Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of what matters, “the database of expectations,” so to speak) is arguably the hallmark of living things. We’re now starting to build computers that work the same way. And we’re building enterprises around this new kind of sense-and-respond computing infrastructure. …It’s essential to recognize that each of these systems is a hybrid human-machine system, in which human actions are part of the computational loop.

I particularly like O’Reilly’s description of the organization as a group mind that incorporates both people and machines, as it fits in with my thoughts on organizational cognition. The organization also incorporates culture, processes and many other feedback loops that structure how the organization accomplishes its tasks.

Let’s start by taking a quick look at two existing organizational models:

• Small teams - the pre-industrial-age organizational model. In a small team, no organizational structure is needed because everybody knows what everybody else does, and decisions can be made organically or by consensus. New team members are indoctrinated into the way things work by social pressures. Whether discussing hunter-gatherer bands or artisan guilds, it’s rare that organizations grew to more than 30 people without splitting into smaller groups. There’s a reason that even modern managers understand the power of small targeted teams. Communications limited the size to which a team could grow, as the number of communication pathways grows exponentially with the size of the team.
• Hierarchy - the industrial-age organizational model. Information and decisions are funneled up to the appropriate decision-maker, and the resulting decision is distributed out to the employees who carry out those decisions. This was ideal in a world of limited communications, as each employee knew that information flowed up to their manager, and decisions flowed down from their manager, so they only had one primary communication link to maintain. Hierarchies also simplified assimilation of new people because the hierarchy defined each employee’s responsibilities, generally in an organizational handbook.

There have been various hybrid organizational models where there are hierarchies of teams and other configurations, but teams and hierarchies have been the basic building blocks for most organizations.

We are in a fascinating time where the number of possible organizational solutions has gotten much larger, as technology has removed the communication limitations that previously eliminated many potential configurations. We are just now figuring out what the new possibilities are, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, so that we can find the appropriate option for a given venture. To put it in geekier terms, we are starting to map out the vastly expanded search space for organizational structures.

I think O’Reilly’s post identifies one direction, where organizations integrate computers so that certain decisions (like Google ranking web pages) don’t need to be handled by people and instead information deluges are handled by software. One of my interests is in trying to map out other possibilities, what they would look like and how they would fit various organizational purposes. My previous post about the future of organizations discussed how the new limitations may be social rather than technical, which implies that we need to start designing new social structures that can take advantage of the newly available technology.

One possibility that I’m playing with is that of overlapping teams with clearly defined roles. The good teams I’ve been on involved people who trusted and respected each others’ contributions to the team’s overall goals. I’d like to think that a fractal organization could be built off of such teams which each have a team goal, and then each team trusts the other teams to accomplish their goals in order to satisfy the organization goals. There would be a ton of communication necessary to distribute information within the organization to where it needs to go, but I think that is becoming more realistic by the day.

Another possibility is the free agent world, where there are no continuing organizations. Instead, coalitions of individuals are formed for specific projects, accomplish those project by bringing in other people as needed, and then disband to pursue other projects with different people. This would be the endpoint of the world where everybody becomes a consultant in their specialty.

I’m sure there are lots of other possibilities that I haven’t considered. For instance, I’m definitely interested in what we can learn from how World of Warcraft guilds are organized to accomplish their goals when every player is free to leave guilds that don’t work for them. Or how organizations mobilize volunteers to work for them - I’m sure there’s much to learn from Obama’s campaign this year. I’d love to hear of other ideas that people have on how to organize people.

P.S. I finally created the Google group/email list to discuss organizations that I mentioned in that future of organizations post, so go ahead and join up if you’re interested.

I was trying to figure out what was different about this time versus the other times I’d seen it fail, and realized that it was the specificity of the appeal. On the other flights I remember, the flight attendant said “We have several people trying to make close connections, please let them through”, and that appeal had no effect, as everybody considered themselves to have close connections, so everybody got up. What was effective this time was that the flight attendant had framed it as a story - the one-line story of the couple trying to get to Amsterdam reified them in our brains as “real” people. The story also invoked our social sense, and made us defer to them as we would for any member of our community.

To give more background on my thinking, my post on the ultimatum game explores how our brains react differently when we have a one-off transaction with somebody (where we try to get all that we can from that transaction) versus how we react when we are part of a community (where fairness becomes a factor as we’ll have to interact with them again in the future). I also argue in the following post that we can use stories to expand our “monkeysphere”, the number of people that we consider to be “real” people as opposed to strangers who we distrust and/or take advantage of.

Making people persons by associating stories with them comes up in many different situations that I can think of:

• One obvious application is that of user interface design, where I’ve been heavily influenced by Alan Cooper’s tactic of using personas to model real users. In particular, one of the reasons I was effective as a software developer is that I was always developing software for specific people with whom I interacted, rather than for a generic “user”. Because my target audience was specific and real and I knew the stories of how they worked, my software was more effective at helping those people accomplish their goals.
• Another example is in the area of management, especially in the creation of a divide between managers and workers. When the two sides don’t know each other, there is the tendency to ascribe the worst motivations to the other side, and assume that they are actively working towards one’s destruction. But both sides are just fallible humans doing the best they can. Sometimes there are no good choices as a manager, and the manager is doing the best he or she can under the circumstances. As somebody who interacted with both sides, I saw both viewpoints and therefore couldn’t demonize the managers as arrogant control freaks or the workers as entitled whiners. I couldn’t flatten them out into stereotypes, as their stories kept them real people to me.
• One last example is in the area of politics, and specifically homosexuality. I grew up in a very sheltered and religious suburb of Chicago, where the default assumption was that homosexuals were deviant and evil. When I got to MIT, and found myself living in a house with such people, I was initially wary. But of course, once I got to know them as people, I realized how stupid and broken the stereotypes in my head were. And this has been my observation of others as well - it’s difficult to treat somebody as a stereotype once you know them as a person, because their specific details supercede the stereotype in your head.

It takes practice to remember to treat others as people, and not as puppet players on whom you are projecting your own fears and hopes. I still fall into the trap of ascribing my own stories to other people and assuming the worst or best, and being surprised either way. Learning to treat others as real people in their own right remains a goal towards which I strive, and I think it’s an essential skill to learn in a massively networked world where we are always interacting with people outside of our own core community.

What do you think?

P.S. A friend’s new blog, Made of Happy, has a neat star rating Wordpress plugin, and when I inquired about it, she said it was GD Star Rating, so I just installed it. Now you can provide feedback on my posts without the trouble of having to come up with a comment!

I recently posted on Twitter, which then posted as my Facebook status message, about my attempt to convince myself that I should spent ~$200 on these bike/dress pants. Something like 10 people commented on these pants, which is kind of bizarre in and of itself, and most of the comments were something like “Duh, of course you should get the pants - they’re nice, you can afford them, what’s the problem?” So this got me thinking about my reticent attitude towards clothing.

Part of it is that, yes, I’m an adult, and I could buy the pants, but at the same time, as an adult, I have to balance my wants with other longer-term wants and run an implicit cost-benefit analysis between dropping $200 on pants today and saving up for a down payment on a house. Admittedly, I think I weight myself too heavily towards the long-term, and almost never buy anything for myself (except books) (and I’m trying to cut back there by using this remarkable place called the library that brings me books for FREE!). So it’s hard to say.

I also have a hard time convincing myself to spend money on clothes in general. I’ve never been particularly interested in looking good, although I make abortive attempts occasionally. Mostly I make one trip a year to Macy’s, or in the last couple years, make one order on L.L. Bean, buy a couple pairs of slacks and shirts, and I’m good. So the idea of spending $200 on a single pair of pants is kind of horrifying to me as that’s typically what I spend on clothes in a year.

Interestingly, I’m willing to spend that kind of money on shoes. I wear shoes every day, and finding comfortable, durable shoes is worth it to me. I love my Ecco boots - I bought them two years ago and they’re holding up just fine despite daily wear and tear (my previous pair of boots lasted four years). I bought a new pair of Ecco dress shoes this summer that I expect to last me ten years.

But clothes aren’t the same way. Part of the reason is that clothes wear out. I at least have finally gotten in the habit of throwing out clothes with holes in them - I had a conversation a few years ago with a friend who asked me whether I owned any t-shirts without holes in them, so this is a bigger step than you might think. I actually paid for new t-shirts (*gasp*) which horrified the thrifty anti-appearance troll within me.

Part of the reason is I’m just bad at buying clothes. I’ve occasionally bought myself shirts and slacks that just don’t work on me for one reason or another, and that money just went to waste. Those just sit on my hangers making me feel stupid - moving back from New York was my excuse to give a bunch of those to Goodwill.

The couple times I’ve gone shopping with friends definitely helped, as they forced me to try on lots of outfits to find out what worked for me. That helped me realize that a significant portion of getting clothes that look good is finding clothes that actually fit. It wasn’t a magical process, there was no secret - it was simply spending several hours trying on things, and seeing what looked good. I still don’t like the process, and am mostly standard sized enough that I can order things over the web, but I at least understand that I could look nicer if I put in the time.

Which raises another underlying tension - I’m uncomfortable with trying to improve my physical appearance. I’ve always identified myself as “smart”, and to some extent, it feels like trying to also look good would dilute my focus. In other words, I present it to myself as a bi-valued choice, and feel like I can only pick one - looking good is explicitly not part of my identity, so I choose not to pursue it. Which is stupid, I know, but there you go.

Anyway, it’s interesting to me that I started thinking about all these topics as the result of an innocent twitter about pants, so I thought I would share. I’m most of the way towards convincing myself these pants would be durable and look good and I could wear them regularly for years, which would be enough to get me to buy them next week some time. Of course, they’ve added more pants choices since I first looked, which is just making the choice harder as I can’t decide which color or which material to get. Damn you, paradox of choice!

“But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size. …For the future, the trend to bet on seems to be networks of small, autonomous groups whose performance is measured individually. And the societies that win will be the ones with the least impedance.”

This is interesting to me because I’ve been thinking about organizational cognition recently, which is the question of how an organization creates a group mind that knows more than its individual constituents. If the trend is towards smaller organizations, then perhaps the problem isn’t how to get large organizations to operate more effectively, but instead how to facilitate cooperation between organizations. These are similar problems, but existing organizational solutions like hierarchies don’t work for inter-organization collaboration, which creates urgency to find more flexible solutions.

This move towards less formal organizations to accomplish tasks is also covered well in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Shirky cites Ronald Coase’s theory that companies exist because the transaction costs associated with organizing people were more expensive than the associated inefficiencies of not necessarily finding the best person for each individual task. According to Shirky, new technologies lower the Coasean floor and create the possibility of impromptu evanescent gatherings of people accomplishing things together that could simply not have been organized previously.

So how small can organizations get? Are we approaching a full free market world where we recruit different people for each individual project (the analogy I use in that post is movie making)? I don’t think so. And here’s why.

My theory is that the new Coasean floor is going to be set by social trust. While we are in a world where I could hire a programmer to do a task from Elance or oDesk, I have to admit that I would be very nervous about doing so for any critical task. Why? Because I wouldn’t know the person and wouldn’t trust them.

It takes time and experience together to build the trust necessary for a team to function effectively and efficiently. Teams do not begin jelling as high performance units until each member of the team trusts the others to the point where he or she feels comfortable outsourcing parts of their intelligence to them. In other words, even though we have the physical technology now to collaborate informally and spontaneously, we do not have the social technology yet to fully exploit those capabilities (which, now that I re-read that post, reminds me that I need to get back to that topic at some point).

So where does the social trust Coasean floor lie? Katzenbach and Smith suggest that the highest performing teams have between 6 and 15 people - the lower bound is set by not having enough variety of skills within the group to really create a group mind, the upper bound by communication inefficiencies. That range sounds right to me as well, based on my own experience with various teams at various companies. To really get an answer, we’d have to map out the performance curve of groups as they grow; in other words, 2 people working on a project together might get less done than those 2 people working independently because of the communication overhead, but they might be more effective because they can bounce ideas off of each other. How that scales up to 3, 4, 5, or 10 people depends on the people, and the organization, and the communication technologies in place. But I would guess that the sweet spot is in the 6-10 person range.

If that is the team size which is most efficient from a social trust perspective, we return to the original question I posed above: how do we facilitate communication and collaboration between such small teams? What are the social and physical technologies we can use to transfer knowledge and expertise so that teams can build off of each others’ work? I don’t know what the answers to these questions are yet. Some people would suggest semantic knowledge management technologies to parse knowledge and distribute it automatically to the right people. Others would suggest quantitative approaches where measuring for the desired results will spur appropriate action. I tend towards humanistic approaches where trained generalists build the bridges between such teams, but I’m slightly biased as that’s one of the roles towards which I strive.

I think these social technology design questions have the potential to created fantastic productivity benefits over the coming decades. We’re hitting the limits of what physical technology can do for us. We have more and more powerful computers that sit idle most of the time, as users stare at them trying to figure out the interface. No amount of technology seems to remove the need for meetings to synchronize the organization. And we’re at a fascinating time when the physical technology Coasean floor has been removed, opening up new experimental possibilities for social technologies to help solve these organizational questions. I plan to continue exploring this topic, and hope that you will join me.

P.S. To be specific, a few of us from Convergence08 are starting a regular get-together where we exchange ideas on the topic of how organizations think and work, and share articles and resources via email; in fact, this post was inspired by discussion from that list. Let me know if you’d be interested in joining us.

Dispositionists believe that our tendencies and behaviors are fixed because of the kind of person that we fundamentally are. They search for explanations in a person’s character to explain their behavior. So when a criminal steals, they try to find the “flaw” in that person’s character that would make them perform such an act. This explanatory search can concentrate on nature (looking for genetic correlations) or nurture (looking at the childhood surroundings), but the search is for a character trait within the person that explains their actions.

Situationists like Zimbardo think that people’s behaviors, while influenced by their parents and upbringing, are dominated by the situation in which they act. The Stanford Prison Experiment is the most glaring example of this, where intelligent, well-adjusted college students turned into abusive guards and mentally unbalanced prisoners within three days of being placed in a prison environment. Because of these overwhelmingly powerful situational effects, if somebody performs “evil” actions, it is not necessarily an indication of a fundamental character flaw on their part; instead the situation must be examined to see how it contributed to the actions.

When comparing the two, the dispositional viewpoint is easier to understand, with a simple narrative to explain somebody’s actions (”Lucifer is a bad person, which is why he did bad things”). The tricky thing here is that saying something is something raises warnings flags for me (see my review of Wilson’s Quantum Psychology for a longer take on the difficulties of “is”-ness). Attributing a characteristic as a fundamental component of something, as is implies, simplifies the narrative, but at the cost of making us more vulnerable to the true complexities of life (I’m reading Taleb’s The Black Swan right now which expands upon this idea). The dispositional viewpoint also has dangerous consequences in how we raise kids: treating intelligence and talent as fundamental characteristics of children actually retards their development, as they don’t even try to improve themselves. I think that while we have dispositional tendencies, we need to recognize the situation defines how we behave. But I’m going to stop with the discussion of the tendencies themselves (since others have done it better), and focus on the managerial consequences of these two ways of thinking about people.

In a dispositional workplace, life is relatively simple - you interview candidates, find the ones that have the right fundamental attributes (e.g. “Smart and Gets Things Done”), and then focus on removing obstacles to progress so that these people get things done, in accordance with their nature. It’s a nice, tidy view of the world. Unfortunately, I think it’s too simple, as it ignores the influence of the system on the attributes that people display - people that are tremendously successful and effective under one system might be completely ineffectual and unmotivated in another system where their strengths go unused, as sports teams find out each year in free agency.

Situational management is about designing the system to match people with the appropriate environment to get the desired organizational results. This system design can take a couple forms:

• Designing a financial incentive system that rewards appropriate behavior, although Robert Austin cautions us as to the difficulties with this.
• Desiging a culture and vision that reinforce the desired employee characteristics towards a common goal, such that employees “believe in the mission they are trying to accomplish and know that they are contributing to its success”, as a former CEO of Southwest Airlines puts it.
• Understanding employees’ strengths and weaknesses and giving them jobs that leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. The canonical example of how not to do it is promoting a great software engineer into management, since the manager mindset is completely different than the engineer mindset. Good management in this scenario is about placing people in situations that maximize their chances for success while contributing to organizational goals.

What’s I like about this conception of management is that it means that management is a design position. Management in a dispositional world is about hiring the right people and then getting out of their way - it’s passive and uninvolved. Management in a situational world is an iterative systems design problem with constraints - managers have to pick a vision, align employees with that vision, work towards the vision, re-evaluate progress, possibly pick a different vision that aligns better with the strengths of the employees, etc. It’s an ongoing active process that involves being involved with all aspects of the business, understanding how employees work best, what the organization’s capabilities are, monitoring the environment outside of the organization to understand how to align potential outputs with environmental demand, etc, and using that understanding to better design how the company works. This is the type of manager I aspire to be someday.

I had this vague intuition for years that arguing against an idea still supported the idea. I never was able to fully articulate this intuition until I read George Lakoff’s work on framing, which explained how arguing against a proposition still reinforces the proposition as stated. Lakoff’s classic example is “tax relief” - even arguing against “tax relief” reinforces certain connotations, including the idea that relief implies an affliction. So referencing a worldview, even if one is arguing against it, still reinforces that worldview.

So why do people do it? I have a feeling that we are wired to play finite games, where we are trying to win the game with the rules as stated, rather than infinite games, where part of the challenge is to step back and re-define the rules (James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games is obviously a big influence on me). So people get caught up in trying to win the argument within the context that they are given, rather than thinking about their overall picture and whether they are contributing to that. In other words, I agree with Noah’s point that “the best way to fight this kind of behavior is to not talk about it. But most people can’t help themselves.” We want to win the finite game, even when the game as framed will contribute to the other side’s success. To avoid that, we need to be thinking about playing the infinite game instead.

Getting to Yes is another framework for thinking about these sorts of issues, as it emphasizes figuring out your principal interests and focusing on those, rather than getting sucked into zero-sum positional bargaining about specific issues. If we go into a negotiation focused on winning every individual point, we may often fail to actually achieve our interests (much like Internet pundits arguing against certain issues, but only providing them more visibility and respectability in the process).

So when faced with a screed which makes us want to argue and tear down an opposing perspective point by point, we need to step back and figure out if we’re just contributing to their worldview by doing so. We need to concentrate on our overall vision and figure out whether what we’re doing is contributing to that end goal. We need to find opportunities to reframe the discussion to find points of commonality (e.g. both sides of the abortion issue agreeing that they’d like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies) so that everybody can feel like they are moving towards their goals.

Or, sometimes, we just need to accept that the other person is too locked into their viewpoint for us to be able to convince them. If their frames are so strong that all incoming information will be mapped to their frame, such that no facts or arguing will convince them, we need to recognize that and move on rather than continue to futilely waste our time. This is definitely one of the hardest skills to learn on the Internet.

Man. I really need to get back into writing regularly. There’s a whole trove of interesting territory around zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum thinking that I need to explore at some point. It’s fascinating stuff to me, and while it’s a frame that I’m probably over-applying right now, I think it has some explanatory power.

The first session I attended was on “Building a better search engine”, which I chose because I work at Google (although on nothing related to search). The attendees speculated about the next big jump in information finding technology, including:

• Personalized agents that know you and just find the right information - I brought up privacy, and the general response was that privacy was overrated and should be ignored for the sake of this discussion as better results would trump privacy.
• Semantic technologies with natural language understanding - somebody from Powerset was there pushing this idea, and somebody else recommended Semantifind. I’m extremely skeptical of such technologies, as I’ve spent most of the past ten years figuring out how to translate between different disciplines as a generalist, and I already understand language. I think it’s going to be a long time before computers can figure out the implicit frames that influence comprehension.
• Social search - leverage our social networks to find more relevant results. If a trusted associate noted something, it’s probably more relevant than a random stranger noting the same thing. The issues I raised is the modelling of the social network - I would trust certain friends to make recommendations about stereo equipment but definitely not about clothes and vice versa. And unless the software can gather enough data to model those subject- and pairwise-specific interactions, it’s not going to get the desired results.

As an aside, it was interesting to me that I’ve gone from being a technological positivist where technology will solve our problems, to being skeptical of most technical solutions, partially because I now think the hardest and most interesting problems are not solvable by technology per se, but instead require the design of new social technologies to coordinate people in new ways.

The next panel I attended was called something like AI and Sense making. I’m fascinated by the question of how we make sense of the world as my continuing obsession with stories makes clear. This was a session where people discussed the idea of sense making (Gary Klein’s work with firefighters was a big influence), how it could be embedded into technology and possible business ideas built on such technology. The discussion was interesting but because sense making is a fuzzy cognitive concept, one attendee afterwards commented that it was difficult to separate sense making from general AI. Two recommendations for further reading I want to record for myself: Perspectives on Sensemaking, an article by Gary Klein, and Sensemaking in Organizations, a book by Karl Weick.

One useful construct from the session was the idea that we create a frame, view everything coming in through that frame, but keep track of whether things are corroborating with reality. Once the discrepancy with reality grows too large, we have to consider junking the existing frame and finding a new one that fits the data better, which I see as yet another form of Bruno Latour’s process.

Then it was time for the keynote speech by Paul Saffo, which I had been eagerly anticipating after having seen him speak several years ago. I was not disappointed - even though it covered many of the same topics as that previous talk, it was entertaining and informative. Tidbits that I wrote down:

• “If you don’t change direction, you’ll end up where you are heading.” (in other words, inaction is a choice with consequences)
• The future will still have a lot of dull parts (riffing on Hitchcock’s claim that “Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it”). We look forward to all the excitement of the future but forget that amid all that excitement will stlil be dull parts.
• “Change is never linear” (s-curve, s-curve)
• “Cherish failure, especially someone else’s” - this was a theme from the other talk I attended, where he pointed out that the consequences of the s-curve is that the time when everybody decides that a technology is a failure and that it will never work is the time when it might be just about to take off. Which actually made me wonder about my dismissal of semantic technologies in the session earlier, as part of the reason I dismissed it is that it’s been “just around the corner” for 20 years now, which, in Saffo’s world, means it may be just about to finally succeed.
• “Look for indicators” - form a quick opinion, but then look for proof that you’re wrong, which he elaborates in his strong opinions, weakly held blog post.
• “Use forecast techniques until reality gets too complex” - this was an interesting riff where he said that even our forecasting techniques continually get outmoded and need to be updated. He believes that we’re in such a phase transition now, where the old qualitative models are breaking down, but new quantitative models haven’t arrived yet. The four factors that he thinks will drive the next generation of forecasting models are Moore’s law, better forecasting algorithms, more and better data, and more of our lives being stored in digital form thanks to Facebook. My eyes lit up, as that’s a perfect explanation of why I joined a forecasting group at Google.
• Three book recommendations: the novel Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, “A general theory of bureaucracy” by Elliot Jaques, and the “creative destruction” work of Joseph Schumpeter.

Sunday morning started with a panel on synthetic biology. There were a variety of panelists, with backgrounds in physics, software, and biology, but my favorite was Denise Caruso of the Hybrid Vigor institute, as she questioned the assumptions that the optimistic scientists were making. Her focus area has been on risk analysis, especially in new fields where the risks are difficult to quantify, but her point is that the benefits are equally difficult to quantify, so we shouldn’t be going in with the assumption that innovation is automatically good. Her belief is that we need to come up with better processes and methods for assessing risk with interdisciplinary input. You can see why a generalist like me would be a fan (I actually asked a question during Q&A supporting her viewpoint). I chatted with her a bit afterwards, and also attended the breakout session after lunch with her on innovation and risk, which brought together interesting conversations and different perspectives (the work that Etan Ayalon is doing at GlobalTech Research looks particularly interesting to me). I also liked Caruso’s concept of Bayesian regulation, where it’s not black and white, but involves conditional probabilities.

I missed the next session as I ended up chatting with folks from that first after lunch session for about half the next session, and then had to prepare for my session, “How do organizations think?” I threw it open as a discussion forum expanding on the ideas in my post on organizational cognition, and had a good discussion with the eight people who attended. We talked about different people’s experiences with different organizational structures and what might work to improve those. One key concept that was identified was that designing an organizational culture and structure has to first start with the purpose for which the organization is built. Different structures will serve different purposes, and incongruities between the structure and purpose will cause friction. People expressed interest in possibly having a follow up session after the conference was over, but I didn’t get everybody’s contact information, so I hope they get in contact with me.

I ended up bailing out on the end of the conference during the longevity panel, as I had other plans for the evening, but all in all, it was a good experience - I met a couple new interesting people, had some good discussions, and found new food for thought, which were pretty much my goals for the weekend. But now it’s time to get back to my normal life.

Technorati tag: Convergence08

Last weekend, I was catching up on a couple such talks that I had meant to see but missed for one reason or another (including Nancy Pelosi’s visit), and the one by Philip Zimbardo caught my eye. Zimbardo is infamous for the Stanford Prison Experiment where he simulated a prison with Stanford students and was aghast at how quickly the prison became real to all involved. Within a day, the guards were finding ways to humiliate the prisoners and previously healthy “prisoners” were having mental breakdowns (the images from the experiment were eerily echoed by Abu Ghraib). I’m currently reading Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect, where he discusses the idea that evil is not a dispositional but situational; in other words, people who do bad things are not inherently evil, but instead all of us have the potential to do evil in the right situation (as his Stanford students demonstrated in their “prison”).

His latest book is called The Time Paradox, about the psychology of time, and he came by Google to give a talk on the subject. He started the talk with a discussion of the marshmallow experiment. The subjects were four-year-olds who were given a choice - they were given a marshmallow, but if they could wait a few minutes before eating it, they would be given two marshmallows for their patience. Some of them ate the marshmallow, some of them managed to hold out and wait for the greater reward. Here’s the astounding result: the experimenters returned to their subjects fourteen years later and found that the ones that had the self-control to wait had better grades and better SAT scores by a statistically significant margin. In other words, one brief experiment on a four-year-old was highly correlated with their future performance in life. So what’s going on?

Zimbardo identifies the two types of children as having different time perspectives: the ones that ate the marshmallow have a present time perspective, focusing on the immediate gratification of the marshmallow. The ones who waited have a future time perspective, able to trade off their present gratification for future results. And our culture rewards those who can make those future tradeoffs (e.g. study now rather than play to enhance one’s college test scores).

Zimbardo later extended the classifications of time perspectives to include past-positive (focusing on the good things that have happened in the past), past-negative (focusing on the bad things), and present-fatalistic (feeling unable to influence the events impacting one’s life). You can find out your time perspective tendencies by taking the online test. Zimbardo has done survey work to show that the results of the marshmallow experiment are not isolated - the time perspective of a person is strongly correlated with the results that person achieves in many areas of life.

What I like about this is that it feels right to me as an explanatory mechanism. There are certain areas where I am heavily future-weighted, such as financial planning where I will forgo something I want today for the sake of something I am saving to buy next year. There are other areas where I am past-weighted, such as in my social identity where some part of me still clings to my self-identity from when I was a teenager. There are still other areas where I am present-weighted, with a focus on whatever feels right at the moment (which contributes to my inability to maintain a regular exercise program). I was also able to immediately start classifying other people around me into the various categories.

The sign to me of a powerful classification system is when it breaks open a problem where everything seemed ambiguous before. Back when I was a programmer, I used to love that feeling when I finally hit upon the right way to represent the data and everything suddenly became easy. And I’d been feeling muddled about certain people recently where I just didn’t understand why they behaved the way they did. But when Zimbardo gave me this new template for thinking about how people think, their behaviors immediately fell into place.

The other nice part about Zimbardo’s use of time perspectives is that they are not fixed. A future perspective can be taught. So we could test four-year-olds, identify the ones that have a present perspective and give them the tools to develop a future perspective, thus improving their ability to adapt to adult life where future tradeoffs are always necessary. Zimbardo trashes the idea that success is genetically determined, instead focusing on the idea that the tools for success can be taught with the right system - not surprising from the man who identified that evil is present in all of us in the wrong system.

I recommend watching Zimbardo’s talk if this sounds interesting, as he explains it better and more rigorously than I do. But I wanted to share this idea that had immediate impact on me. I’m curious if others have the same feeling - maybe this is just obvious to others, or maybe it’s a helpful template for thinking about the world. What do you think?

Such conversations are where an organization’s thought processes are made visible (audible?). In other words, if an organization could be perceived as a group mind, then those conversations are the equivalent of watching the synapses between neurons firing. It’s the only way to get insight into how the group mind operates. This may sound a little wacky, but I’m inspired by Edwin Hutchins’s book Cognition in the Wild, where he extracts observations about cognition by watching how a group mind in the form of a navigation team operated. In the best case, meetings can be a reflection of this organizational cognition, an aspect which Peter mentioned in the comments of my meetings post.

So by listening in on such conversations, one can map out how the organization operates. Which assumptions are taken for granted? Who are the stakeholders mentioned regularly as needing to be consulted? How are decisions made in such conversations - is it by consensus, persuasion, or hierarchy? These sorts of observations may not be directly relevant to one’s job, but it’s invaluable to an amateur anthropologist like myself in understanding the different forces that are at work within the organization.

Even better, conversations often arise when new organizational territory is being mapped out, either in the form of current assumptions being questioned, or in the development of a response to a new stimulus. When everything is running smoothly and there’s a defined process for how to do things, there is no need for conversation as everybody knows how to do their job. But when one reaches the limits of one’s understanding, then one has to consult another person, and such consultations are where somebody like me can see how the organization, in the form of its constituents, learns. To use the framework of Latour, conversations are where we can see the organizational Collective perform the Consultation process, where it grapples with an outside influence (what Latour calls “Perplexity”). Seeing the Collective go through a round of growing and learning is exactly what I mean by saying that conversations are a window into the cognitive process of the organization.

This is also exactly the sort of fuzzy stuff that I once would have scorned as a hard scientist and logic-driven engineer. These sorts of ephemeral observations about an organization are difficult to quantify and would not have even been on my radar ten years ago. And now they are the sorts of things that capture the value I bring to an organization, as my ability to attend meetings and listen to passing conversations and extract this sort of organizational knowledge is a testament to my ever-improving observational skills. I liked Rands’s description of it as the culture chart, as opposed to the formal organizational chart. The culture chart isn’t written down anywhere and is supremely fuzzy - it can only be intuited by reading between the lines of conversations.

So that’s my rationalization for why listening in on conversations when starting a new job is important. It’s the best way to understand how an organization operates: which assumptions are stated (and more importantly, not stated), which stakeholders matter and which can be ignored, etc. And, in case you’re wondering, all this listening to conversations is why I have to stay at work until 9pm a couple nights a week to catch up on my individual contributions. Once I am more efficient at my assigned tasks and up to speed on how Google works as an organization, I hope to get my hours down to a more reasonable number.