The Future of Higher Education – MLA Seattle

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Skip Walter

Action driving tweets – who knew that such few characters of text could drive action that leads to engaging learning.

A few days ago, Cathy Davidson tweeted that she was headed to Seattle, WA to the Modern Language Association Conference where she was participating in a panel discussion on “The Future of Higher Education.”  What a delight that I would be able to hear and experience Cathy in person, not just through her books and video snippets.  Even better, Ed Lazowska from the UW Computer Science Department would be on the panel as well. And still better, the panel session was open to the public.

This duo of synchronicity and hyper locality started by a simple tweet moved me to rearrange my schedule to attend the session.

I had high expectations for the session given the quality of the participants, and those expectations were far exceeded.  I was treated to four superb intellects sharing their passions from very different points of view across the sciences and the humanities, and yet a powerful vision of what could be emerged from the talks.

The styles of presentation were also interesting and formed a spectrum of ways to shed light on a critical topic.

Kathleen Woodward did a wonderful job presiding over the session and making all of us feel at home.

Sidonie Ann Smith started the panel talks with “Emergent Projects, Processes, and Stories.”  Clearly, this professor is a wonderful writer and her medium is text.  The few slides were all text to share her outline and to provide a few quotes.  In a more traditional lecture style, she read from her prepared paper.  She spoke at a hundred miles per hour, so fast that my traditional note taking couldn’t keep up.  She provided several wonderful turns of phrases like “the new dissertation – thinking outside the proto-book.”

Smith presented four Macro-Narratives to describe the state of higher education:

  • Macro-Narrative 1: Declining state support for public higher education.
  • Macro-Narrative 2: Redefinition of the “institution” of higher education.
  • Macro-Narrative 3: Re-conceptualization of knowledge and knowledge production.
  • Macro-Narrative 4: The emergent scholar.

Smith then followed her macro-narratives with her suggested action plan:

  1. Transform doctoral education
  2. Forge a new ethics and praxis of scholarly communication
  3. Rethink our relationship to scholarship
  4. Re-conceptualize our scholarly collaboration – faculty, students, community, world
  5. Update our narrative of the humanities – from the singular word to the expanse of Big Data

As much as I believe that I read broadly and keep up with a wide range of topics, I never thought I would hear an English professor talking about Big Data.  Did I miss that there was a harmonic convergence in Seattle this week?

Next to speak was Curtis Wong from Microsoft on the topic of “Learning Collaboratories, Now and in the Future.”  From the world of macro-narratives Curtis transported us millions of years into the universe with his WorldWide Telescope project (WWT).   The context for Wong’s talk was the notion of a collaboratory.  His vision for WWT is a prototypical collaboratory where not only is there a visualization capability but the ability to develop curated journeys through the vast data.  Curtis shared another nice turn of a phrase – “education could be a collection of curated journeys.”

As Curtis toured us around several curated journeys, he made clear that story telling is the passport to education.  I am a little slow on the uptake, but here was the union of science and the humanities – storytelling and narrative providing a context for “big data.”  Professor Smith presented a suggestive narrative presentation primarily in words.  Wong presented a visually animated narrative of what the union of the humanities and science could be.  The power of the visual map of the sky illustrates so clearly where there is scientific work going on AND where there isn’t work going on – inviting the community at large (professional and amateur) to contribute to our knowledge of the universe – and to tell stories about their discoveries.

What I especially liked about the ability of the WWT to host meta-data, text, video and audio as a curated journey, is that there was always a smooth transition between content and context.  With a blog entry or a Vook (video book), when you follow a link you are jarred from your current context as you leap from one disparate piece of content to another.  WWT seamlessly integrates the multiple media into a single visual space.

As an innovator in the development of visual analytics capability through our work in creating Attenex Patterns to exponentially increase the productivity for legal electronic discovery, I wanted to run to the podium and meet Curtis to explore how far his WWT engine could be pushed into the realm of document visualizations.

However, I calmed down and looked forward to Ed Lazowska’s presentation on big data – “It’s the Data Stupid!” Ed is one of those wonderful gifts to the computer science community and to the state of Washington.  He is a tireless advocate for the importance of research and high technology.  Whether in a public presentation or in small group meetings with Ed, I always come away smarter.  My favorite learning from Ed has affected my pedagogy ever since he advised “never answer a students question directly. Always seek first to understand the misunderstanding that caused the question to be asked in the first place.”  Forgetting this advice leads to poor mentoring on my part when interacting with students or colleagues.

Ed started his talk off with a wonderful hook “Let’s look at four things that happened in 1969 – man walked on the moon, Woodstock happened, the Mets won the World Series, and the first data packet was sent over Arpanet (precursor to the Internet).  Forty years later, which of these four events had the most impact.”  Clearly, all of us answered the Internet.

Ed then went through the evolution of approaches to science:

  • Theory
  • Experiment
  • Observation
  • Computational Science – the world of simulation
  • Today:  eScience – the dawn of data driven science

Connecting with Wong’s talk, Ed pointed out that the Sloan Digital Sky Scanner that created the data source for the WWT collected 80 Terabytes (TB) over seven years.  This amount of data precipitated the shift to the public sharing of data which is a big leap from previous methods of hoarding data based on how expensive it was to collect and curate data.  We are seeing the democratization of science through this sharing of big data.

Current desktop gene sequencers generate 17 TB of data per day.  Imagine the amount of data that a roomful of these desktop gene sequencers create – every hour, every day, 24/7.

In his wonderfully fact based presentation style, Ed shared several observations on how these advances in big data are destroying the economics of the university.  Lazowska connected nicely with the talks from Smith and Wong by arguing convincingly for the connection of humanities to big data to aid in telling the stories buried in the data.

With three talks completed and one to go, I knew I was in the presence of a special event. Each speaker had a unique style and a unique point of view, yet they prepared and shared bridges and connections to the views of the other speakers.  As a regular attendee and presenter at academic and business conferences, it is a rare occurrence to have a group of panelists coordinate their messages so seamlessly.

Now it was Cathy’s turn to share her thoughts on “How to Crowdsource Thinking”.  Over the last month, Cathy’s books, videos and prolific tweets entered my invisible university of thought leaders.  Of course, Cathy being a professor at Duke University, my alma mater, and sharing anecdotes about Shane Battier, one of my favorite Duke basketball players, helped a lot.

Cathy’s recent book Now You See It is an inspiration at so many different levels.  At the top level, her insights give me a completely different way to see both the student/teacher relationship as well as the manager/employee relationship.  As a practitioner and teacher of human centered design, I spent the last four years trying to improve the learner centeredness of my courses in the UW HCDE Department and in the UW Foster Business School.  While I made some improvements, I was operating without a framework or theory or evidence based method for teaching AND assessment.

Through Davidson’s research and innovation in the classroom, I now have several frameworks to use to change the learning dynamics in the classroom and “in the wild.”  I loved Cathy’s description of her charter while she was Vice Provost at Duke “break things and make things.”

Cathy issued several interesting questions and observations as she began her talk:

  • If <1% of college students go on to become tenure track professors, why is an English department structured for the 1% rather than the 99%?
  • Quoting Clay Shirky “institutions tend to preserve the problem they were designed to solve,” Professor Davidson asked “why do we have to keep preserving the institution of higher learning?”
  • Why are we letting the industrial-educational complex, drive scientific labor management into scientific learning management?
  • Why do we continue to use the “A, B, C, D” grading system that even the American Meat Packing Association rejected within months of starting its use?

Why indeed?

As she described in her book, Cathy’s talk was from the union of head and heart as she did not use a prepared paper and had relatively few slides.  As an audience member, it was easy to feel that I was in a conversation, not a lecture.

The Q&A session was lively and gave the panelists an opportunity to share an even wider range of thoughts.  As I left the room, I had to chuckle at the sign on the back table.

As I walked from the Ballroom at the Seattle Sheraton back to the ferry terminal for the ride home to Bainbridge Island, I was flooded with imagery of a software application that I would really love from today’s panel discussion.  I imagined that prior to the panel discussion, all of the books, publications, videos, and reference pointers from the speakers were loaded into a visually rich environment like the Wong’s WWT engine.  And the panelist presentations and Q&A session were recorded (video and audio) and loaded into the WWT engine.  Then, after the session, each of the panelists would curate a journey through this n-dimensional media space and capture their reflections on what they took away from the event and the ideas shared by the other panelists.  After the event, all of us as participants, could start adding our reflections and relevant references to the compendium and curate our own journeys through this rich topic space.  What a conversation that would be.

This kind of tool would truly be “content with context.”

The lasting benefit of the panel discussion today is that along with Cathy and Ed, I am adding three more professors to my invisible university.

Posted in Big Data, Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Idealized Design, Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management, Learning, University, User Experience, WUKID | 6 Comments

Don Norman would be proud

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Skip Walter

Don Norman is a delightful professorial curmudgeon who collects and publishes examples of good and bad design in books like The Design of Everyday Things and Living with Complexity.

On my walk through the Seattle Ferry terminal yesterday I finally took the time to capture the theater of the absurd when it comes to public safety and add to the collection of bad designs.  With all the lawyers that travel between Seattle and Bainbridge Island, I don’t know why somebody hasn’t filed a lawsuit at this crazy lack of common sense on the part of public officials.

Here is the offending bench:

Here is the warning sign placed at eye level for normal height adults – at least 30 feet away from the closest offending bench:

What parent would ever see the sign or think of the danger, until after a child has caught their finger in a hole?  For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they don’t just remove the offending benches.  I guess common sense isn’t so common anymore.

Posted in Health Care, Human Centered Design, Travel | 1 Comment

Say What – human cloud?

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Skip Walter

You know you are getting old when you mis-hear something that leads to more interesting that what was actually said.

I sat in on Professor David Socha‘s class on “Evidence Based Design” for MSCSS students at UW Bothell last evening.  David gave me the gift of sitting in on my “User Centered Design” course last quarter and I am returning the favor for him this quarter.

As David was providing the course overview and describing the different types of prototypes, he emphasized the importance of low fidelity versus high fidelity prototypes.  He shared that with low fidelity prototypes you get great insightful feedback on your ideas, while with high fidelity prototypes you get feedback on font sizes and colors and button locations.

One of the students volunteered that this reminded him of a great website to look at.  I thought I heard him say “the human cloud.”  What an interesting term.  I had not heard the term before so immediately did a Google search to see what he was referring to.  There were several great websites and the essential theme for “human cloud” was another term for “wisdom of crowds.”

However, just to make sure that I had heard the student right I asked him what the specific URL was for his comment.  He replied “Hugh MacLeod’s gapingvoid.com.”

This mis-hearing is a perfect example of “On the Way to Somewhere Else“.  It could have taken months to come across the meme of the “human cloud.”  However, through the wonders of getting old and having gradual hearing loss, I found a new meme (“human cloud“) and was re-introduced to a favorite author and cartoonist – Hugh MacLeod.

Posted in Humor, Learning, Quotes, Teaching | Leave a comment

The Four Boxes of Knowing

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Skip Walter

While reading David Weinberger’s latest book Too Big To Know:  Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room, I was reminded of the Four Boxes of Knowing.  At this point, I have no idea where I came across the framework or how I’ve modified it over the years.

One of my favorite exercises when teaching or facilitating a consulting session is to change directions and have some “fun” with the four boxes of knowing exercise.

I start out by describing the three boxes of knowing:

  • What you know?
  • What you know that you don’t know?
  • What you don’t know that you don’t know?

Then I ask “in this context, what is the fourth box of knowing?”

Of course, everyone goes directly to trying to add a larger fourth box to surround the other three and do the continued extension to the absurd of “what you don’t know that you don’t know that you don’t know ..”

After teasing out some more ideas, I draw in the smaller fourth box – what you think you know that is wrong.

As we all have a good laugh, I then ask for what are the system dynamics of learning something new?

This question if I am patient enough leads to an engaging discussion.  Soon someone will provide the insight “as your box of ‘what you know’ grows larger, the other boxes grow exponentially larger.  It’s a never ending virtuous process.”

I then have the audience spend 5-10 minutes drawing the boxes and in the context of the subject of the class or consulting engagement, place elements of knowledge in each of the boxes.  Most of the audience can pretty quickly fill in the “what you know” and “what you don’t know boxes” but of course have a difficult time filling out the “what you don’t know you don’t know.”  I suggest that the class speculate on what might be in that third box.

After working quietly for a few minutes, the class shares their results.

What a wonderful time it is to see the “wisdom of the crowd” show up as the participants realize that what they don’t know is known by somebody else in the audience and vice versa.

However, the real learning comes from the “speculations” that are in the largest box.  The blind spots of knowledge for the group show up in this last box.

What are your speculations about “what you don’t know you don’t know?”

Posted in Knowledge Management, Learning, Teaching, Working in teams, WUKID | 5 Comments

Evolving a Personal Software Design Process

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Skip Walter

Self observing is always a dangerous proposition.  I remember my father-in-law, Dr. Michael Keleher, always remarking “the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.”

The following notes are a result of self-observing myself when I am designing innovative software.  Who knows what the real process is that I use.  Although I am sure that in the real process, procrastination plays a large role.

Over the years I have collected several descriptions of design processes that their authors have either offered as descriptive or prescriptive models.  Recently, I came across a model from Stan Davis and David McIntosh in their book The Art of Business: Make All Your Work a Work of Art.  I have added a few steps to their process description to fit what I go through.  I am not sure at this point whether I would recommend this process, but it fits the types and scale of software product and business design problems that I am most interested in.

The context of their model arises from the authors comparing “flow” in the economic world and in the world of art.

The core design process model from Stan Davis is:

  • Hunch
  • Immerse
  • Simmer
  • Click! (the Ah Hah step)
  • Verify

To this model I would surround it with two other steps:

  • Unease, discomfort or stuck – something doesn’t feel right.  I’m frustrated and don’t know why
  • Hunch
  • Immerse
  • Simmer
  • Click!
  • Verify
  • Find the productivity metric

A brief explanation of the steps follows (some from Davis, some from me):

  • Unease
    • I get this background discomfort that something isn’t right in my thinking or in the world.  It could be a more general issue like with business design or it could be specific to a product I’m working on.  Or it could be part of switching from analysis to synthesis mode while working on a business problem.
    • It is like a dissociated pain.
    • The symptoms that help me recognize this state are:
      • I find that I am reading a phenomenal amount of fiction junk books
      • I really do not want to take part in any social situations
      • Very low energy
    • To get out of this state, I do one or more of the following:
      • Take an unrelated seminar
      • Teach or mentor
      • Go hiking
      • Seek out an old friend for a discussion on what is new or different in the world
  • Hunch
    • Scientific breakthroughs often occur when there’s an exception to a rule.  Scientists and stock market mavens both call these anomalies.  In other fields they are called insights.
      • Example from The Art of Business:  “On a trip to Europe, Howard Schultz noticed the abundance of cafes.  Unlike their counterparts in the US, they served a range of drinks that extended beyond regular and decaf.  They had a comfortable place to sit for as long as they wanted.  And they had plenty of customers who were happy to pay a little extra for the experience.  Schultz came back to Seattle and built that hunch into Starbucks.”
    • For me, a 35 year old hunch has kept me driving to develop a document visualization tool as a way to get extreme productivity for knowledge workers.  After many failed attempts (analogous to the development of commercial airplanes – DC3 described by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline to differentiate between what is necessary and sufficient), I finally succeeded in proving the hunch with Attenex Patterns.

  • Immerse
    • “You have to take in all the materials before you start sorting them out and eliminating anything.  You want to open yourself up and take as much in as you can without analyzing it.”  p. 106
    • “Whether you are an artist or a business person, preparing for a piece requires you to take on a student like role, learning what is on your palette, what materials you have to work with, and what effects you can put together.  The best way to learn about something is to learn how to do it yourself.”
    • My ability to immerse myself has grown by leaps and bounds with the advent of the Internet and Amazon.  By the time I get into the simmer stage, I have usually amassed the electronic equivalent of two bankers boxes of articles and have ordered about 50 books related to the topic I’m researching.  With the advent of the Amazon Kindle ebooks and the iPad Kindle Reader, all of this immersion material can be with me all the time.
    • This is also the stage where I enter into dialog with people who have the suspected problem, along with “experts” who have experience in the arena.
    • If possible I try and observe the actions of folks who have the problem.
    • I cast as wide a net as possible to explore the problem space.
    • I look for what are the key questions that people are researching or are struggling to articulate.
    • From the human centered design perspective of user research and observation, I am looking for that “got to have” latent unmet need.
  • Simmer
    • “After you’ve immersed yourself and before you have a breakthrough is that period when you sift, stir, rearrange, and wonder why it’s taking so long to get it right.  This is the stage where chance favors the prepared mind.” p. 106
    • “Software evolves, and it needs time for simmering and debugging.” p. 107
    • This stage is where I start my tentative exploration of the solution space.
    • I like to find similar pieces of software or analogous books, looking at form, function, layout and content.
    • I start exploring the supplier base – what can I buy rather than build.
    • I start the business model and profit patterns exploration along with looking for potential competitors.
    • I pay particular attention to whether my energy continues to build or dissipate.  If my energy dissipates, then I know that the timing is not yet right for the innovation.
    • I alternate quite a bit between the Immerse and Simmer states.
  • Click! or Ah Hah!
    • “This is the most talked about and least understood phase in the creative flow.  In mental terms, it’s the most artistic and least economic part of the process.  It’s also the shortest in duration.  You can’t really plan for an epiphany; what you can do is recognize when you have it.” p. 108
    • “The most frequent kind of epiphany is the retrospective epiphany.  It’s the recognition of what you just did, the enjoyable and emarrassing realization that you didn’t know you were having an epiphany, when you really were.  By the time you notice it, it’s already happened.” p. 109
    • In almost every design that I’ve done there has been a very clear “Click!” state.
    • This is the time of the conceptual prototypes.
    • Almost simultaneous with this state, I try to generalize the insight to see if it scales.  This is my how I know that it is a genuine “Click!”.  I also go through the stage of envisioning myself using it.
  • Verify
    • “Great! So you’ve had an epiphany.  Too bad that’s not enough.  Just having a great idea doesn’t qualify as creativity.  Now you’ve got to vet your big idea.  Creativity does not mean a straight line from idea to completion.” p. 109
    • This is the time of the behavioral prototypes.
    • The key effort for me in this stage is can I explain the creation so that the software engineers will understand it?.  Over the years I’ve learned that it is easier to explain if I’ve been peripherally involving them in the “Immerse – Simmer” cycle.
    • Collections of stories begin to emerge.
    • The one pager description and 30 second elevator pitch emerge.
    • I start putting together slide shows and making sales pitches to see if I can pre-sell the idea even before much expense is spent in building it – both to potential purchasers and potential investors.
    • I look for that moment when the potential customer or investor tries to rip the prototype from my hands, not caring what the price is.
  • Productivity Metric
    • One of the things that became clear in the development of the first two Attenex software products (Patterns and Structure) is the creative power that comes from having a clear productivity metric.  With Patterns we discovered a productivity metric very early on – reviewer document decisions per hour.  By adding a productivity test to the standard stages of human centered design, and agile software development, we had an instant guide as to whether a piece of functionality was good or bad for the product – did it increase or decrease document decisions per hour?  With Structure, even after four years, we still had no clear productivity metric (the problem with almost every knowledge management application).  As a result, we had to give up on the development and marketing of Structure.

One might ask in looking at the above, how this design process is the same or different than the model I’ve shared before with the six circles?

The Socha-Walter Software Design Model presented above assumes that it is a group process with a multi-disciplinary team.  The personal software design model is unique to the way I think and work within the context of the group model.  There is a mapping between each of the steps that fit into the group design model, and that is a topic for another time.

What is your personal software design model?  How does it work in collaborative design processes?

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Knowledge Management, User Experience, Value Capture | Leave a comment

The Power of Metrics to Guide Software Development

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Skip Walter

One of the big challenges with software product development is how to prioritize which features to add.  Many books and academic papers are written on this topic each year.  From my vantage point, the human centered design process is the best general process that can lead to successful products and product evolution.

Yet, as the feature requests pile up once a product is released, most product development teams succumb to whoever yells the loudest – either leading edge customers or the sales force.  Within Attenex, we stumbled on a more powerful method for guiding product development – the Northstar metric.

We started Attenex intending to build and market two products to the legal market – one for authoring structured documents like contracts (Attenex Structure) and one for discovering the relevant documents in eDiscovery litigation (Attenex Patterns – now a part of Ringtail 8).  As we delivered the products to customers, it became clear that with Attenex Patterns we had a very clear metric that provided both business guidance and feature guidance.  The metric was “document decisions per hour.”  That is, how many documents per hour could the average lawyer reviewer read and place into categories like “responsive”, “non-responsive”, and “privileged.”

With Attenex Structure, we were never able to identify any metric that mattered at both the users business level or at the guiding of feature prioritization.  As a result, we stopped development on Attenex Structure.

Attenex Patterns with the “document decisions per hour” metric proved both a marketing/sales tool to compare our product with other offerings in the market and a way to guide our feature development.

On the feature development side, the process was to continuously observe our users and understand their hassles (see hassle maps by Adrian Slywotzky) or bottlenecks in the workflow (see Theory of Constraints by Eli Goldratt).  As we spotted hassles or bottlenecks we would design a prototype and then test the prototype with the user community.  If the new features improved the “document decisions per hour” we would leave the feature in.  If the new features did not improve productivity, or decreased the productivity, then we pulled the feature out.

On the marketing and sales side, the “document decisions per hour” metric allowed the company to compare the benefits of Attenex Patterns to all of the competitors.  Because the Attenex result was 5-20 times better than other software vendors, Attenex was able to use value based pricing.

Over the 10 year iteration cycle of 450+ prototypes, we improved productivity from our baseline studies from 2X to over 50X productivity improvement in the “document decisions per hour” metric.

Posted in Big Data, Content with Context, eDiscovery, Human Centered Design, organizing, User Experience, Value Capture | 5 Comments

Duolingo – The Second Half of the Chessboard?

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Skip Walter

As a result of the mentoring I received from Russ Ackoff, I am fascinated more by really good questions than by the answers.  My colleague, Professor David Socha, pointed me to a Ted Talk by Luis von Ahn on “Massive-scale online collaboration“.  Luis is a professor at Carnegie Mellon and the inventor of the internet security feature captcha and reCaptcha. For a look at the humorous side of captchas, check out CAPTCHArt.

When he found out the millions of hours that were being wasted 10 seconds at a time entering captchas, he asked the question “what value could we provide with that amount of time?”  The answer was to reconceptualize re-captcha as a way to help translate older scanned books where OCR misses 30% of the text.

At the core of his research is how to use the value of hundreds of millions of internet users to provide society value a little bit at a time.  His most recent exercise is Duolingo for using the process of learning a language to help translate large parts of the web.  The question he asked of himself and his grad students was “how can we use the talents of 100 million people to translate the web to every major language for free?”

The answer is Duolingo.  His value proposition is to learn a new language while simultaneously translating the web AND learning with real content.  Today the business model for language learning is fundamentally flawed – a student has to pay >$500 to buy a Rosetta Stone course.  While that may work for the rich, it doesn’t work for the poor around the world.  This kind of business model is another aspect of our innovation in the university forum around the for profit university – how to provide value while you learn by paying with your time.

While David shared his excitement about this approach, I was immediately struck with how this is an excellent example of what Andrew McAfee was talking about in my post about Creating Jobs – Racing with Smart Machines.  Duolingo illustrates McAfee’s point about us now being on the second half of the chessboard with technology advances.  Having just written the post, my immediate thoughts went to what about all the jobs that will be lost by putting professional translators out of work?  By making language learning free, you also put a Rosetta Stone out of business (now a $250M per year company).

Yet, as we discussed it some more, we realized that we had not factored in the implication of 100s of millions of people now being multi-lingual.  Is Duolingo providing a huge pool of professional or semi-professional translators?  Or how many more jobs open up to someone with multiple language skills?

For myself, I am delighted that there are brilliant and engaging professors like von Ahn who keep asking these wonderful questions that help drive us farther into the second half of the chessboard.  Duolingo is living proof that you can do well by doing good.

What are other examples of these phenomena?

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management, Learning, Teaching, Transactive Content, Working in teams | Leave a comment

Mentoring Idea Stage Startups

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Skip Walter

One of the joys of teaching project based classes in Human Centered Design is encouraging the teams to explore building their product and starting a company to monetize the product.  This fall’s class project assignment was to research, design and prototype a mobile application for a smart phone or tablet device.

All seven of the teams did a terrific job and the research and designs were the best I’ve experienced in my twenty years of teaching graduate students.  At the start of the quarter I challenged the class to not just prototype their application, but to see if they could actually build a working application.  One group built a fully functioning mobile app on an Android phone that communicated and did intermediate processing in the cloud, and returned the results to the smart phone.  Their results were far more than I had expected.

The team that built the fully functioning prototype met a couple of times after the end of the quarter and decided they wanted to take their app from a prototype to a monetizable app.  So they called over New Years weekend 2012 and asked if they could buy me the proverbial dinner.

I agreed and asked them to send me their full, current resumes along with questions they wanted me to answer or suggest answers to.

The kind of questions they sent and that I get from Idea Stage startups are variants of the following:

  • What do we do next?
  • What’s the best way to move forward in getting this app manifested into a real, genuine app?
  • We know we need to do more user research, how much more? When will we know we’ve done enough?
  • Should we be focusing on usability now or do we need to do more user research?
  • In creating a company for our app, how do we fairly divide up the percentages of ownership?
  • What kind of formal corporate structure do we set up – LLC, S corp, or C corp?
  • Is it time to create a business plan now?
  • We feel strongly about releasing the app on all 3 major mobile smart phones at once (be multi-platform from the start): iPhone, Android and Win8 – is that actually wise, even though our intuition tells me that it is?
  • How do we protect our intellectual property?
  • One approach we talked about is setting an end-date in the future and backwards engineering a schedule from there – does that seem like a good idea to you?
  • We all still have to work full-time (or go to school full-time), but we really want to make this happen and do it right!
  • Can we fund this ourselves or should we seek investment?  If we seek investment, should we get it from friends and family, an incubator, angel investors, or venture capitalists?  How much money should we try and raise?
  • What should our “go to market” strategy be?
  • How do we find a business model that will work?
  • Skip, will you be part of our team?  Will you be on our advisory board?  Will you invest some money in us?
  • How good do you think our idea is?  Can we really make money with it?

With a smile, my standard answer to all of the above questions is “It depends.”

My challenge is figuring out how to balance sharing everything that I know about what they are about to encounter (hitting them with the fire hose of information) versus sharing what they are almost ready to learn (what are the near term next steps).  Or should I just ask thoughtful questions as a way to guide them to their own answers for their own unique situation?

Before meeting with the team, I remind myself to re-read Scott Peck’s “The Rabbi’s Gift” and repeat to myself several times the mantra “I unconditionally accept where you are, but respect you enough to help you strive for your ideal.”

As a general process when we meet, I try and work through the questions that they came in with and not get taken too far astray with all of the side conversations and information drill down that a good team will want to ask.  Along the way I mention several books that would be good to read at this stage and let them know that I will follow up with the references after the meeting.  Along with the references, I usually have reflections that I share.

Here are a couple of reflections from our meeting last night:

  • You need to spend time as a group thinking through the implications of building an app versus building a company (like the Stanford iOS video on iTunes we talked about in class with the partner from Kleiner Perkins iFund, Chi-Hua Chien – Lecture 11).  There is a big difference between the building an app and building a company.  You don’t need a lot of formality to build an app.  Building a company (as a product itself) is a different undertaking.  I am always focused on building a company so I forget to stop and ask this question in a serious way versus assuming that of course everyone wants to start and build a company.
  • The comments about starting with Agile techniques are aimed not so much at the technique but building in daily transparency and accountability from the beginning.  With the limited time that you have it is important for everyone to know what is or isn’t going to get done on at least a weekly basis but preferably a daily basis.  The key is accountability and getting at dependencies between each of you, not just information sharing.  These meetings (or emails or skypes) should be separate from working meetings where you are working on some aspect of the business or the app.

The book references in roughly the sequence that I would go through are:

  • Visionary Business by Marc Allen – this book in story form helps you sort through what role everyone is interested in playing and what each person wants to get out of the enterprise.  Often times the founders think that everyone else has the same motivation, but rarely do each of us do things for the same reason.  This is one of several things we would do in the 4-6 hour One Page Business Plan workshop.
  • The One Page Business Plan for the Creative Entreprenur by Jim Horan – there are several books in this series.  I have most of them and they are basically the same thing.  This one is closest to what you need.  The key thing is to make your business plan a living document that is revised a couple of times a month in your first year.  It is far more valuable than a 40 page business plan.  As a companion to this you need to keep two presentations updated in parallel – one presentation to your customers or partners and one presentation to your potential investors.  What you did for class is a good start for both of these but like the one page business plan as you learn things each week you want to go back and revisit your pitches, your 30 second elevator pitch and your sequence of 4Ps.
  • E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber – this book also gets at the different roles (individual contributor, manager, and entrepreneur) that are needed to make the business successful.  It is also terrific for its emphasis on systematizing everything so that you are always increasing the valuation of your fledgling company and always able to sell the business to someone else.  And the key message is that you have to devote significant time to working ON the business, not just in the business.
  • Demand by Adrian Slywotzky – this book is an excellent look at the six pillars of what it takes to build a successful product.  It is an excellent expansion of the three pillars of viability, capability, desirability that we talked about in class and is covered in Change by Design.  See the section on this book (number 1 rated) in my blog post:
  • Change by Design:  How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Time Brown (IDEO)  – This is the companion book to Demand.  While Demand is written by the consummate business professor who has discovered human centered design by working backward from spectacular business results, this book is written by the best human centered design product consulting group who thinks in business terms.
  • Early Exits by Basil Peters – while it is too early for this book, I include it here as a reminder that once you get rolling and start generating revenue and demand there are some administrative and strategy things you need to be doing so that you are always ready for an exit opportunity to realize the valuation of the company that you’ve created.  At Attenex, we were the counter example of everything he recommends.  As a result of not doing what is in this book, we lost over $35M in valuation at exit.  But that is a story for another time.

If you haven’t taken the chance to read the blog entries on Working in Teams Part 1 and Working in Teams Part 2,  I would read them now.  You will be iterating through the forming, storming, norming, performing a lot during the next couple of months both because you are doing this part time and because you have one member who will be remote.  You will need to get good at always keeping each other up to date and be good about understanding when roles are shifting and be explicit about the role shifts.

In our class this fall, we mostly spent our time on generating insights to lead to a desirable and viable mobile app (courtesy of IDEO and Larry Keeley).  We didn’t spend any time on the feasibility or capability part (the what is possible) because it was clear that each teams proposed application could be built.  However, now that you want to go to the next step, we need to focus some quality time on the “possible” part of the equation.

At this point when mentoring, idea stage startups I suggest a 4-8 hour workshop where we work through the One Page Business Plan components together.  The end result of this effort is generating the vision, mission, objectives, strategy, and tactics to get the company formed and the app built.  And that is a story for a future blog post.

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, iPad, iPhone, Learning, organizing, Teaching, Transactive Content, User Experience, Value Capture, Working in teams | 2 Comments

Through Natures Lens

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Skip Walter

There’s an app for that.

Today, I did my three mile walk with EveryTrail.  I’ve traveled this same trail either walking or running hundreds of times in the last ten years.  Yet, I’ve never taken it with a camera in hand.  So with my iPhone 4s I did my walk this morning, but stopped to actually see this walk through the lens of what I had not noticed before.

It was a completely different walk.  I noticed things that are always there but not when I am out for just exercise.  What a transformational activity when we look through natures lens.

To see the map and a slide show check out the living GPS Photo map.  And don’t forget to click on the different background views of satellite, hybrid and terrain while the slide show is cycling through the photos.

I was so excited about what I could do walking I wanted to see what would happen with the Every Trail when I was driving.  I had to go over to Seattle for a dinner with several of my students from my HCDE class so I took the opportunity to take several pictures along the way to the ferry, some photos from the ferry, and a few photos on the way to the restaurant.  See the results on the web.

Posted in Exercise, iPhone, Nature, User Experience | 1 Comment

Creating Jobs – Racing with Smart Machines

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Skip Walter

In this silly season of presidential politics and having to listen to the nightly shenanigans of both parties about how important jobs are with the cynical me knowing that none of them have a clue how to improve the job situation, a couple of insightful books have shown up.

Jim Clifton wrote a thought provoking book on The Coming Jobs War.  Mr. Clifton is the Chairman and CEO of the Gallup Organization which is uniquely situated with its polls to understand the key trends throughout the world.  In the introduction to his book, Clifton writes:

“The coming world war is an all-out global war for good jobs. As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities because it’s been the cause and the effect of everything else that countries have experienced. This will become even more real in the future as global competition intensifies. If countries fail at creating jobs, their societies will fall apart. Countries, and more specifically cities, will experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolution. This is the new world that leaders will confront. If you were to ask me, from all the world polling Gallup has done for more than 75 years, what would fix the world — what would suddenly create worldwide peace, global wellbeing, and the next extraordinary advancements in human development, I would say the immediate appearance of 1.8 billion jobs — formal jobs. Nothing would change the current state of humankind more.

“A good job is a job with a paycheck from an employer and steady work that averages 30+ hours per week. Global labor economists refer to these as formal jobs. Sometimes leaders and economists blur the line between good jobs (formal jobs) and informal jobs. Informal jobs are jobs with no paycheck, no steady work. They’re found in, but not limited to, developing countries and include basic survival activities such as trading a chicken for coal. These jobs do create subsistence and survival, but not real economic energy. They are held by people who are not only miserable but, according to Gallup, suffering their way through life with no hope for a formal job — no hope for a good job.

“Of the 7 billion people on Earth, there are 5 billion adults aged 15 and older. Of these 5 billion, 3 billion tell Gallup they work or want to work. Most of these people need a full-time formal job. The problem is that there are currently only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs in the world. This is a potentially devastating global shortfall of about 1.8 billion good jobs. It means that global unemployment for those seeking a formal good job with a paycheck and 30+ hours of steady work approaches a staggering 50%, with another 10% wanting part-time work.

“This also means that potential societal stress and instability lies within 1.8 billion — nearly a quarter of the world’s population.”

Andrew McAfee (Enterprise 2.0) and Erik Brynjolfsson wrote the book Race Against the Machine:  How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.  They recently released an MIT Sloan Management Review article “Winning the Race with Ever-Smarter Machines” which nicely summarizes the key points in their book.

“The second concept relevant for understanding recent computing advances is closely related to Moore’s Law. It comes from an ancient story about math made relevant to the present age by the innovator and futurist Ray Kurzweil. In one version of the story, the inventor of the game of chess shows his creation to his country’s ruler. The emperor is so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The clever man asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so on, with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous.

“The emperor agrees, thinking that this reward was too small. He eventually sees, however, that the constant doubling results in tremendously large numbers. The inventor winds up with 2 to the 64th power grains of rice, or a pile bigger than Mount Everest. In some versions of the story the emperor is so displeased at being outsmarted that he beheads the inventor.

“In his 2000 book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil notes that the pile of rice is not that exceptional on the first half of the chessboard:

“After thirty-two squares, the emperor had given the inventor about 4 billion grains of rice. That’s a reasonable quantity—about one large field’s worth—and the emperor did start to take notice.

“But the emperor could still remain an emperor. And the inventor could still retain his head. It was as they headed into the second half of the chessboard that at least one of them got into trouble.

“Kurzweil’s point is that constant doubling, reflecting exponential growth, is deceptive because it is initially unremarkable. Exponential increases initially look a lot like standard linear ones, but they’re not. As time goes by—as we move into the second half of the chessboard—exponential growth confounds our intuition and expectations. It accelerates far past linear growth, yielding Everest-sized piles of rice and computers that can accomplish previously impossible tasks.

“So where are we in the history of business use of computers? Are we in the second half of the chessboard yet? This is an impossible question to answer precisely, of course, but a reasonable estimate yields an intriguing conclusion. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis added “Information Technology” as a category of business investment in 1958, so let’s use that as our starting year. And let’s take the standard 18 months as the Moore’s Law doubling period. Thirty-two doublings then take us to 2006 and to the second half of the chessboard. Advances like the Google autonomous car, Watson the Jeopardy! champion supercomputer, and high-quality instantaneous machine translation, then, can be seen as the first examples of the kinds of digital innovations we’ll see as we move further into the second half—into the phase where exponential growth yields jaw-dropping results.”

McAfee and Brynjolfsson go on to demonstrate through their research that the current job crisis that we have is the result of being on the second half of the chessboard.  Even though the economy has improved, due to the exponential doubling of technological capability we are seeing great leaps in many areas of business.  One example is the ability of IBM’s Watson to beat world class chess players.  However, the authors point out there is a surprising twist:

“The action moved to “freestyle” competitions, allowing any combination of people and machines. The overall winner in a recent freestyle tournament had neither the best human players nor the most powerful computers. As Kasparov writes, it instead consisted of

“a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. … Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

“This pattern is true not only in chess but throughout the economy. In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing, and even scientific discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.”

The object lesson is then to blend the best of the machine and the human.  This is the

Indy Cars demonstrate man competing WITH machine, not against the machine

approach that we took with Attenex Patterns using a visual analytics approach to electronic discovery in litigation.  With this kind of blended man-machine software, we were able to get from 10-100 times improvement in productivity in reviewing terabytes of electronic emails and documents.

The unfortunate impact of being on the second half of the chessboard is a reduction in jobs for those of low and medium skills at a time when as Clifton points out we need 1.8 billion NEW good jobs.

Where are these jobs to come from.  McAfee and Brynjolfsson offer some hope in how we can use Schumpeter‘s notion of creative destruction once again.  With the explosion of apps in Apple’s, Google’s and Amazon’s App Stores, Threadless allowing the custom design of TShirts, Kickstarter funding new development, and Heartland Robotics providing cheap robots for manufacturing we are seeing many new businesses and lots of new jobs created out of the opportunity that the creative destruction brings:

“Collectively, these new businesses directly create millions of new jobs. Some of them also create platforms for thousands of other entrepreneurs. None of them may ever create billion-dollar businesses themselves, but collectively they can do more to create jobs and wealth than even the most successful single venture.”

The nice result of this kind of thinking is that progress in creating jobs is relatively rapid as opposed to relying on the long term effects of education and retraining.  The authors go on to describe the problems of the educational system:

“Unfortunately, our educational progress has stalled and, as discussed in Chapter 3, this is reflected in stagnating wages and fewer jobs. The median worker is not keeping up with cutting-edge technologies. Although the United States once led the world in the education of its citizens, it has fallen from first to tenth in the share of citizens who are college graduates. The high costs and low performance of the American educational system are classic symptoms of low productivity in this sector. Despite the importance of productivity to overall living standards, and the disproportionate importance of education to productivity, there is far too little systematic work done to measure, let alone improve, the productivity of education itself.

“It’s not a coincidence that the educational sector also lags as an adopter of information technologies. Basic instructional methods, involving a teacher lecturing to rows of passive students, have changed little in centuries. As the old joke goes, it’s a system for transmitting information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without going through the brain of either.”

Yet there are bright spots like the Khan Academy and novel uses of their approach:

“An increasingly common approach uses the Khan Academy’s tools to flip the traditional classroom model on its head, letting students watch the video lectures at home at their own pace and then having them do the “home work” exercises in class while a teacher circulates among them, helping each student individually with specific difficulties rather than providing a one-size-fits-all lecture to all the students simultaneously. . . “

“In particular, softer skills like leadership, team building, and creativity will be increasingly important. They are the areas least likely to be automated and most in demand in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Conversely, college graduates who seek the traditional type of job, where someone else tells them what to do each day, will find themselves increasingly in competition with machines, which excel at following detailed instructions.”

So where do the insights of this collection of authors leave us?  I think the important lesson for me is that the focus for innovation in the next twenty years should go beyond just commercializing technology to understanding how to generate “good jobs” in addition to creating the new technologies.  Let the “good job innovators” begin now.

Posted in Content with Context, ebook, Human Centered Design, Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management, Learning, Quotes, Transactive Content, User Experience, Value Capture | 2 Comments