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Question 62 of 365: Why does waiting matter?

Published on March 4, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

In so much of what I write and think about, I am interested in what is instant and what I can will into being. I am so interested in creating what I can’t yet see. I want to be a part of the conversations that create change and I want to be with people who are passionate and have purpose behind their actions.

And yet, there is the waiting.

I wait because other people make me wait. I wait because I want to know what they have to say. I wait because that is the only way that listening can occur. I wait because being told no should always be an option on the table.

So, today I waited for a response. I waited to hear a judgement being handed down. And while I waited, I wracked my brain for what I could do better. I wrestled with every conceivable question that could have come up, every roadblock that someone else thinks I have. I sat nervously trying to iterate without a concrete direction. I wanted to speak, but knew that it wasn’t yet my turn.

And in the end, I wanted so badly just to be able to reach inside of someone else’s head and change their mind. I wanted to write the e-mail that told me I was doing a good job and that all of my hard work had paid off. And yet, that isn’t what makes waiting important.

I am not going to Techstars for a Day, but I will be continuing to iterate on my ideas and see if I can make it into the big show. This news wasn’t what was important either.

The waiting was the best part. It was the not knowing that provided the most freedom to have hope and hopelessness. It let me see two diametrically opposed futures: one in which everything goes exactly according to plan and I have an easy time convincing others that my ideas are valid and the other in which I have to fight for every conversation and every user. The reality is somewhere in the middle, but it is important to be in limbo sometimes and weigh both sides as equally possible.

Only waiting can let me get comfortable with ambiguity. Through waiting, I am able to doubt everything and come out on the other side. I can challenge my assumptions and figure out just why those assumptions were stupid. Flat out rejection is too harsh because you end up throwing out everything. Pure success is equally damaging. It can make almost anything seem like a good idea.

Waiting is what makes us vulnerable enough to let others make us better. And that is what I did today. I got better.

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Question 61 of 365: How do we make renewal more accessible?

Published on March 2, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

Sometimes, making a single change to a long held practice will completely renew your interest and commitment to that practice. One of those times was this week.

I am renewed in my fascination and commitment to blog comments.

For years, I have thought that along with PDF’s (as Will Richardson puts it), they were where ideas went to die. They only lived as tiny little attachments on the end of a post, an asterisk on an idea. While they may spark a lot of debate or be the most interesting part of a blog, I could never help but feeling as though they were a waste because of how little they were incorporated into everything else I was doing. Sure, you have been able to subscribe in e-mail to comments on blogs, but it never felt like a cohesive conversation. Sure, people have had threaded comments for a couple years, but it always worked more like just an extension of the regular commenting structure than a real debate of ideas. The threads never really went anywhere besides what the original blog post had envisioned.

So, why this renewal?

The switch to Disqus comments has fueled my new outlook on comments. The simple ability to respond to a comment directly in e-mail and then see all of the threads as a conversation in gmail has made me think that there really could be a commenting renaissance in our future. Because each comment now has its own short link, I can send it out on Twitter or Buzz and continue the conversation.

I am now looking at my comments as ways of forming relationships and beginning/continuing conversations that were impossible to do previously. And, all from one simple switch to a different commenting system.

So, this has gotten me thinking about whether or not the entire process of renewal can be made more accessible to others. It makes me want to figure out which feature of a process could be changed in our every day lives that would cause us to buy-in anew and want to create something.

Which aspect of collaboration can I change to incite renewal for others?

Which part of meetings can I shift in order to renew interest in talking with one another?

What can I change in the writing process to allow people to see it as a renewing force in their life?

And there is the crux. In order to make renewal available to everyone, there is a level of investment required. All of these things do require someone to DO something. So, by focusing on things that people are already doing, we may be able to shift them one or two degrees in order to bring about real change.

In essence, what I need to figure out is not so much what are the changes I can make for others, but to really figure out what people are doing and go from there. Unless I have a good understanding of exactly how people are using a given tool, protocol, or idea; I will have no chance of making a lasting change that brings about renewal. I need to hear more stories about how people are meeting and collaborating, about how they are asking questions and about how they are leveraging the people that they know in order to find answers.

Until I listen, I can’t renew or reinvent anything.

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Question 60 of 365: Who should be our partners?

Published on March 2, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

Not all collaboration is equal.

There are the types of collaboration that require that I do a first draft and then everyone hangs ideas off of it like a christmas tree. Generally, these are things that I have a lot of experience in, but many others have opinions about. Google Docs is the perfect platform for getting things like this done because it is basically begging for someone to start an idea before sharing it out.

There are the types of collaboration that require divvying up the work in a big way so that each person. I think about every time that I have started a wiki or managed a project. There are just some things that we gravitate toward because we actually have time to tackle them. Each page is owned by someone else and while there may be commenting back and forth, the pages really feel like one person’s work.

There are collaborations that call for extremely distributed contributions. We are talking here about the ones that use hashtags, forms or drop boxes. These kinds of collaborations do not feel especially well organized because their point is to gather data rather than propose an idea. The real result is that someone must use the data wisely and produce a first draft type of collaboration.

All three of these types of collaboration are fine, but they aren’t partnerships.

To me, partnerships are all about shared resources and shared responsibility. They are all about taking a risk in the hopes of finding a reward. They are about joining forces so closely that it doesn’t matter who is doing the action, both entities feel “on the hook” for making sure it is a good one.

These kinds are partnerships are few and far between. And yet, they are the ones that I am looking for. I am actively engaged in finding groups of people (whether those are companies, organizations, or just self-organizing conglomerations) that are interested in giving up a piece of what they have in order to find something greater.

I am looking for groups willing to invest time and resources in building an idea, and not necessarily their idea. Rather, I want groups who are willing to share an idea.

And yet, how do you get a group that is already established to buy into something that isn’t “theirs” in the strictest sense of the word?

It is my belief that in order to partner with someone, your value must be so glaringly apparent as to make it inconceivable for the partner to want to do anything else. Too often we settle for less than ideal partners because we either do not believe that we have this kind of value or we believe that it does not exist outside of us, and therefore, is impossible to find.

The people we partner with should be able to help us achieve one of our goals better, stronger, or faster. If not, we should take a pass. And if they do not see us in the same light, they should move along as well.

Partnerships should be made based upon creating something new. If it is just consolidation or dovetailing of interests, a partnership is unnecessary. People will collaborate just fine without formalizing a relationship. But, creating something new, requires new people to step forward. It requires a leadership that cannot be slapped together. Creating something new, at least something lasting, is impossible without sharing a thought process and following through on that process.

A partnership also must be perfected over time. The relationships are very much like any good marriage: they require a lot of communication and work. I believe in the power of working hard to communicate between two entities and in fulfilling the requests that one another have. “Trouble Tickets” should be able to go both ways. The process of fixing something broken is both systemic and swift, iterative and intuitive.

In short, I want to partner with those who want to partner with me. Any takers?

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Question 59 of 365: When is Judgement better than Feedback?

Published on February 28, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

I speak a lot about the value of perpetual beta or the need to emphasize process over product, so this maybe an entirely hypocritical thing to say. But… Judgement is better than feedback sometimes. Knowing in an absolute sense that someone hates your idea can be preferable to having any number of people try and help you make it better. Sometimes getting an objective kick in the pants or pat on the back can galvanize passion in a way that the incremental process of working toward a goal never can.

And, very soon I will be looking for judgement. Not, from my network, but from the outside, from people I have never met (online or otherwise). Very soon, I will be demonstrating an idea in the hopes that people will tell me that it sucks, unequivocally. I want them to be rabid about it too. I want them to be so mad that it doesn’t work the way that they want it to that they will challenge me to think about it differently.

I also want other people to make the judgement call that it is worthy of their time. I want them to believe so much in my ideas that they will be willing to back it up with funding, connections, and full throated support in everyday conversation. I want their judgement to be absolute, not dependent upon the next version forthcoming.

And when the judgements come, they will be swift. It will be a moment of consideration and then a decision. People will pronounce fate, and do it based upon evidence I have provided. They have the control, and yet, I am the one putting myself up for such a judgement. I am submitting myself to being graded for the first time in a long time.

And that is why I think it is special, and it should stay special. Grading and this kind of judgement on what you have done, should be something that only comes along once in a great while. It should hinge upon you being ready to stand up to criticism and believe that you have put the best possible version of what you believe forward for review.

That is why I believe in defending dissertations. It is why I believe in writing grants. It is why I believe in applying to schools. It is why I believe in the interview process.

And for the same reason, it is why I do not believe in standardized testing. It is also why I do not believe in many versions of performance review (the kind that is based on progress, not a culmination or an application for something new).

I believe that moments of judgement should be based on individual achievement, not measured against a standard. A test cannot measure what an application can. A review based upon Smart Goals will never be as good as a review that requires a person to rewrite their job description and apply for that new job. A judgement means that you have done something worthy of esteem. A feedback loop means that you can never take a step back and pronounce something as good.

So, as I head on into my next judgement. I hope people like what I am doing enough to tell me, and I hope people hate it enough to do the same. Either way, Judge me.

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Question 58 of 365: How are local and crowdsourced opposing forces?

Published on February 28, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

The folks in my local network are amazing. They are the ones who will babysit for my children, or hang out after work with my family. They are the ones who seem to share a lot of the same values with me. After all, they moved close to where we live for a reason, right? They are really the ones that I should be turning to with my problems and with my questions.

But, they aren’t. In fact, there are so few local people that I turn to on a daily basis, that I am almost scared by it. Other than a few key people (my wife included), my local network is a wasteland of e-mail threads and empty projects. Whenever I have a new idea, I don’t put it out to the people that I work with on a daily basis. I send the idea out to anyone who cares to take a stab. And more often than not, the only people with that inclination are anything but local.

It is counterintuitive to think that people who do not share the same space and time with me (or even have a previous personal relationship with me) would be more likely to join in on a project than their local counterparts. In fact, it is almost unfathomable that my local network would be so silent on some of the issues that I seem to face all of the time.

My local network does not see the value in commenting back and forth. They do not see the value in Twitter or Buzz. They are not plugged into the conversation. They are not ready to avail themselves of crowdsourcing activities. And, I guess that is the difference.

The local is striving to stay local.

The crowd is striving to be a part of the crowd (or, at least, and individual in the crowd).

The only way to stay local is to be unplugged and uninformed. If you are engaging in conversations that are universal, you will become international, even cosmopolitan. If you are striving to connect, there is no choice but to connect with those outside of your local network.

While I would like to bring the local to meet the crowdsourced, the only way for that to happen would be for the people near me to adopt the methodology of the crowd. they must be more public with their work. They must strive to answer passionate questions. They must stop placing so much value on people that they can “have a beer with.”

Being a source for someone’s crowd is valuable because it means that they will be a source for you as well. There is a certain level of reciprocation that we can expect from the crowd, even if it is only a feeling about such things. Again, this is counterintuitive. It should be that the locality will produce more reciprocation because of proximity, but instead it breeds a lot more competition. If you are doing something of value, it will be noticed among the crowd and leveraged to everyone’s benefit.

If we are able to bring more people along from the local to the crowd, we may be able to change the very nature of what it means to be local. We may be able to change the expectations for how much participation is possible and what level of investment is guaranteed. We could change local to mean all kinds of connection, not just face to face.

While, I see a lot of drawbacks to crowdsourcing, when it comes to asking my own questions. I am directing them more toward people I don’t know than people I do. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the most interesting opportunities and people have always come from outside the local, and not from within. Is that a function of the web, or is that just the way that it always has been?

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Question 57 of 365: Who is doing the asking?

Published on February 26, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

As I have been asking a lot of questions of late, I thought it was time for me to see who else is doing the same. I should have something in common with those other who are also looking for answers, right? A kind of community could be formed around this practice, and in time, we would be able to figure out what makes each of our questions important.

However, after quite a little bit of research, the community may have to wait. It seems as though each site that helps people ask and answer questions isn’t really trying to create a community of practice so much as they are trying to create a database of answers or a platform for connecting questions with answers rather than people together.

This somewhat disheartening notion came from these facts:

So, I guess I am just a little disappointed with the platforms currently available. More than that, though, I am disappointed that more people don’t seem to be noticing that they are connecting with a system rather than with people when they ask questions. I am surprised that they aren’t clamoring for a better community of practice, but perhaps they don’t know how.
Perhaps, the people doing the asking don’t know that they can ask for more. Perhaps, they don’t know that they can get an answer and a network. Perhaps they aren’t aware that the process of asking the question and iterating on that question to find a better one and debating honestly as people instead of avatars can be one of the most rewarding experiences online or offline.
So, who is doing the asking?
Well, right now it is those who have a need, but don’t see what that real need is. It is people who will may find an answer, but won’t find an experience. It is just individuals, and it will remain that way until something allows them to come together and find real solutions, rather than just words.
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Question 56 of 365: How can we make openness tangible?

Published on February 25, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

I have written about openness before in a more theoretical sense. I have talked about open as “the space between.” And yet, I never explored just what that idea of openness actually looks like and how we can strive for the balance of openness in our work every day. Defining what it means to be open, should exist in a context. It should be a part of the objects, situations, and people who are open.

So, I start with a story:

My introduction to anything like a blog was Karl’s Corner. Originally (in about 2000 or 2001), it was just a list of all of the happenings that the band Weezer were doing across the world. It spoke about how they were gearing up to record “the green album” and had lots of pictures and music to listen to. Karl updated the site nearly every day. He was incredibly transparent with almost all aspects of the way the band was progressing.

Karl is open. He shares the space between me (as a music fan) and the band (as the creators themselves). In many ways, I have tried to emulate Karl in my years of writing. I have tried to find the space between education and myself and explore that space. I have tried to ask the questions that will lead to figuring out the inner workings of that education, whether it is mine or someone else’s.

Another story:

A few weeks ago, I went to Nebraska to work with some teachers at an online school, ESU 13. I was being paid to come out and talk about what I always talk about: Authentic ways of teaching and learning. After the two 4 hour sessions in which we discussed Moodle, Google Apps, Screencasting, and the learning that happens after you ask the question but before you receive the answer via the submit button in Moodle; they said that they probably would want to continue working with me on these ideas. The principal of the school said that he would like to be able to pay me for doing work on an ongoing basis with the school.

For most people who do consulting full time, that isn’t a weird request. For me, it was incredibly odd. I was going to work with those teachers whether he paid me or not. I was going to keep the conversations going on Twitter, in Buzz, and in any other way that we wanted to continue them because the truth is that I am learning too. To me, the conversation has to be out in the open, if we are to advance in any way. Openness is the space between teacher and student. It is the space that we can both exist within and neither of us needs to be paid to exist in this space. If it happens that we are paid to be a student sometimes and a teacher others, then so be it. But, we must make contracts with ourselves and not some “third-party” so that we can learn and teach.

Last story:

I am applying to a startup incubator called Techstars. It is incredibly competitive and like over 700 applications will be sent in this year. I am planning my journey to apply out in the open. I am figuring out the itch that I want to scratch, and the itches that other people are interested in scratching too. No piece of information or idea is too small to be included in the journey. I want to always be able to see the iterations I have gone through (including changing names and directions completely).

So, this is the space between revisions. It is the space between now and the next now. It is the space that allows me to be wrong over and over again as I work toward being right, or at least right for someone. Doing this out in the open means that I will actually be able to use this data and not hold everything hostage until I finally can release version 1.0 of my idea. That is why open matters. It allows me to focus on being better with others, not being the best alone (because that will never happen).

We make openness tangible by giving others the space between creator and consumer, the space between teacher and student, and the space between this version and the next. If we can do these things for one another, we will be bringing about the most change for our ourselves, our schools, and our companies.

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Question 55 of 365: What is the unit of measurement for an idea?

Published on February 24, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

We measure  and rate everything.

We measure how much things weigh, how many calories we consume, what rating a movie should have based upon violence, how good a meal was, how long our batteries will last, and on and on. We even measure our measurements, like how often we take a poll or how correct our prediction of the weather may be. The only thing that I can figure out that we don’t have good way to measure is ideas.

We don’t know when an idea starts or when it ends. We don’t know where they come from or where they go. We have almost no way of telling with an objective rating system whether an idea is good or bad. Essentially, we have no unit of measure for an idea.

But, I would like to. I would like to know the value of an idea, at least in relative terms. I would like to know when a new idea is being formulated so that I can grab onto it and help to create it. I would like to be able to say that a certain document, or video, or audio recording has a definite number of ideas and then be able to enumerate them so that I can see their value.

I understand that this process may be taking some of the art out of idea making, but I believe that if we had a better way to measure an idea against another one, we could actually come up with better ideas on the whole. I believe that if we had a mechanism to break a piece of content up into idea chunks, we could advance those ideas and build greater things off of them without letting the superfluous ideas weigh down the ones with real potential.

For example: If we were able to separate out every idea within the Health Care bills that are proposed to congress and weigh each one carefully, we would have a mechanism for separating out the very good ideas from the very bad ones. Obviously, what is a very good idea to one person might be a bad idea to another, and yet, when they are all wrapped up into one document, there is simply no way to tell where people stand on any given concept. It is my contention that with enough participation and collaboration on identifying valuable ideas, a lot of the subjectivity will go away. Mostly because the ideas that get the most debate are probably the ones that are the best ideas. The ideas that no one is debating probably can either be passed through or killed on the spot. Those ideas don’t require our focus, the ones that are contentious and will produce a reaction, are the ones that we really need to solve.

And yet, if we have no unit of measurement for ideas, how can we go about this process?

So, here is what I am proposing: What if every video that was produced could be split up into idea chunks and then rating on an individual basis. What if every document that was created could be highlighted according to the same idea chunks and rated on a scale that makes sense. What if every piece of media could be broken down so as to provide data about that object.

If we started there, what would the ratings system be? What is the scale that we could measure an idea against? Perhaps the relevance scale, or the passion scale, or even the understandable scale.

Clearly my answer here is the start of a much bigger conversation, but perhaps it is time to consider just how we are having our conversations about the most important issues of our day. Perhaps we need to be thinking about how we can at least agree on the measuring stick by which all ideas can by rated. Because as it stands right now, we either look at things on the whole which doesn’t allow for much analysis or we are all using different terms which only let’s us claim victory according to those terms.

As I think through this, I wonder about this video. For all of the ideas that he talks about in his Open Letter to Educators, I know that some are good. I know that some are inconsequential. How can I talk about one without talking about the others?How can I give his entire work 5 stars while I know that only a few of the ideas are really going to bring about real change?

If I could break things up or boil them down, I would have a better chance of figuring things out.

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Question 54 of 365: Why are we digital amnesiacs?

Published on February 24, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Diagram showing overview of cloud computing in...
Image via Wikipedia

I was going to say that we may be digital goldfish, but then I did a little bit of research and it looks like goldfish have a lot longer memory than we have ever given them credit for (about 3 months for colors and other things). My point actually is that we seem to keep on having the same conversations in new contexts and think that we are making real progress every time. It is like we believe that everything that has come before this particular moment in time doesn’t matter. The problems that we run into and unique, and our solutions are novel.

We state that we are reinventing something, but we frame it in terms of the old thing.

Take cloud computing: We are putting huge amounts of information online for access anywhere. We are accessing web platforms and programs in the cloud that used be housed on our hard drives. We are putting so much together onto the servers belonging to great companies, and we are paying for the right to access it.

We are amnesiacs if we can’t recognize that we are now reliving the days of mainframe computers. We are storing everything on a server in a room somewhere, and we are accessing it via a terminal. Essentially, we are time-sharing (great documentary at MIT labs in 1963)  our files and processing power, and sometimes (see The Fail Whale) not even for as much reliability.

Take “collaborative tools”: We have been talking about participatory culture and the read/write web for a few years now, and in many ways completely oblivious to the fact that collaboration is not something new. We claim that it is a 21st century skill, but people have collaborated beautifully without the need for such a label.

Whiteboards work. Post-it notes work. And the best collaborative tool is a really good conversation. We conveniently forget these are options when we design spaces online.

Take Social Search: This latest version of search is masquerading as something new. We are ready to crown it as the next big thing in vetted information and resources. By simply applying a social process to videos, links, and question asking in general, Social Search is aiming to become the officially sanctioned “Google-killer”.

And yet, people have always been the best vetting mechanism. A person who has the experience to pull resources from everywhere and know which ones will matter most to an individual is always going to do a better job than an algorithm or leveraging a crowd that has no personal investment in the individual seeking knowledge. Truly, the librarian is the original Social Search.

We conveniently forget just how much has already been done and thought. We don’t realize the other iterations of an idea, and we don’t seek them out either. We are happy with our Digital Amnesia because it helps us to consider ourselves as original, even innovative. However, when we are blind to the analog and only care about the digital, we will only be able to make small gains in our organizations and companies. If we can’t truly learn from the past and stand on the shoulders of giants, of what use are we?

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Question 53 of 365: Who are our board of directors?

Published on February 23, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.


All organizations have a Board to govern them. They check in on what the org is doing and they have a unique perspective to see the whole rather than having to worry about the everyday. Board of Educations guide policy for school districts and Board of Directors guide companies and non-profits. In many cases, Boards are looked down upon as meddling in the affairs of an institution or issuing directives that are absurd or counterproductive. Often decisions that must be “run by the Board” are ones that we agonize over. The Board has the power to kill our projects of passion or redirect our efforts with their ability to fund or unfund at will.

However, this is not the kind of Board that I am trying to invoke. What I am talking about here is a form of mentorship that you can’t get without actually stating who your mentors are. You can have friends and family and you can get advice from them, but if they don’t know that they hold a pivotal role in helping you to envision a direction and a future, there is a lot of unfocused pushes toward nothing.

As I have embarked on answering questions and figure out the next steps for my career and my life, I have enlisted my Board of Directors because they are the people who I want to share my future with.

Here is how I chose my Board:

I looked for the people who have a passion for getting things right, those who are not satisfied with a first attempt. I chose those who will not let me be an expert for too long. I chose people who have something to teach me, or who will let me learn with them.

My Board is all older than me. While this isn’t essential, I mention it because I think that people who have the experience to put things into context for me are essential. I looked for those who take pictures. I watched for people who could express themselves, and express frustration well.

(An aside: Frustration has to be the hardest emotion to express well. We mostly give off noises to show it. The people that can really do this well, however, are capable of getting genuinely mad in the face, describing their frustration and letting it flow through them as they work out their next action. They never put their hands up in the air and then never write someone off. They see opportunities for frustration and pursue them in order to alleviate other’s frustrations. They express frustration with steady pressure and focused fanaticism for the way things should be.)

The people that I wanted to elect to my Board do not have everything figured out. They are failures sometimes. They are disinterested at others. They are honest about both.

What I wanted were wrecking balls for my thoughts.

I wanted writers. I wanted people who go out for coffee. I wanted people who use pens and paper.

And that is what I found. I found mentors who I talk to on a regular basis and whose conversations I cherish, save and come back to quite often. My mentors change my perspective on a regular basis. They make me better at asking questions and finding answers. And, they are the reason why I learn.

Finding people to push you to learn is the best thing you can ever do, no matter the workflow, tool or job at hand. It is the people that will prevail, no matter what.

(And perhaps, that is why so many organizations struggle. Their Boards don’t push them to learn, just to work harder.)

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