelligence Community

I recently sat down with Andrew Gorham for an interview and case study of progressive summarization, a method of summarizing notes in a form that is easily discoverable in the future. It is one of three techniques I teach in our online course Building a Second Brain.

Andrew works for BMNT, an innovation consultancy that introduces innovation practices to national security organizations, including the Special Operations Command, the Marine Corps, Cyber Command, and over a dozen others.

He also teaches progressive summarization as part of a Stanford course called Hacking for Defense, in the Technology Ventures Program of the Department of Management Science & Engineering. The course introduces undergraduate and graduate students to “lean launchpad” techniques, applied to solving national security problems. Here’s a short video about the course.

I thought we were going to stick to note-taking, but in just 30 minutes we somehow also touched on innovation in large organizations, conducting customer interviews, equipping Navy SEALs for missions, the importance of rapid iteration and testing with users, exceptions to “just-in-time” summarization, and the potential role of natural language processing in knowledge management.

Watch the video below, listen to an audio-only version, or read a lightly edited transcript (progressively summarized of course!) at the bottom of this post, including links to resources mentioned.

Transcript

Tiago Forte: OK. So here we are doing a case study on progressive summarization with Andrew Gorham. Thank you so much for joining us Andrew. It’s a real pleasure. Why don’t you just start with a little introduction, like your background, what you do now, and how you came across progressive summarization, just so people have the context.

Drew Gorham: Yeah Tiago it’s great to be here. Thanks for bringing me on to talk about how we’re using progressive summarization at the company I work for right now, called BMNT, and basically what we have done, what we’re trying to do, is bring lean startup principles into government and defense, national security problems. And so we’re taking a new approach to the innovation that goes on in that space.

But you asked about my background. So I came out of the app gold rush, you could call it, back in 2010 or 2011, when everyone was building apps. I started as an app developer and then moved into design, eventually started my own company called the App Factory which is basically an app development shop that helps non-technical founders build a product, and built about 100 or so apps over a four-year period. And what I realized over that time is that I had the easy job – building the product is really easy – and the really hard part is validating that there’s a real business need out there, that there’s a real market, that there’s customers that have a pain point that you were actually solving.

So after many failures of building apps that weren’t solving a real pain point, I was just looking for answers like, “Why was this happening?”, and got turned onto Steve Blank’s Lean Startup methodology. The whole idea of, you can’t come up with a solution for a problem in a room like this with whiteboards on the wall. You have to get out of the building. You have to talk to customers. And really at the early stages of an idea your goal should be to maximize your speed of learning. And so I started incorporating that into the work I was doing with non-technical founders and started to see a lot more success that way.

And I got pulled into BMNT about two years ago where they were noticing the same problem in these massive bureaucracies. I mean the largest human organization on Earth, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), with something like a 600-billion dollar budget. It’s just insane. They’ve got massive problems that they’re trying to solve. And they’ve got this legacy approach that is really committing all of the mistakes that Silicon Valley learned back in the late 90s, early 2000s, really their problem is they’re solving the problems of 10 years ago with technology of five years ago to be fielded into operation, you know, five years from now.

So the thesis at BMNT is that the key to our national security is not going to be the robustness of our defense infrastructure. It’s really our ability to adapt to change. And all of this rapid technological change that’s coming out after us. It’s really incumbent upon us to increase the speed at which we solve problems because the problems are changing all the time. And so our founding partner Pete Newell, he came from the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force where they would build prototypes out in the middle of Afghanistan to rapidly solve problems over the course of weeks rather than years. He came out to Colorado and basically had a collision with Steve Blank, the Lean Startup godfather, and they created this methodology called Hacking for Defense, which has turned into a university course, first at Stanford.

But we’ve also commercialized it into a kind of innovation methodology that we’ve since expanded to “Hacking for X” where X can be defense or healthcare – any kind of large bureaucratic organization in a highly regulated environment. We’ve taken the Lean Startup approach along with all the other great design methodologies, like design thinking, total quality management, all of these things need to be a part of how we solve problems in the future.

But to tie back. One of Steve’s big things is getting out of the building, talking to customers, doing a lot of interviews with people who share the pain point you’re trying to solve. And one thing we’ve struggled with is how to compress all of the data we’re gathering from these interviews and then make sense of it in the future. And the unique thing, the hard thing about doing customer interviews is that it’s really hard to be listening to a conversation in real time and also deciding what is worth writing down and what is superfluous or not really relevant.

So we’ve figured out that the best note-taking strategy for customer interviews is to write just about everything you hear. I mean it’s not quite a transcript but it’s very close to a transcript. So you’re just typing at the speed of sound and and we need a way to compress that down and so that’s where progressive summarization has become useful for us.

TF: What a fascinating journey you’ve been on. Wow. Gosh, so many ways we could approach this. I couldn’t agree more. It’s so hard to do multiple mental operations, to listen and to think and also to judge and to decide and filter and distill. It’s like people think that isolating their environment – I’m in a phone booth pretty much right now – they think that will keep them from multitasking. You can multitask right here in your head.

AG: Oh absolutely. Yeah that’s a great point, especially when you have a limited amount of time with these folks. You know you’ve got maybe 30 minutes and you know they have really good information that you have to extract. And it just takes so much mental bandwidth to decide where to take the conversation, to allocate some of that to capturing, it’s just overwhelming.

TF: Could you say more about the environment? Are you just sitting down one on one with potential customers of defense products or defense contractors or are you doing a workshop? What is the scene?

AG: Yes. So we are working with folks in government. They might be with the Marine Corps or government employees working at an intelligence agency for instance. And usually it’s over the phone. I mean ideally you’d be face to face or from there, slightly less good would be a video interview, and below that would be a phone call. But the folks we’re interviewing are often distributed all over the world so we’re forced to resort to a phone call, and they’re behind all kinds of technology firewalls where they can’t open a Zoom conference like we can because it’s restricted on the network. So we have to talk to them over the phone.

It’s typically one person driving the conversation who we call a “problem curator.” So we collect all of these problems from our customers. We’ve got a backlog of hundreds of them from across the DOD and across the intelligence community, and we pick one out and we figure out who are the “key beneficiaries” – who are the people that if you were to solve this problem for them, they would run up and give you a big hug. They’d be so excited to have this problem solved. So we talk to those folks, typically over the phone, and the person driving that conversation we call a problem curator, and sitting next to them is basically a note taker. And yeah like I mentioned we figure the best note-taking strategy is to just write down as much as you can and decide what’s relevant later when you can free up that mental bandwidth.

TF: I love that too, it’s like a tag team. So one person can be totally present and the other person can be running around, at least mentally, trying to pick up all the pieces and probably make sure that the details are filled in, that’s very interesting.

AG: We’ve tried doing it with a single person driving the conversation and taking notes and what we’ve found is it’s just way too much, and the quality of the conversation, that’s what really takes a hit. It’s just not worth it.

TF: So true. I loved what you said about problems. In fact, this is one of people’s favorite exercises from the Building a Second Brain course, is the 12 Favorite Problems exercise. Essentially I have people list their favorite problems. What are the problems they love solving? Which typically appear again and again and again in their life. In different permutations and different manifestations. I just realized this has a relationship to customer development, which is, most people specialize in particular solutions. So they have their hammer and they go looking for their favorite nails. But if you specialize in a problem, but you’re agnostic to how you solve it, that is powerful. That’s way more latitude that you have in recommending things to clients. Is that what you find?

AG: Yeah. That is. That’s one of our core value propositions to customers is getting them to break out of that mental model of being that hammer in search of a nail, which has been the default mode in this environment for decades, and I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of reasons behind that. But coming up with real problem statements and saying your problems out loud is actually very difficult and in a lot of environments it’s not rewarded. So we’re trying to flip that and force people to define their problem and who it’s affecting. And what we’ve found is that no problem statement survives first contact with these beneficiary interviews. They always change.

I mean the classic example we have, and this came out of the Stanford courses, they were working with the Navy SEALs and one of the medical officers who was in charge of making sure the Navy SEALs were in top shape when they would go out on missions. He was like, “Hey our SEALs are getting hypothermia because they’re underwater too long. So my problem is that I need them to wear a wristband that keeps track of their vital signs – their heart rate, body temperature, stuff like that.” That was the problem Version 1.0: “I need this wrist monitor.” And the team went out and they talked to the Navy SEALs and were like “Hey guys, if we gave you this wrist monitor how would that affect your day to day, your job down there?” And they were like, “Well, if you gave me that wrist monitor, first thing I would do is throw it at the bottom of the ocean, because I don’t want to be pulled out of a mission because someone in a back office says my heart rate is too high.”

And what they discovered was the actual problem was that GPS navigation is nearly impossible at this significant depth underwater. So the SEALs couldn’t find where they were underwater or they weren’t able to map out their route. And so once they figured out that was a problem they built a simple prototype, which is basically this little GPS unit in a waterproof container tied to a string. It’s literally like a GPS buoy that they would unravel. It would go up to the top so it could get a signal periodically. So now they can locate themselves underwater and, I mean, talk about a pivot. That’s just the power of validating a problem through interviews with real problem owners, I guess we’d call them. And that wrist band probably would have been like a 500-million dollar contract.

TF: Useless solutions are very expensive to develop.

AG: Yes. Especially when they take years and you don’t show them to the end user until you’re three years into development.

TF: So I’m wondering, how do we tie this back to progressive summarization? So once these two people who are in the interview take the notes, and then they capture everything, they write everything down, what does the process look like? I mean do you take them by hand in an app and then store them somewhere? What is the flow?

AG: What I’ve found is it’s way too difficult to transcribe the conversation by hand in real time. It’s just too fast. You have to type it out. So typically in Evernote there and just furiously typing. And what I found is, I like your approach of,  don’t use progressive summarization until you need to. Right. But what I found is that when the conversation is still fresh in my mind, that’s the best time for me to try and pull out the relevant parts of that conversation. So typically we’ll take like 10 minutes at the end of an interview to just go through the different layers of bold and highlight.

TF: Interesting. I wonder if that’s a potential exception to doctrine. Because with text that was written to be static text, it doesn’t matter when you summarize it, because it was created to be easy to preserve across time. But I’m guessing, do you find that with a conversation there’s all this messy contextual stuff, like their body language, their tone of voice, the feeling in the room, that you can’t quite write down but is present there? So by doing this summarization you’re at least capturing a little bit of that. Is that what’s happening?

DG: That’s a great point. I never thought about it that way but that’s so true. There’s all sorts of information in the tone of voice that is only in your working memory. And if you wait too long that will probably be gone, so maybe you are encoding that a bit in what you decide to summarize, what you decide is relevant. Yeah that’s a great point.

The other thing we’ve been sort of experimenting with is putting our notes through some natural language processing to see if we can pull out some interesting connections across these interviews. So you’re focusing on this one problem and you might interview five people. So by capturing real language…if we were just typing notes it wouldn’t really be natural language. It would be sentence fragments. But by capturing whole sentences you’re able to use these powerful techniques…and pulling out names and organizations. So I’ll keep you posted if that turns into anything. But I think adding the progressive summarization into that data model could provide another layer of relevance scoring, you could say. Have you heard of anyone experimenting with that or combining progressive summarization with natural language processing?

TF: I’ve seen some small experiments…this isn’t quite natural language processing, but I think one of the first things to be automated…I’m looking at the building a second brain methodology, there’s all these manual processes. And one at a time they’re going to be automated. It’s not like one day there’s going to be general AI and the whole thing is going to be automated. It’s going to be one piece at a time. It’s going to be like a modular process. So I think one of the first things is just going to be getting a text down to its essence. There’s a service called SMMRY, and I had this experience where I progressively summarized manually a text, and then I did SMMRY, where you basically just have a slider, and you input the text and you say, “How short do you want this to be?” And you can slide it down or you can slide it up.

DG: Really? That’s cool. I’m going to check that out. I have a note with the two side by side. I’ll post it when I post this recording.

Extras

Here’s a quick summary of the process Andrew used to teach progressive summarization at a U.S. intelligence agency:

The Process

We had 5 participants total. Each participant received a physical copy of the book Talking to Humans, by Geoff Constable.

It’s quite short, so they were able to extract Layer 1 in ~90 minutes. Some had their laptops open while reading and typed directly into Evernote. Others kept their laptops closed and copied notes onto Post-its, then transcribed the Post-its into Evernote afterwards (the former group finished faster and enjoyed the process more).

Once everyone had their Layer 1 complete, I explained the concept of Layer 2 and each participant bolded the passages that really stood out. This took ~10 minutes.

Then I used the same approach for Layer 3 — that took ~5 minutes.

By the end of the 2 hr exercise, each participant had familiarity with progressive summarization and their own personalized summary of Talking to Humans. These summaries became a great resource material for them later in the week when they got outside the building and ran their own customer interviews. Also sparked a lot of interest in the BASB movement.

Thoughts

I see a lot of applications between BASB and intelligence work. 90% of the intelligence community (~100,000 people) are pure knowledge workers.

They do Progressive Summarization to the extreme — a 15-page report is summarized into a paragraph when it reaches a Senior Leader, that paragraph is summarized into a color (red, yellow, green) when it reaches a commander. It’s kind of absurd.

Lots of interesting overlap I’ll continue to explore!

Slides

Click here to view or download the slides used in the exercise above

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.

The post Second Brain Case Study: Progressive Summarization in the Intelligence Community appeared first on Praxis.

Progressive Summarization VI: Core Principles of Knowledge Capture

It might seem absurd that something as simple as a method of highlighting could be so important to a person’s productivity and learning. Even I’m surprised that’s turned out to be the case.

But as testimonials and stories have streamed in from people putting it to use around the world, I’ve become convinced that it is the beginning of a sea change in how we consume information. Just as mindless materialism has given way to mindful consumption, as we’ve realized that more is not always better, I believe we’re starting to see a parallel shift in our attitude toward information consumption. We’re learning that making is often more satisfying than consuming.

“Economic development is based not on the ability of a pocket of the economy to consume but on the ability of people to turn their dreams into reality”

–Cesar Hidalgo, Why Information Grows

College students have told me they will never take notes any other way (“You mean my class notes could be useful even after I graduate?!”). Elite consultants have used it to help their clients make sense of the massive amount of data they have at their disposal. I’ve been happily surprised to hear people with many years of educational experience tell me that Progressive Summarization has reinvigorated their reading and note-taking.

Even if you decide not to adopt the summarization method as I’ve described it in this series, I want to outline what I believe to be the universal principles of knowledge capture in the digital age.

In no particular order:

Interaction over consumption
Balance detail with discoverability
Opportunistic compression
Intuition over analysis
Focus most of your attention on the most valuable information
Tacit knowledge over explicit knowledge
Value questions over answers

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

The post Progressive Summarization VI: Core Principles of Knowledge Capture appeared first on Praxis.

Interview with Khe Hy on Rad Awakenings: The Privilege of Sharing Knowledge

I recently sat down to talk to Khe Hy on his podcast, Rad Awakenings. I was his first guest when he started last year, and I was honored to close out the first season with episode #52.

We talk about how with new multi-billion dollar industries being created each year, there are countless opportunities to create new “lanes” of expertise and ultimately “product-ize” that knowledge. We break down how to identify these new pockets of opportunity, become a full-stack freelancer, and create a distributed digital company – all because sharing knowledge is one of life’s greatest privileges.

Click here to listen

 

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

The post Interview with Khe Hy on Rad Awakenings: The Privilege of Sharing Knowledge appeared first on Praxis.

P.A.R.A. VIII: Core Principles of Digital Organization

Over the past year, I’ve seen P.A.R.A. implementations of all shapes and sizes. I’ve seen them from every corner of the globe, in languages I don’t even recognize, in at least a dozen different programs, and both digital and physical forms.

Over that time, seven core principles seem to have emerged as fundamental features. Whether you’ve taken on the particularities of the system I’ve described in this series, adopting these principles will seriously upgrade your digital organization.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Organize by actionability
Organize opportunistically
Move quickly, touch lightly
Controlled randomness
Complex systems have to be grown, not made,
Focus on outcomes
Fail gracefully
Shallow hierarchies

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

The post P.A.R.A. VIII: Core Principles of Digital Organization appeared first on Praxis.

P.A.R.A. VIII: Core Principles

Over the past year, I’ve seen P.A.R.A. implementations of all shapes and sizes. I’ve seen them from every corner of the globe, in languages I don’t even recognize, in at least a dozen different programs, and both digital and physical forms.

Over that time, seven core principles seem to have emerged as fundamental features. Whether you’ve taken on the particularities of the system I’ve described in this series, adopting these principles will seriously upgrade your digital organization.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Organize by actionability
Organize opportunistically
Move quickly, touch lightly
Controlled randomness
Complex systems have to be grown, not made,
Focus on outcomes
Fail gracefully
Shallow hierarchies

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

The post P.A.R.A. VIII: Core Principles appeared first on Praxis.

Hostwriting with Michael Fogleman

I recently had a conversation and interview with Michael Fogleman, who offers a service called Hostwriting that takes writers step by step through the process of writing their book.

Michael and his team offer coaching services, an online course, and an ebook production service, all centered around the idea that writing can be fun and easy when it’s centered around a conversation. Their approach is designed to get words on the page but also make you a better writer in the process.

Check out the recording below, and click here for a limited-time offer Michael has offered exclusively for Praxis members. You can also join the Hostwriting email list which includes a series of automated emails introducing you to the Hostwriting method in small chunks.

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

The post Hostwriting with Michael Fogleman appeared first on Praxis.

A Conversation with Ryan McCarthy of the Global Kindness Initiative

For last week’s Praxis Town Hall, I invited Ryan McCarthy of the Global Kindness Initiative to join us for a conversation about the connection between productivity, knowledge management, individual performance and larger issues like organizational change, socio-emotional awareness, and effective communication.

Ryan’s recent guest post Impact Cycles: Finding the Why Beyond the How provides a good introduction, and we expanded upon it significantly in this 90m interview, conversation, and Q&A. Visit their website above or email Ryan at ryan@kindus.org if you’d like to talk about coaching or training for yourself or your organization.

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

The post A Conversation with Ryan McCarthy of the Global Kindness Initiative appeared first on Praxis.