Learning and the Internet – Cathy Davidson

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Skip Walter

“When the student is ready, the master will appear.”

I hate it when I come across a book, buy it, and then have it get lost in my other Amazon Kindle book purchases.  Such was the case with Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.  I bought the book in August, but did not find it again until starting a collaboration on innovating on the future of the university with colleagues from the University of Washington Bothell.

I really wish I had read it before starting my Human Centered Design course at UW Seattle.  I made a lot of changes in the course this year (as an example see the use of MBTI to form teams) that dramatically improved the student’s class projects compared to previous years.  However, as the course went along, I realized I changed a lot in the syllabus but I didn’t fundamentally change the assessment process.  I was excited and relieved to see a whole chapter in Davidson’s book about the way assessment needs to change when we reinvent and reinvigorate learning and teaching in the Internet Age.

The following are several highlights from the text that are helping me to rethink the role of assessment in a graduate school project based course:

“By the end of This Is Your Brain on the Internet, I felt confident I’d taught a pretty impressive course. I settled in with my students’ course evaluations, waiting for the accolades to flow over me, a pedagogical shower of student appreciation. And mostly that’s what I read, thankfully. But there was one group of students who had some candid feedback to offer me for the next time I taught This Is Your Brain on the Internet, and it took me by surprise. They said everything about the course had been bold, new, and exciting.”

“Everything, that is, except grading.”

“They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internet—everything from public commenting on products and services to leader boards—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed that my assessment method had been so twentieth-century. Midterm. Final. Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn’t get more twentieth-century than that. It’s hard for students to critique a teacher, especially one they like, but they not only did so, they signed their names to the course evaluations. It turned out these were A+ students, not B students. That stopped me in my tracks. If you’re a teacher worth your salt, you really pay attention when the A+ students say something is wrong.”

“Assessment is a bit like the famous Heisenberg principle in quantum mechanics: the more precisely you measure for one property, the less precisely you can measure for another.”

“Grading measures some things and fails to measure other things, but in the end, all assessment is circular: It measures what you want it to measure by a standard of excellence that you determine in advance.”

“Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence.”

“Once we figure out how to teach collaboration, how do we measure it? Kids shouldn’t have to end up at their first job with a perfect report card and stellar test scores but no experience in working with others. When you fail at that in your first job, you don’t get a C. You get a pink slip and a fast walk to the exit door.”

The above are just a few of 261 highlighted passages and 19 notes I made while reading the book.  Along with the work I did with Russ Ackoff in the 1980s on the Idealized Design of the University, Cathy Davidson’s research work will be instrumental in inspiring us to innovate for the university of the future.

In addition to her book, Now You See It, several other Cathy Davidson resources are available on the web:

When you read her book, it becomes clear that not only is Cathy a prolific social media writer (see her pointers for following on the top of her blog page).

Posted in Knowledge Management, Learning, University, User Experience | 5 Comments

Transactive Content

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Skip Walter

In one of our many discussions on Content Management that continue since the early 1980s, Geoff Bock introduced me to the notion of “Transactive Content.”  He had come across the term in a Gilbane report which referenced work done at Forrester.

“Forrester was one of the first of the major market research firms to target the
Internet and web applications, particularly for e-commerce. Their concept of
“transactive content” has been influential in helping drive home the critical role
of content in commerce. There is now quite a collection of terms used by other
analysts that are similar (processable content, dynamic content, active content,
actionable content, transactional content, etc.).”

Forrester (2000) defined Transactive Content as “software that blends transactions with interactivity and content over the net.”  Further, they go on to say:

“Internet commerce struggles to fulfill its promise.  The reason? Web technology cannot deliver a seamless self-service experience.  This report concludes that a new type of application – Transactive Content – will redefine Internet self-service.  The key: support for a fluid commerce experience, from gathering information to executing transactions.

“Two mismatches undercut today’s efforts to fulfill the self-serve imperative:

  • Current Web technology is too thin. The Web delivers information to and from anywhere, but it cannot handle give-and-take conversations such as on-line commerce
  • Web-enabled business apps are only a partial solution. Slapping browser front-ends on internal transaction systems — like order entry or inventory — only gives customers access to “commitments.” This is not enough. Questions, answers, and decisions are not supported.

“Forrester believes that a more powerful model — Internet Computing — will subsume the Web by 2000 and lay the groundwork for high-grade self-service. Internet Computing sets up rich discussions between firms and Web visitors with:

  • Two-way conversations. With live software easily delivered to the client using technology like Java and Dynamic HTML, sophisticated interactions can happen without prior setup. This approach produces intelligent clients that do real work — for example, crunching data or rendering multimedia — which powers compelling commerce.
  • True sessions. Internet Computing lets the give-and-take between Net clients and servers flow coherently across time and multiple systems. This continuity underlies the self-service imperative.

“Your competitors are 18 to 24 months away from delivering advanced Transactive Content. To get there ahead of them:

  • Ask Mom to buy something at your site. The first step on the path to Transactive Content is to shed the evolutionary mindset that dominates most on-line commerce thinking.
  • Make friends with the right people. Get started building affiliations across the Net that will address the whole experience your customers need. Set a new breed of business development managers loose on-line, building relationships with complementary sites — connections that are much deeper than Web links. Move into what Forrester calls Syndicated Selling — embedding your content and transaction links in partner sites.
  • Be gutsy about technical innovation. Transactive Content front-runners will blast away at two technical initiatives: 1) today’s production Web offering, and 2) a Transactive Content lab. Co-locate these groups to breed interaction that will incrementally enrich the current offering with new technologies – Java, Dynamic HTML, and emerging component platforms – and connect the “TC” dreamers to the rigors of quality and deployment. “

To the above list we would now add social media and the world of smartphone and iPad applications.

In 2005, my colleague Eric Robinson showed me a slide show of digital camera pictures of a trip he took on his motorcycle between Seattle, WA and Reno, NV.  As he clicked to a beautiful snow covered rock formation, I asked “where was that?  I’d love to go visit that area?”

Sheepishly, he answered “I don’t know.  I know it was somewhere in the Cascades but there aren’t any clues in the photo that helps me remember where I was.”  As a typical software architect, he bemoaned “I sure wish they made digital cameras with a GPS device in them so that you would always know when and where you took a photo.”

“What a great idea,” I responded.  Then it occurred to me that somebody must have already had that idea.  So we immediately called up Google and searched for “camera and GPS”.  To our amazement a range of responses came up that included GPS camera phones and software that could combine data from a GPS device and from a digital camera .   We looked at the sample website  and found an amazing set of automatically generated context.  Given that I had a digital camera and a GPS device, I immediately jumped in my car and took photos on the way to the ferry and then over to Seattle.   An overview satellite photo comes up with labels for where the photos were taken.  You can click on the positional label or on one of the thumbnails on the left side of the web page.  When the specific photo comes up you see the photo, the satellite photo of the surrounding land mass, and then pointers to MapQuest (for driving directions), TopoZone (for the topographic information), and then the structured information (latitude and longitude, elevation, camera make and model, photographic settings).

With the recent advances in camera phones, you can now have voice combined with the camera and GPS information.  The iPhone 4s combines all of the above features plus it can let you know who you might have been talking to while you were taking your photos.  Without having to wait until you get back to your PC your photos are automatically uploaded to the iCloud and have friends and families seeing the content in context immediately.  I still am amazed (I amaze easily) when I take photos with my iPhone and then see them magically appear on my iPad.  With apps like 360 Panorama and Photosynth you can go beyond just simple photos and videos that are geotagged but all the way to 360 degree panoramic views.  With the latest Dot panoramic lens you can go even further.

In business, we have the same needs placing the content that comes our way on the flood tide each day in a larger, more organized context.  An email arrives from Eric, what is the context of this email?  Which project does it belong to?  What is the social network of people and organizations that are associated with this project?  What is the event time line for this email – is it leading up to a particular deliverable on a particular date (the two dimensions of time)?  What is the semantic network of other documents that are closely related to this message?  What financial transactions in the form of budgets and actuals should be linked to this item?  Is this message a part of a sales activity or intellectual capital that could be patented?  Each of these questions leads to a collection of potential contexts for a message much in the same way that the act of simply taking a digital photo could automatically generate additional context that is a part of the process of creating a travelogue that is immediately shareable.

With Attenex Patterns (acquired by FTI Consulting and a part of Ringtail) we had many of the pieces of Transactive Content, but we did not have the transaction component of eCommerce.  As a result we set up a prototyping effort for a project code named Quicksilver to explore all aspects of Transactive Content.  In parallel with starting the prototype, I reflected how we had gotten to our current understanding.

In the beginning was Office Automation (OA, circa 1980).  With much hand wringing about how people couldn’t type, the worry of OA was that we would turn every office worker into a secretary.  Here we are 26 years later and for the most part there are no more secretaries and we all know how to type.  We are much more efficient and probably more effective with the current tools than we ever were with paper and secretaries.  In the process we also became our own travel agents and graphic designers (well OK, Powerpoint slide generators).

Now we are pretty much in an age where every knowledge worker is a content generator every single day.  We turn out an incredible amount of stuff, as Attenex sees everyday when it comes to electronic discovery.  In the business world the content that we generate is still primarily text and numbers.  But as Stan Davis in the Art of Business pointed out – we are text and numbers in business, but with the advent of the iPod, iPhone, iPad and the digital camera we are sound and pictures at home.  His prophecy is that business will soon be flooded with all four forms of content – text, numbers, sounds, pictures.

Then along came an incredible sea change as the result of the big fraud cases and homeland security and litigation issues like the Zubalake case ($1 million judgement, $30 million sanction for electronic discovery fraud) and the Morgan Stanley/Coleman $1.5Billion sanction for not keeping and being able to produce relevant emails.  In attending the seven conferences on these topics in 2005, it was clear that business was in the process of making every employee a professional records manager.  And along the way they are adding the burden of becoming compliance managers and regulatory compliance managers and Sarbanes Oxley policy wonks.

An interesting example of how bad it has gotten comes from Kevin Esposito formerly at Pfizer.  From his role in the law department it became clear that Pfizer needed to dramatically update their records management policies and start adhering to them.  This was going to cost 10s of millions of dollars and take several years.  Yet he got the program sold and approved with 1 slide.  He found a slide that had been used at a manufacturing plant manager’s meeting the week before that described the water quality results from the plant for the previous week.  He put the slide up with it’s five bullets.  He then went bullet by bullet and pointed out which regulatory agency required the information to be produced AND retained.  The shortest time that the information needed to be retained was for 2 years.  The longest time was seven years for one of the bullets.

“Let me be very clear.  Not just this information needs to be retained, but this slide needs to be retained for the longest time period of the regulations,” Kevin pointed out.  For each document like this that we don’t retain appropriately we are liable for sanctions ranging from $10,000 to millions of dollars.”  Further he elaborated:  “And notice that this document has nothing to do with our core business which is producing pharmaceuticals.  Imagine how much worse those records retentions policies are.”  Needless to say after everyone stopped swearing and fainting, they had everyone’s attention and the records management initiative was approved.  This was in 2003.  Regulations, compliance and the high stakes of litigation have made the problem much worse since then.

The above is all about the negative side of information and records retention (although unfortunately it is what gets everyone’s attention).  What business really needs is for each knowledge worker to realize that they are incredible Intellectual Capital generators – human capital, structural capital, and relationship capital (customer capital).  Yet, there are no tools for personal knowledge creation and management, let alone trying to do Intellectual Capital Management and Accounting at the Enterprise level (even though as Tom Stewart et al have pointed out this is the biggest unaccounted for part of every company’s financial accounting gap).

So the challenge is how do we take the “stick” approach and turn it into a carrot opportunity.  Today, the simplistic response to this challenge is to do “search” better.  Ideally, this means to have the tools to “unite” the unstructured document pools that I want to explore – the complete deep internet, the whole enterprise, my personal document universe (email and my hard drive).  But nowhere is the context of the search kept, which at its fundamental level is the business process that triggered the search in the first place.  As Autonomy talks about in their recent literature, if you have to do a search it is a sign that your application has failed.  It is the formal and informal work processes that contain the context of why a search was needed.  I believe that this is the next big area with companies like Genentech which is to take the documents that already exist that have an incredible amount of latent structure.

The placeholder notion that I’m using for this arena is Transactive Content.  The term comes from a Forrester Research initiative in the late 90s to describe the advent of XML processes but seems to have been lost.

In 2005, Enrique Godreau one of our board members at Attenex challenged me to describe our prototype Quicksilver in terms that simple people could understand.  The following is a result of that homework:

With a little bit of time to reflect and think about how I would talk about Quicksilver the almost one sentence description would come out something like this:

Quicksilver is a way to quickly See What Matters at the personal, departmental and enterprise levels.  It allows me to visually recover things I know are in my document/data pool but I can’t quite remember how to get at them exactly.  It enables me to discover patterns that I didn’t know were there that matter to me in the moment.  It automatically provides ways in which I can make my key intellectual assets more findable.   Depending on the workflow, the user can also recombine the ideas that are found into a virtual document that more closely matches their intent.

The following are representative stories or use cases to illustrate the above.

What is the cost of recovery?

Marty Smith is a senior partner and transactional attorney, formerly at K&L Gates.  He took on the most important and complex contracting tasks for companies like Microsoft.  As he negotiates clause by clause in these complex contracts he often has to go find similar clauses in contracts that he has constructed and then modified over the past 25 years.  During a user research session on a “live” contract negotiation, we watched him spend over 30 minutes trying to find examples of ways in which he had modified a particular clause.  He knew that he had done it about 30 times in the past but couldn’t remember for which clients and which contracts.  He finally gave up and had to craft his changes from scratch without the benefit of his previous work.  With the Quicksilver Attenuated Search capability he would have found the documents which contain the clause within 30 seconds.  The cost to the client from lost productivity >$500.  The cost from not doing the best work – unknown.  This happens several times a week for each transactional attorney.

In the past, most corporations have simply recycled the computers of employees who have left the firm.  Now firms are realizing the lost intellectual capital and risks associated with simply deleting the work of a former employee.  Many companies and law firms could use Quicksilver to quickly search and organize a former employees digital assets and place those assets into a “corporate memory”.  The intellectual assets are both the documents that somebody had crafted as well as the people relationships developed.

What is the benefit of discovery?

A globally known textile manufacturer suspected that two of its sales people were committing fraud.  Law firms and accounting firms estimated that it would cost $50,000 to $100,000 and take 1-3 months to examine the 2 GB of email from the two sales people.  By using an early single user prototype of Quicksilver, the Sales Manager was able to examine the emails and in one hour (which included training) found over $1 million of fraudulent transactions.  Investigations of suspected employees can become routine by the appropriate manager.

The pharmaceutical industry has coined the term “freedom to operate” to describe a process need to identify early on whether the drug they are thinking of developing is already being worked on or has patent problems associated with it.  Today, they often spend $100 million or more to discover and develop a new drug only to find out after releasing it that others hold patents on that drug.  With Quicksilver at any stage in the development process, the drug researcher can combine searches of their own research, the patent database, product announcement databases and the medical research literature to identify problems in the development of new drugs.

Anti-money laundering software is difficult to develop and generates thousands of alarms to a compliance manager.  Today’s systems just look at the transaction flows going through a financial institution.  What the financial company wants is a way to tie the transaction flow into the CRM system and into the emails of the high net worth customer managers.  Quicksilver is the only tool that can provide analytics into each of these different pools of data and then visualize the results so that the number of alarms can be dramatically reduced.

In each of the cases mentioned, the combination of Quicksilver’s automatic indexing and easy access to many sources of unstructured, semi-structured and structured information combined with visualization capabilities allows a researcher or investigator to quickly see what matters without having to wade through, correlate and laboriously analyze lists of results from traditional search engines.

The above are just a few of the stories and the use cases that we’ve identified with the key aspects of Quicksilver.  The overarching goal is to move into an area I am calling transactive content.  That is, content that is retrieved, analyzed, and used as part of an overall goal directed business process.  Search engines today are disconnected from the goals and processes of anyone doing research or investigations, whether as a knowledge worker inside an enterprise or a consumer.  The ability for an individual to do this research on their own materials independent of a company having to make a global enterprise purchase is key to personal productivity.  Attenex Patterns requires an enterprise purchase and IT staffing.  Quicksilver would be as easy to use and install as Google desktop but far more powerful.

An important part of Transactive Content is making sense of citations.  Citations come in many forms – URL links from one web page to another, case law citations in formal legal briefs, references in journal articles, forward and backward prior art references in a patent, and pointers to people to talk to in informal email sessions.  The importance of citations even emerges from the “Workflow as a Pi Process” discussion that the goal of email is to create a contact.

I’ve been enamored with citations from my first introduction by Russ Ackoff to the notion of invisible universities to what Chaomei Chen has been doing with the visualizations of citation references in formal journals.  Clearly Google has made a fortune out of a very simple citation link – page rank and then connecting that to the powerful set of citations called WordSense and Adsense.  Facebook is doing a similar thing with its EdgeRank.  Each citation link has an enormous amount of information buried behind it, but I have to lose context to go chase that link.  This is particularly painful when I’m reading a paper book or business article where there is no easy link to the electronic information.   The hardest part is that I don’t get to see the author’s whole product – their content plus all the content they’ve drawn from to create their content.  In addition, I also want to see who has been referencing this content.  In the legal field, this is a core part of the value that Lexis and Westlaw provide – what cases does this case reference and who is referencing this case.

The Amazon Kindle with the annotation highlighting option provides an interesting public sharing of highlights.  As you read a book, sections where 5 or more people have highlighted the text show up as a public highlight.  However, what I would really like is some way to connect with the knowledge workers who are highlighting the same things I am.

I’ve felt that there has been something missing to jump to the next step which is to have some associated content to place the citation in some form of abstract concept space.  I didn’t know how to get there without having the content for every citation as well as the content of the document which contained the citation.  Assuming that I now have some content/context for the citation I now have fodder to do some interesting joining.

Let’s say you wanted to do a formal document like a contract or a brief or even a white paper.  The author instead of having to author everything as is the case today could instead write basically an outline of statements about what they want to put together.  The tool then looks at the statements and compares them to its database of statements to find the best match.  A good match would be a document that included all the statements, but most likely you would match against bits and pieces of existing documents.  The tool would then bring back the piece parts and the user would select the document sub pieces that best match their intent.  The really good news about this approach versus what we were trying to do with our Attenex Structure product is that there is no knowledge to maintain or create beyond the original documents with their citations.  95% of the cost of knowledge management systems goes away and yet you get over 90% of the benefit without having to go through the pain of generalizing the knowledge that sits in a specific memo like this piece of paper.

If this core citation stuff works, then I think we have the whole next level of PageRank and EdgeRank and can generate Transactive Content processes rather than having to always author them through very specific, very brittle and very narrow in scope workflows.

Where I’m trying to go with this is to define transactive content in order to get into the Intellectual Capital management business by discovering what is already there (see what matters).   All of these thoughts are about putting content in context.

Posted in Content with Context, social networking, Transactive Content, Value Capture | 3 Comments

Burgundy – Visiting the Cradle of Pinot Noir

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Skip Walter

Several years ago I walked into the office of Skye Hallberg who was the Chief Marketing Officer at Benziger Family Winery and confronted her with the question “Why can’t you folks in California make a Pinot Noir as good as they do in Oregon?”

Well, you would have thought I had turned on a siren by how quick Skye jumped up and got in my face.  She stared down at me through her chic glasses and roared “Who the heck are you to walk in here and talk to me about Pinot Noir?  Don’t you know that I am one of only two Americans allowed to buy a vineyard in Gevrey-Chambertin, Burgundy, France?  I’ve forgotten more about Pinot Noir than your naive Oregon palate will ever experience.”

After I stopped laughing, we all settled down for a wine geeky discussion on the merits of different Pinots and a wonderful life long friendship started.  Skye was kind enough to educate this poor Northwest wine snob in the finer distinctions of Burgundy, California, Oregon and New Zealand variants of Pinot Noir.

A year later Skye asked if my wife, Jamie, and I would like to spend a week with her in Gevrey-Chambertin.  She needed to go over and work with her winemakers, the Heresztyns, and check on their arrangement going forward.  This visit would be her first since she sold her house in Burgundy and she knew she needed some company.  Jamie and I found that we could free up our schedules to join her for the week (how could we not?).

The rest of this blog is a journal of our visit along with a couple of messages to our daily diary from winemaker friends in Oregon and California.

Day 1

We arrived in Paris after an all night flight from Seattle on Air France and took a taxi to Gare de Lyon to catch a TGV train to Dijon.  The high speed train is just amazing.  It flies so fast through the countryside and yet is so quiet.

We arrived in Dijon where Skye met us for the very short drive to Gevrey-Chambertin.  We immediately went to the Heresztyn’s for their traditional Sunday lunch.  Chantal and her husband Bernard along with Chantal’s mother Justina kindly hosted us for an unbelievable dinner.  We had beef bourgonone and a beef stew with leeks, carrots and cabbage.  Unbelievably good and oh yes, we had three types of wine.  We started with a 2007 Heresztyn White Burgundy (chardonnay for those of us unattuned to Burgundy) that was better than all of the 20 white burgundies I tasted in Belleveu, WA at a Grand Cru Burgundy event tasting as preparation for the trip.  Nice color, nice aroma, good acid.  We had the white with a wonderful appetizer dish with homemade mayonnaise.

Then Bernard quietly brought the first of the Red Burgundies, a 2004 from the Les Goulots vineyard which is the highest of the premier cru vineyards above the village of Gevry-Chambertin.  About halfway through the meal he brought out a 2002 Champonnet Premier Cru.  Both of these wines opened up very nicely over the course of the two hour main course.  We then finished the second wine with a sampling of three wonderful cheeses.

After “lunch” we went to the “cave” below the house where Skye’s wines are stored and where Bernard keeps his collection of wines.  The cave is over 200 years old.  Many of the wine bottles were coated with the same mold and accumulated gray white “stuff” clinging to the walls.  This cave was the embodiment of everything I’ve read about old French wine caves.  Most of the bottles didn’t have labels but rather had a “chalk marker” of the abbreviation for the vineyard and the vintage.

We also got to feast our eyes on a 1972 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti that Skye estimates is worth several thousands of dollars per bottle.  It was a gift many years ago from Bernard to Skye.

On our drive into Gevrey-Chambertin the unexpected thing was how short the vines are – the main root comes up about 12 inches (clearly old and thick) but the vines themselves are only another 12-18 inches higher.  It was hard to believe that these were vineyards.  The vines are also planted extremely close together.

Skye then took us for a drive to visit where she used to own a house.  It is much farther away from Gevrey than I imagined and much higher up from the valley floor and the main highway, RN74 (which the restaurant chain in the US is named for).  The good news is that she was able to drive up to her old house and not get emotional.

We then drove back down from the Haut Nuits to drive through Clos de Vougeot one of the more famous Burgundian vineyards.  While the day had been mostly overcast by the time we started our drive the sun had come out and the late afternoon light was just drop dead beautiful on the vineyards.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped by Skye’s friend at Domaine Denis Mortet to set up a tasting for later in the week.  This is one of the more famous Gevrey Chambertin vigneron.

What a way to get introduced to Burgundy.  What a masterful hostess, interpreter and tour guide Skye is.

Day 2

We awoke after 13 hours of wonderful mostly sleep to a drizzling cloudy day in Gevrey Chambertin.  We slowly came awake and got ready for our first day of serious wine tasting.  We had a very nice breakfast at the Hotel Grands Cru and then headed to meet Skye at Phillippe LeClerc‘s winery in Gevrey-Chambertin.

Phillippe is evidently quite the character wearing black capes and being very much the extrovert.  The last time Skye visited Phillippe and had dinner she felt something curling around her leg and looked down to see the pet boa constrictor.  Unfortunately, Phillippe was not there today so one of his assistants gave the tasting.  We tasted four wines at LeClercs:

  • 2005 Gevrey-Chambertin En Champ
  • 2007 Chambolle Musigny Les Babillains
  • 2006 Gevrey-Chambertin La Combe aux Moines
  • 1999 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Champeau

As we tasted through the wines, it became clear that the LeClerc wines were at one end of the spectrum – the non-traditional end.  He only uses new oak for his Pinots and you could tell that the 2005 and 2007 still needed two years of age on them to be drinkable.  The 2006 was the most drinkable now, but still had too much wood for my taste.  The 1999 showed us a bit how his wines might age, but even after 10 years there was quite a bit of wood.  From the website photos you can see examples of the wonderful old wine making equipment that is in the tasting room.

Evidently the assistant, who did not speak any English, was somewhat intimidated by all my notetaking.  Skye let her know that I was a famous American wine writer in hopes that she might bring out more of the good stuff.

If you want to follow along with which vineyards we are tasting from you can see some excellent maps in Scott Paul’s blog.  If you scroll down you will see an overall map of Burgundy and then you can click on the detailed place maps to see the vineyards we are talking about.  Click on the Gevrey-Chambertin map (and click again to magnify the map) and you can see the individual vineyard names.  In the upper right you can see the vineyards we tasted the last two days Les Goulots, Les Champeau and La Combe aux Moines.  If you then scroll down you can see the En Deree vineyard that Skye Hallberg owns a part of.

We bought three of the wines (everything except the 2005 En Champ) and then headed out to Beaune for lunch.

We took the back road most of the way to Beaune (Rue de Grand Cru) and then ended up at the Place Carnot in Beaune.  The village electricians were busy putting up all kinds of Christmas lights.  In the Place was a cute little Carousel.  We wanted to eat at Le Gourmandin for lunch but they were busy when we first got there so we went next door to the all things wine bookstore, wine shop and wine paraphenalia.  We got a book by Lincoln Russell on Adventures in Burgundy which were a set of wonderful pictures of the vineyards, wines and people of Burgundy.  The forward was written by Allen Meadows of Burghound, one of, if not the best authority on Burgundian Wines.  Unbeknownst to us in this small world, Allen spent 2.5 hours that day at the Herestzyn caves tasting the current vintages of their wines.  The Herestzyn’s were quite excited as their wines are amongst the few that are getting good ratings lately.  But we missed him.  Oh well.

I also finally bought a large scale map of the Cote de Nuits and the Cote de Beaune so I’m looking forward to framing those when I get back home.  In addition, I bought one of the same Pinot glasses that Skye has which is a great glass for exposing any faults in a red wine.

We finally got into lunch and we all splurged on traditional Burgundian dishes.  I had a ham type of meat loaf.  Jamie had Beef Burgundy and Skye had scallops.

During lunch Skye pointed out some of the big differences between wine talk in Burgundy and wine talk in the US.  Here it is all about the land.  Everything revolves around where your vineyard is located.  The difference of 50 feet can determine whether you can charge $75 for a bottle of wine or $15.  It’s almost a planned economy communist kind of thing.  It’s not necessarily how good your wine is but whether your vineyard was declared a Grand Cru or a Premier Cru somewhere in the Napoleanic past.  So the first question is always where is your vineyard?

On our journey from lunch to Meursault, we passed a really ugly water slide on the edge of a vineyard.  Skye laughed and said “Yes, France doesn’t do modern very well.”

While we were a little late for our afternoon tasting at Hubert Chavy’s Domaine Chavy-Chouet, it was a high point of the day.  It took us a while to find the winery.  We stopped some man to ask directions and it was the French version of “you can’t get there from here.”  Even Skye got lost in the sequence of lefts and rights.  But we finally made it.  Hubert’s wine tastings are held in his kitchen.  It was this wonderful mix of a two hundred year old house with an incredibly modern stove that was beyond a Viking stove that took up a large expanse of the main wall.  We were enamored with Hubert’s two bull dogs and a large old winery cat.

We tried three wines:

  • 2008 Meursault Premier Cru Les Charmes
  • 2008 Puligny-Montrachet Premier Cru Hameau de Blagny
  • 2007 Pommard Premier Cru Les Chanlins (red)

These are two of the best Chardonnay’s I’ve had in my life.  They were both quite well balanced and even though the vineyards are only a couple hundred yards away from each other, each had a distinctive taste.

Hubert was wonderful and switched easily between English and French.  We took lots of pictures and enjoyed our 1.5 hour tasting.  We got three bottles of each White Burgundy, one of the Pommard and Hubert was kind enough to throw in an extra village wine.  I didn’t realize that Pommard was kind of the oddball as it is the only area in the south of the Cote de Beaune that produces red wine.  Hubert let us know that he put up a website this year so you can see photos of the house and the winery.

Hubert also made sure that I saw and took a picture of the honorary Burgundian wine society (Chevaliers du Tastevin) that his grandmother was inducted into in 1951.  This was an incredible honor at the time because you were being acknowledged for making great wine and she was a woman – a very rare combination in those days.

All things being equal I was amazed at how well both Jamie and I were staying awake and staying engaged.  Jet lag and lots of good wine are not conducive to high brain functioning.

While we were at lunch, Skye confirmed that we could get a tasting at Denis Mortet.  This winery is very hard to get into, but Skye has known the wife of Denis for a number of years.  Denis committed suicide several years ago and his son Arnaud now runs the winery.  Skye used to take Arnaud to school along with the Heresztyn boys when they were five years old.  Skye is all excited to taste the wines and see if Arnaud is carrying on his father’s tradition.

After we came back from Hubert’s, Skye dropped us off at the hotel for a short nap.  I checked email and found I a nice note from Leigh Bartholomew of Archery Summit and Patrick Reuter Domino IV.  Leigh and Patrick had shared how much they loved working in Gevrey when they found out we were going to Burgundy.  They stayed at the Hotel Grand Crus for several weeks.  So I wanted to let them know that we were finally on the trip and that we really liked the hotel as well.

Leigh shared in her email:

Skip and Jamie!

I am so envious and happy for you that you are in such an amazing place and being taken care of so well. It sounds absolutely amazing and I am sure you are loving every minute of it. This is truly a trip worthy of…a great bottle of wine to put in that lovely cellar of yours, thankfully absent of the mold that makes those Burundian cellars so funky.

You mentioned Domaine Denis Mortet, that is where I worked back in 1999. It was a great experience and Denis was still around during that vintage. Very heartbreak all the way around, he was  a lovely guy really. Please say hello to the family for me, I don’t know if they will remember me or not. Arnout was still a kid then.

Thanks for the snapshot of your wonderful visit, I look forward to the next installment. Really, all of that on your first day! I can’t wait to hear more.

Leigh

I immediately wrote her back what a small world it was that we were going to start our day tomorrow at Domaine Denis Mortet.  We will certainly pass on a big Bonjour from Leigh.

After our all too short nap, Skye took us to dinner at Le Chambolle in Chambolle-Musigny, which is the village just south of Gevrey-Chambertin.  On a rainy, windy night it was quite an interesting collection of international travellers.  There were three Japanese women, a couple from southern Germany (or Switzerland), the three of us Americans, and several tables of French citizens.  We had a terrific traditional Burgundian meal.  We chose a 2005 Chambolle Musigny Domaine Digioia-Royer wine.  This wine was classified a Village wine, the classification just below a Premier Cru.  There was just a little hint of eau-de-Goodyear (stinky rubber tire) in the wine which gave me a good opening to share with Skye, Anna Matzinger’s experiment with putting Pinot Noir in American Oak barrels from the Archery Summit Red Hills vineyard.

While at dinner Skye asked us if we knew why there were so many different types of forks and knives and spoons when it comes to silverware.  She informed us that it occurred in the early 1800s in England when there was a run on silver and households were trying to use silver in a creative way.  All of a sudden one of each type of eating utensil wasn’t good enough, you had to have an ever expanding set.  Jamie laughed and said that sounds like Riedel glassware with all of their different kinds of glasses to drink each type of wine. Riedel glassware in the 2000s is the silver sets of the 1800s.

It’s time to go to bed and get ready for our exciting day tomorrow starting at 9am at Domaine Denis Mortet.  I rationalized that I could drink that early because it will only be midnight by my body clock.

In addition to Leigh’s message, we also got one from Rodrigo Soto, the Chilean winemaker at Benziger Family Winery, and a dear colleague of Skye’s:

Dear Skip,

Thank you for the detailed impressions of your wonderful trip. Of course I must say that I have a healthy envy about your experiences. I would very much like to be there and share those conversations with you, Jamie and Skye. I would like to add some comments to your descriptions and maybe trigger some interesting questions for your next visits.

First of all the conversation about is the US wine higher quality or better stated, the new world approach versus old world styles of wine  is very interesting. I really like your comment about communism, which is very close to true. It is a totalitarian approach which does not allow you to have any chance to expect any miracles in this life to change your destiny. It is almost like caste system in India, no chance to change, it is what it is and you have to live with it. But I must say that it is based on trial and error during centuries, and the best wines, and this is consistent, comes from the best pieces of land in the area. And that is consistent with the price of the bottle.

Please pay attention to the topography of the place – it is full of fractures and the soils are so old, that the minimal difference makes a big one in the wines. There are very few exceptions, like the Clos Veugeot which is a bit unstable and really matters where in the Clos the wine comes from and with Puligny Montrachet which is the same thing, where in the puligny?? That is the only marketing allowed, to know where it comes from – pretty cool!!

Could you imagine if that ever happens over here??? What would happen if you are in the Village and you are charging a lot of money for your Cab??? I am sure there will be a lot of resistance to really identify which are the choice pieces of property. That will never happen in the US or the new world. So I am afraid I think that the communist approach is fair, accurate and honest.

Finally I want you to know that Denis Mortet was really an inspiration for me; I got the honor to meet him a month before he took his terrible decision. I spent a whole evening with him tasting all the different wines, and was one of those memorable days in life.  I learned a lot but also engaged more with my profession and with what I do. He was really a fundamentalist of terroir, he really was, even if he was criticized that his wines were a bit new world.  I don’t think so, they were cleaner than the rest, that is for sure, but with incredible texture. I hope you enjoy the experience, because it was really incredible for me.

Skip, keep enjoying the experience, look further than what you normally look, put your ear in the ground, smell the soil, touch it, taste it, feel the ancient, generations and generations of farmers have been there. Look at the colors, the exposures, the length of the day, the cold in the morning and in the night, how steep, how flat, its all there, fully explored – there is so much to learn.

Enjoy and Kind Regards,

Rodrigo

I had tears in my eyes remembering all the great conversations I had walking the vineyards of Benziger Family Winery and sitting in on the monthly biodynamic study group with Rodrigo.  Rodrigo is an incredible winemaker who has the gift of being able to share his knowledge even with a neophyte.  He grounded the context of this trip to Burgundy for me.

Day 3

Yesterday was so fantastic and so long that I couldn’t force myself to write last night.  Or maybe it was the aftermath of so many fantastic wines that we tasted in the caves of Gevrey-Chambertin and at the table of the Heresztyns that there was little energy left to write.

Our 7am wakeup call came way too early – the chimes on the church across the street.  We have a 9am tasting appointment with Arnaud Mortet at Domaine Denis Mortet.  We struggle out of bed and grab a quick breakfast.  An Australian couple stopped us to chat and ask us about our trip.  They were on their way to Normandy for the war remembrance celebration the next morning (10/11/09).  They run a ski area in Victoria, Australia.  This is clearly the slow time of the year as there are only a few rooms occupied in the hotel.

Skye picks us up just before 9am for the 100 yard drive to the Domain Denis Mortet winery.  What a surprise when we enter the new winery (less than 6 years old) and it is pristinely clean.  It felt like we were walking into the very clean winery at Archery Summit.  The staff at the hotel couldn’t believe that we were able to get a tasting appointment at Domaine Denis Mortet.  They shared with Skye that nobody gets in to do a tasting.

Arnaud met us as we walked into the winery and gave Skye a big hug.  His smile lit up the room.  And we followed Allen Meadows by a day again.  He had spent 2 hours with Arnaud the night before.

We started with a tour of the caves.  There was a new section built five years ago and an older section that was 35 years old.  The new section was free of the mold on the walls, while the older section already had a good growth going.  Compared to American wineries, the barrel rooms are much smaller and provided another indication of how small the productions are of each of these wineries.

Clearly, Arnaud and Skye had quite a bit of catching up to do so there was little in the way of translation while they were remembering old times.  However, Arnaud spoke quite excellent English and he was kind enough to include us when the talk got to wine.

I’ve included a picture of Skye and Arnaud in front of the main door to the winery.  In addition here is a picture of the wines we tasted at Mortet.

As we came back upstairs and went over to the tasting table, it suddenly dawned on us that we were going to be tasting through all 24 of the bottles.  Following Allen Meadows isn’t such a bad thing afterall.  The bottles in front were from the 2008 wines that were still in malolactic fermentation.  The second row of bottles were from the 2007 vintage.  Arnaud suggested we just try the 2008 wines that were mostly finished with malolactic fermentation, and then we would try all of the 2007s.  Clearly this was going to be a taste and spit day.  Which somehow seems a tragedy with all of these great Burgundies in front of us.  However, we decided that we’d just have to make the best of it.

The wines we tasted were (please forgive the spellings as I’m sure I’ve got several of these a little off):

  • 2008 Marsannay Village
  • 2008 Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru – a blend of four premier cru parcels
  • 2008 Chambolle Musigny Les Beaux Bruns Premier Cru
  • 2008 Clos Veugeot
  • 2008 Chambertin Grand Cru
  • 2007 Bourgogne Rouge (made from his grandfather’s vineyard just west of Dijon)
  • 2007 Marsannay Village
  • 2007 Fixin Village
  • 2007 Gevrey Chambertin
  • 2007 Gevrey Chambertin Vielle Vigne – old vines village wine that comes from grapes very close to Skye’s vineyard
  • 2007 Gevrey Chambertin En Champ
  • 2007 Gevrey Chambertin Premier Cru
  • 2007 Gevrey Chambetin Champeaux Premier Cru
  • 2007 Gevrey Chambertin Le Clos Saint Jacques Premier Cru
  • 2007 Chambolle Musigny Beaux Bruns
  • 2007 Clos Veugeot
  • 2007 Chambertin Grand Cru

While we were trying to do a taste and spit, there was no way I wasn’t going to savor the Premier Crus and the Grand Crus.  Amazing wines and now I have to somehow find these wines and pay outrageous prices in the US.

Arnaud is working to find his own style to differentiate himself from his father.  The first thing he is doing is to reduce the amount of new oak on his Pinot Noirs.  Each year since he took over the winery he is putting less new oak on the wines.  He’s down to about 50% new oak in his 2009 vintage.

Arnaud did an internship in Oregon when he was 16 at Witness Tree and he shared that he had visited Seattle when he was there.  Of course we invited him to come visit us the next time he was in Seattle.  He also shared that he comes to San Francisco once a year for his distributor and loves to ride a big Harley Davidson one day each visit into the Sonoma and Napa Valleys.

We had to cut the tasting short at 2 hours (are you kidding me) as Arnaud had to meet a New York journalist and famous restauranteur in Fixin.  Simply amazing.

We then headed back into the rain and went to visit the Heresztyns as they were pruning one of their vineyards east of Gevrey.  Bernard and Chantal were in the vineyard along with his brother’s wife, Eva, and his brother’s daughter Florence.  I got to see why the vines were so short – they are pruned that way.  Every couple of vines, Bernard would saw off several inches of the top.  Bernard shared with us that they were cutting all but two of the shoots to prepare for next year.  The Burgundians prune twice a year, where most of the US vineyards just prune once a year.  I still have no idea how they figure out which two canes to leave.  In the spring they will come through and prune to just one cane which will produce that year’s grapes.  Each of the family members was using a battery operated pruner that has helped with their hands.  It is really amazing to see that the family does everything in the vineyards and in the winery and running the business.  They only bring a few temporary workers in for harvest.  Given that it was drizzling and quite cold, it is not very fun work.

We then head off to Dijon to visit a traditional French market day.  Skye heads to one of the cheese shops and we grab some cheese for some walking around nourishment.  We wander the town and make sure we rub the owl for good luck on the side of the Notre Dame of Dijon cathedral.  We walk through the Place Liberte which is the home of the regional government.  It is now time for lunch.  We head to Osteria Enoteca Italiane restaurant where Skye knows the owner and we grab a nice Italian lunch – a change from the Burgundian food of the last couple of days.

The rain and drizzle has let up but it is still overcast.  Jamie got some stamps for the post cards and we head back to Gevrey Chambertin to grab some photos of Skye’s ten rows of vines in the En Deree vineyard.  The vines are just north of the Gevrey Chambertin cemetery.  We get out and start walking the rows and tasting some of the grapes that have been left for the tax man (a story for another day).  Before long we realize that we’ve gained two pounds of muddy, clay soil on our shoes.  These vines and rocky soil are amazing.  Rodrigo Soto in an email message last evening had strongly suggested that I get to know the soil – the smell and taste of the terroir.  Well, today that soil has become a part of me.

I take lots of pictures, but want to take a picture of every vine.  Each vine is a 60 year old sculpture of the weather and growing seasons of Burgundy.  Some of the vines are straight, but many are twisted into these amazing S shapes.  Most of these vines are older than I am.

We then head up above the En Deree vineyard to find Les Goulots vineyard which has this amazing limestone wall over 20 feet high that breaks the vineyard into an upper and lower piece.  This whole area is unbelievably beautiful.  Then we turn around and look the other way down the slope and across the valley.  Lots more pictures to capture as we look over the Premier Cru and Grand Cru vineyards.  It’s clear that we are not going to get an afternoon nap.

Skye drops us off for a quick freshen up and a chance to catch up on email.  After ten minutes we then walk down the hill to the Heresztyn’s winery for our 4:30pm tasting.  Stani (Bernard’s brother) who is doing most of the cellar work is doing the tasting for us.  We start in the tasting room which Stani and Bernard rebuilt several years ago.  He shows us their tasting table made out of barrel wood which they used growing up to make bread.  He shows us how the table top lifts up to reveal a half of a barrel where they used to kneed the bread and then let it rise.  There is a nice fire in the fireplace which he points out is fueled by barrel staves from their old barrels.  It turns out they are no longer able to sell their old barrel staves so they burn them to heat the tasting room.

We enter the winery and see about nine very large old concrete fermenters along with several of the newer stainless steel fermenters.  We then head down to the caves where we are treated to the wonderful smell of aging red wine.  In the corner is some plastic surrounding a few of barrels and Stani tells us this is where they are aging their white wines and the whites need a little more heat and humidity.  So they have warm water flowing into that area from a hose.

We wind our way around to the oldest cave in the back through lots of metal cages holding those wines that have already been bottled.  We arrive at the tasting part of the show and encounter another 12 bottles of 2008 wines drawn from their barrels for us to taste along with six bottles of 2007 wine that is already in bottle and released.  What a day – over 40 different Cote d’Nuits wines to be tasted and savored.  Am I in heaven or what?

While we are tasting, Stani gives us a nice history of the Heresztyn family.  His father immigrated to the region in 1935 working for other wineries.  In the early 1950s he started buying his own land and started making wines.  The wines were mostly sold in barrels to other negotiants with 80% going to Switzerland and most of the rest going to England and France.  Early on they also grew onions and Stani can remember sorting onions at their kitchen table.

Stani is in the process of turning the winemaking over to his daughter Florence and her husband Simon.  Florence and Simon took charge of the 2009 vintage and made most of the decisions on winemaking with Stani providing gentle guidance.  It was interesting to see that both of the tastings today were done with wineries that were in transition between generations.

The wines we tasted with Stani were:

  • 2008 Bourgogne Red
  • 2008 Gevrey Chambertin Clos Village (the vineyard right behind the winery)
  • 2008 Gevrey Chambertin Vielle Vigne (from the En Deree vineyard) – this is Skye’s wine
  • 2008 Chambolle Musigny Village
  • 2008 Gevrey Chambertin La Perriere Premier Cru – this is the sunken vineyard that is just east of the Rue de Grand Cru
  • 2008 Gevrey Chambertin Les Goulots Premier Cru
  • 2008 Gevrey Chambertin Les Corbeaux Premier Cru – the blackbirds vineyard
  • 2008 Gevrey Chambertin Champeaux Premier Cru
  • 2008 Chambolle Musigny Les Borniques Premier Cru
  • 2008 Morey Saint Denis Les Milandes
  • 2008 Morey Saint Denis Grand Cru
  • 2007 Chambolle Musigny Village
  • 2007 Moray Saint Denis Les Millandes

By this time we’d spent three hours with Stani and we could hear his wife’s chair scraping the floor above our heads so Stani knew it was time to finish.  What an amazing couple of hours learning about the family and tasting this wonderful portrait of the Cote d’Nuits.  Clearly we will be paying lots of attention to Gevrey Chambertin wines in the future.  On our way out, Skye shared how exhausted she was from the combination of tasting wine and having to translate wine geek speak for me (terminal analytic that I am).

We walked out of the winery and across the street to the Heresztyn’s to have some of Skye’s wine before we went out to dinner.  We wandered down into Bernard and Chantal’s cave and Skye chose two wines for us to taste:

  • 1996 Gevrey Chambertin Village – Skye’s wine
  • 1993 Clos Morey Saint Denis Grand Cru

While we started tasting, Chantal made dinner reservations for us.  But then her brother called her from Paris on his way back from the Maldive Islands to let us know that the French train system had gone on strike and he couldn’t get to Dijon.  He wanted Bernard’s help to find him a hotel for the evening.  As a result Chantal asked us if we would rather stay for dinner at the house so they could continue to talk to her brother.  We replied we’d love to but only if it was something simple like cheese and bread.

Instead, Chantal quickly created another wonderful meal of an omelet and smoked jambon with French bread.  While we weren’t looking, Bernard went down to the cave and brought up three more wines.

So in addition to the wonderful wines we’d already tasted, we were treated to two more at dinner:

  • 2001 Gevrey Chambertin Les Corbeaux Premier Cru (right next to a Grand Cru if you look on the detailed map)
  • 1990 Gevrey Chambertin Les Champonnet Premier Cru

A great time was had by all and as the wine flowed Bernard loosened up.  Skye decided to finally harras me about my ugly glasses.  Bernard laughed and said they were Mickey Mouse Walt Disney glasses.  He then brought out his even larger version of my aviator glasses.  Skye shared several Burgundian songs for drinking wine and we had a great time sharing our silly French prhases we learned so long ago along with the silly English phrases that Bernard had learned.

What a great evening with new found friends.  Thank you Skye.

It was time to go and Bernard handed me the last bottle of the evening to take home – a 1988 Gevrey Chambertin Les Goulots Premier Cru.  I was speechless. Even better it had that wonderful layer of Burgundy mold on it.

How do you ever thank someone for such an unbelievable evening and the privilege of drinking great wines and sharing the table in the winemakers home.

It was with misty eyes that we walked back up the hill from the village to the Hotel Grands Crus in the late night.  The stars were out and tomorrow promised to be a beautiful day.

Day 4

This morning we awoke to an absolutely stunning blue sky and sunshine.  What a welcome relief from the cold and rain and drizzle of the last several days.  Today is a holiday in France, their equivalent of Veterans Day.  As a result, we couldn’t find any wineries open to do tastings, so we decided to play tourist.  We also decided since we had a late night yesterday that we would have a late start.

Skye picked us up at our hotel about 11am and we headed to Beaune.  However, it was getting on lunch time so we needed to eat before we could do the tourist thing.  The concierge at our hotel recommend a restaurant along the way – La Miotte in Ladoix Serrigny.  We found the restaurant off the beaten path and it was another traditional Burgundian restaurant.  Jamie and I had our “final” Burgundian meal of Coq au vin, chicken cooked in red wine sauce.  We’ve felt like guests of Julia Child all week with this wonderful traditional French cooking.

Since we were in a new town, Skye picked a local wine for us.  A 2005 Ladoix Clos Des Chagnots form Pierre Andre.  It was an acceptable Pinot Noir.  After our repast we headed to Beaune.

I really wanted to see the Hospice de Beaune and the wonderfully colored tiled roof.  The picture gives you some idea of the colors of the roof.  What I didn’t realize is what a wonderful medical museum it was.  Each room in the museum was primarily a display of what medical life was like in the 1600 -1800s.  Each room had an altar and a place to hold mass as the philosophy was – just because you are sick, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to go to mass and receive the sacraments.  We took lots of pictures for our MD nephew Drew to show him the old medical ways.

We then went back to our favorite wine book store and picked up a very detailed wine map and Atlas set of books which describe all of the vineyards and the different owners within each vineyard and how much each vineyard produces on average.  Quite fascinating and now all these maps mean something.

We also picked up a lunar calendar that Stani showed us from the previous evening that he has been using for the last 10 years.  It is our familiar biodynamic calendar.  He uses it to determine when to prune and when to rack and bottle the wines.

We tried to take in a tasting on our way back at a small village renowned for its whites but none of the winemakers that Skye was familiar with were open.  On our way back I really wanted to see the vineyards of Domaine Romani Conti (DRC) which is generally the most expensive wine in the world.  As I mentioned on Sunday, Skye has a 1972 DRC in her cellar which is estimated to be worth several thousand dollars.  Come on, It’s just grape juice.

So we found the vineyard as the light was fading and got a picture of the stone marker and then ventured into the vineyard to pick and taste some of the grapes that were left over from the harvest.  The picture above is of one of the world’s most famous and expensive vineyards.  It wasn’t until we were leaving that we saw the sign that asked visitors to please stay in their cars.

Our next stop was Clos Veugeot to take a look at the big hall where the Chevaliers meet and induct new members like Skye was many years ago. But we got there 20 minutes too late and the main hall was closed.

We came back to the hotel and tried the Pommard from the other day – 2007 Pommard Les Chanlins Premier Cru.  What a nice way to end the day sitting in front of a warm fire in a small hotel in Burgundy sipping a wonderfully soft and feminine Premier Cru.

After our brief respite we headed to the Herestzyns for our last meal together.  Chantal prepared a simple meal of raclettes – a traditional swiss dish of melted raclette cheese over new potatoes and garnished from some pearl onions and capers.

We started the meal with the 2007 Herestzyns white wine and then had two of Skye’s wines:

  • 1997 Gevrey Chambertin Vielle Ville Domaine Ciel
  • 1994 Gevrey Chambertin Vielle Ville Domaine Ciel

Both were a wonderful addition to the meal and went well with the dessert that we bought in Beaune – a layer cake with chocolate mousse on the bottom and creme brule on the top.  Ummmm.

After dinner, I started asking all kinds of questions about the history of the Heresztyns and about Bernard’s father, Jean who immigrated from Poland in the 1930s.  Bernard was kind enough to indulge my questions and we learned many wonderful stories about their past.

Pretty soon it became clear that Skye was exhausted from translating for us.  It is easy to see how hard it is for someone to keep their energy up and do not only the language translation but also the cultural translations.  What a gift.

It’s now bed time and we have to face having to pack everything up and head to Paris for 1.5 days of ABW – anything but wine.

Anything But Wine

Today was one of those days I dislike while travelling – the moving from here to there – the packing and the unpacking.  Or stated another way, I really just wanted to savor some more of these wonderful Burgundian wines.

The day dawned foggy and drizzly as we got up pretty early as we knew we had a bunch of packing to do.  We had tried to get some photos of the entering and leaving Gevrey Chambertin the night before but they didn’t turn out very well.

I then got the shot of the coming and going sign for Gevrey Chambertin.  It took me all week to figure out that a town name with a red line through it meant that you were leaving, not that the town ceased to exist.  It was also sad to think that we were leaving the land of the Grands Crus.

We did a lot of “la bise” (French air kisses) as we said good bye to Chantal, Bernard, Stanni and a whole host of Heresztyn relatives.  Fortunately, we’d found a taxi cab to take us to the Dijon TGV train station that could hold all of our luggage.  I felt like Jed Clampett from West Virginia loading up our taxi with all the wine and souvenirs we’d bought – god, what tourists we’d become.

We made it to the train station in Dijon a little the worse for wear.  Skye informed us midway on the trip that a “toothbrush was not a friend” of the taxi cab driver and every time he talked it was harder for her to breathe.  It was a good thing that Jamie and I were in the back.  We made the train on time and even had time for a last minute “half beer” to toast and celebrate missing Kate on this trip.  We had a minor moment of panic when they posted the track that the train was supposed to leave on after we’d hauled all our heavy bags up a long set of stairs only to find out that they’d delisted the train from our track.  We had an anxious 15 minutes while we obsessed about having to haul our bags back downstairs and up another long stairs to board the train.  But all was saved when they said that the train would arrive where we already were.

Jamie and I will be forever grateful to Skye Hallberg for inviting us to come on this “trip of a lifetime.”  The trip was a fantasy come true for me and a great way to get to know one of the finest wine growing regions in the world.  More importantly, I got to meet such wonderful people in what Skye kept calling – “profoundly France.”  This is the translation of a French term for the real France or the agricultural part of France.  This trip erased the incredibly negative experience I had 30+ years ago when my sister was in an auto accident in Auxerre, France, not far from Burgundy.

Jamie was just amazing as she started recalling so much of her high school French and with the clear encouragement from everyone including her “professor”, the manager of the Hotel Grands Crus, she was holding her own.

At every turn, the French citizens were very helpful and appreciative of every attempt on our part to speak French.  Jamie and I like to sample the local food and experiences and Skye was impressed with how much we ordered Burgundian food at every turn and enjoyed it.

I’m clearly going to have to change my negativity about the French which is the most amazing part of this trip and another of the many gifts that Skye gave us.

We learned an incredible amount about the Burgundy wine industry through the incredible graciousness of the Heresztyns and the many family members who work the vines and the wines.  I am reminded of a quote from Edward T. Hall that I first came across on a Japan Study Mission I was on back in the 1980s.

“Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own. I am also convinced that all that one ever gets from studying foreign culture is a token understanding.

“The ultimate reason for such study is to learn more about how one’s own system works. The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness – an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.”

– Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language

Over my lifetime, I experience the gift of travelling far and wide around the world.  However, it is always special to travel and be invited into the homes of people who are of the place.  Thank you Chantal and Bernard for opening up your life to us for a wonderful week in “profoundly” France.

Posted in Travel, Wine | Leave a comment

The Google 20% Time in Perspective

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Skip Walter

As an executive consultant, I am always looking for ways to crank up the innovation capability of an organization.  I admired Google for their approach of encouraging their engineering talent to take on innovation projects through their “20% time.”

As usual, the brilliant Scott Adams manages to find the dark side humor in every attempt to encourage innovation.

Dilbert.com

Posted in Dilbert, Humor, organizing, User Experience | Leave a comment

Finding My Sword

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Skip Walter

In the late 1980s I had the privilege of attending a three day seminar put on by the Catholic Church called Cursillo in the diocese of New Hampshire.  The course is also known as a short course in Christianity.  The original course was developed in Majorca, Spain, during World War II when it was not possible for youth to travel on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

I was so fascinated by the power of the course that I took several more courses on the history and structure of Cursillo.

A few years later I came across Paulo Coelho‘s book The Pilgrimmage.  The book was a story of Coelho’s journey to “find his sword” after he was denied that sword at the last minute in his spiritual mastery course.  I was delighted to have a first person account of the actual journey to Santiago.  However, I was not prepared for the ending of the book where the secret of the sword was revealed:

“I told myself, trying to convince myself that the Road to Santiago was what was important to me.  The sword was only an outcome.  I would like to find it, but I would like even more to know what to do with it.  Because I would have to use it in some practical way, just as I used the exercises Petrus had taught me.

“I stopped short.  The thought that up until then had been only nascent exploded into clarity.  Everything became clear, and a tide of agape washed over me.  I wished with all my heart that Petrus were there so that I could tell him what he had been waiting to hear from me.  It was the only thing that he had really wanted me to understand, the crowning accomplishment of all the hours he had devoted to teaching me as we walked the Strange Road to Santiago: it was the secret of my sword!

“And the secret of my sword, like the secret of any conquest we make in our lives, was the simplest thing in the world:  it was what I should do with this sword.

“I had never thought in these terms.  Throughout our time on the Strange Road to Santiago, the only thing I had wanted to know was where it was hidden.  I had never asked myself why I wanted to find it or what I needed it for.  All of my efforts had been bent on reward; I had not understood that when we want something, we have to have a clear purpose in mind for the thing that we want.  The only reason for seeking a reward is to know what to do with that reward.  And this was the secret of my sword.

“Petrus was right again:  by teaching myself, I had transformed myself into a master.

“There I stood, overcome by the scene of the lamb and the cross.  This was a cross that I need not set upright, for it was there before me, solitary and immense, resisting time and the elements.  It was a symbol of the  fate that people created, not for their God but for themselves.  The lessons of the Road to Santiago came back to me as I sobbed there, with a frightened lamb as my witness.

“My Lord,” I said, finally able to pray, “I am not nailed to this cross, nor do I see you there.  The cross is empty, and that is how it should stay forever; the time of death is already past, and a god is now reborn within me.  The cross is the symbol of the infinite power that each of us has.  Now this power is reborn, the world is saved, and I am able to perform your miracles, because I trod the Road of the common people and, in mingling with them, found your secret.  You came among us to teach us all that we were capable of becoming, and we did not want to accept this.  You showed us that the power and the glory were within every person’s reach, and this sudden vision of our capacity was too much for us.  We crucified you, not because we were ungrateful to the Son of God but because we were fearful of accepting our own capacity.  We crucified you fearing that we might be transformed into gods.  With time and tradition, you came to be just a distant divinity, and we returned to our destiny as human beings.

“It is not a sin to be happy.  Half a dozen exercises and an attentive ear are enough to allow us to realize our most impossible dreams.  Because of my pride in wisdom, you made me walk the Road that every person can walk, and discover what everyone else already knows if they have paid the slightest attention to life.  You made me see that the search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others.  Before finding my sword, I had to discover its secret – and the secret was so simple; it was to know what to do with it.  With it and with the happiness that it would represent to me.

“I have walked so many miles to discover things I already knew, things that all of us know but that are so hard to accept.  Is there anything harder for us, my Lord, than discovering that we can achieve the power?  This pain that I feel now in my breast, that makes me sob and that frightens that poor lamb, has been felt since human beings first existed.  Few can accept the burden of their own victory: most give up their dreams when they see that they can be realized.  They refuse to fight the good fight because they do not know what to do with their own happiness; they are imprisoned by the things of the world.  Just as I have been, who wanted to find my sword without knowing what to do with it.”

For many years, I worked diligently to figure out “what to do with my sword.”  Yet, I was never comfortable or fully committed to the paths forward that I came up with.  Every so often I would go back and re-read The Pilgrimage to see if I could figure out what Coelho had decided to do with his sword.  Try as I might, I couldn’t find anything in the text that let me know what Coelho decided.

Then I realized that I didn’t even know what my sword was.  There wasn’t one core question in the book, but rather two:

  • What is my sword?
  • What do I do with my sword?

I decided to use a different process from personal reflection to get at these two questions – I would seek wisdom and guidance from those colleagues, family and friends who knew me best.  I sent out the following email:

Dear treasured colleague,

I recently re-read Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage for the third time.  The book is about a journey that Paulo took in Spain to the shrine of San Tiago.

The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom by Paulo Coelho

From the first reading, I have endeavored to come to the insights of Coelho that life is not about acquiring a sword, but about figuring out what to do with the sword.  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to answer the same question – what am I going to do with my sword?

Yet on this re-reading I had to laugh at myself as I realized I had not ever asked the question, what is my sword?  No wonder I couldn’t answer the second question.

As someone who I trust and value and who has known me for a long time, I would appreciate some help in your point of view on “what is my metaphorical sword?”  What do you think is my best skill?  What is my special gift in this world?  What is it that I’m really good at?

Thanks ahead of time for your insights.

Peace,

Skip

I was stunned by the seriousness and depth that my treasured colleagues returned.

From my oldest daughter Elizabeth came this prized response:

“Ok, so I have been thinking about this for a few days and here is what I have come up with…

“(It is quite possible that my perspective has been shaped by your note about how “A vine is a machine for transforming terroir into stories” and by the “Digital wizard” story and I am a shameless copycat.  But perhaps there is something useful in what follows nonetheless.)

“You have many talents. From my perspective, the keystone in all of these is that you identify (and create) stories and communicate them to relevant individuals far earlier in the unfolding “tale” than anyone else is able to.  And this lets you shape the story more than most others. I would wager that what allows you to do this is your ability to be open + curious to new people and ideas (ie: true enjoyment of “networking” in the deeper sense), and your tendency to be humble + interested enough with the people who matter that they want to teach you about new fields (ie: you don’t seem to pigeon-hole yourself into one domain).  And you “get” how business works, so you are able to write some of these stories in the marketplace.  You also have passion — you care about the underlying story — which gets you very excited at times, but also very upset when someone else comes in and starts editing with a giant black marker.

“To be totally low-brow: What you do best can be likened to reading a Clive Cussler book.  You know how these books start off with 4 seemingly unrelated chapters occurring many years apart?  Some of us need the connections spelled out in the later chapters, while other readers can predict the connections right away.  It seems to me that you are in the latter category, in terms of reading real life events.  You are able to grasp unrelated interactions and see the story weaving through many disparate events about 10 years (+/- 5 years) earlier than anyone else in related fields is able to.  You see the arc of the storyline before most of us have even identified the main players.  And you appear to have a good memory for remembering key players in earlier chapters, to bring them back into the story when the time is right.

“You have said yourself a number of times that you have had to figure out how to “lead” people to see the story line in your head by “planting seeds” that will eventually sprout to get them to get themselves to a place that they can’t be dragged to.

“So, perhaps you are a farmer of ideas. (And after refraining from using a witty comment about “hammering swords into plowshares” I think my work here is done.  😉

However, the response that helped the most came from a longtime product marketing colleague, Mason White:

“Your sword? I have had most of a flight to pare this down to a bumper sticker.

Your sword is swordmaking.

How Skip makes swords:

Reading, listening, observing and discussing BROADLY and then reflecting to better frame the problems at hand, understand the relevant enviromment and synthesize a set of plausible potential solutions. Developing a set of definable concepts and vocabulary to improve communication about the problem, enviroment and solutions.

Wash, rinse, repeat to sort through the impacts of the candidate solutions. Present the choice space and a recommendation.

How many times do you suppose you have done this as a student, employee, teacher, consultant, executive, mentor and parent?”

In a matter of days, what I had spent several years of reflection and contemplation trying to articulate came flowing back in so easily from these wonderful treasured colleagues.

So off I go for yet another day to do my swordmaking.

Posted in Knowledge Management, Learning, Nature, Paulo Coelho, Spiritual, Teaching, WUKID | 1 Comment

Meyers Briggs and Project Team Formation

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Skip Walter

While I am not a professional teacher, I find that in business and consulting I am teaching all the time.  Several years ago thanks to the trusting invitation of Professor Jan Spyridakis, I found myself teaching graduate school at the University of Washington in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department.  I enjoy teaching a lot, but I was not pleased with the student evaluations after the first couple of courses.  I bought lots of books and several DVDs on how to teach graduate students and learner centered design, but I never found the time to absorb them.

In a conversation with Dan Turner, Associate Dean of the UW Foster Business School, I brightman copyasked how he had improved his graduate school teaching.  He suggested that I should look up Professor Emeritus Harvey Brightman of Georgia State University.  He described how much he got out of Harvey’s Master Teacher program.  So I gave Harvey a call and arranged to attend his course at Emory University in early September 2011.

At the start of the class, Harvey made the provocative statement “your students are not like you.”  I muttered to myself “thanks for the blindingly obvious.  Today’s students only want edutainment in the class room.  I know they are not like me.”

Harvey continued “Your students are not like you.”

I looked up from my notes to see if he was senile and liked repeating himself.

Once more Havey said “Your students are not like you.”

OK, now you’ve got my attention Harvey.  Where are you going with this?

Harvey smiled and brought up a slide that rocked my world.  Harvey stated “In study after study, research has shown that 70% of business students are ES on the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  However, 70% of business school faculty are IN on the MBTI.”  (For an overview of the different type talk see the discussion of extrovert versus introvert and sensing versus intuition.)

In that short moment, twenty years of teaching communication problems with my students flashed in front of my eyes.  Our differences weren’t about age, experience, or attitude, it was mostly related to MBTI Type.  I now had what I’d been missing – a framework for how to improve my in class teaching skills.

For the next two days, Harvey offered tip after tip about how INs can communicate better with ESs.  As an example, he mentioned that ESs really hate complex diagrams.  They want to see things in diagrams that are small chunks.  Over the course of a semester, they want to see the diagram filled in a chunk at a time.  INs love complexity.  The more a diagram is rich and complex, the more the INs love them.  The key insight is that if I taught in my own style (IN), I would be losing 70% of the audience.  The following two images show the before and after of part of my course outlines for an introductory graduate course in human centered design.

BEFORE

AFTER

The advice that pushed me over the edge to acceptance was Harvey sharing that INs will actually love the new style, as they will build the complex diagram for themselves during the course of the quarter.  By building it themselves, they will learn more and be excited to share their complex creation.

Could it really be that easy?

After the seminar, I had to scramble to put as many of Harvey’s insights into my syllabus and lectures for the fall class.  During this process it occurred to me that I might be able to take this a step farther and form the class project teams based on the MBTI type. Because a quarter is so short (only ten class sessions) and because there is so much material to cover, in past classes I did not want to deal with team collaboration problems.  So I tried to get around the problem by having the students form teams by themselves, hopefully with students they’ve worked with in the past.  Now I wondered if I would be better off by assigning the teams myself based on several pieces of demographic data starting with the MBTI.

At our first class meeting, I found that for 28 of the 29 students, this was their first class in the HCDE Professional Masters Program.  So none of the students knew each other. Further, for seven of the students they had just arrived in Seattle the week before and were new to the United States with English as a second language.  Now I knew that I had to be proactive in forming the teams.

I asked each student to give me the following demographic information:

  • MBTI Type (ES or IN)
  • Social Style Model (Driver, Analytic, Amiable or Expressive)
  • Undergraduate Degree discipline
  • Number of years working after undergraduate degree
  • Role they worked in professionally

Armed with the above information, I then formed teams of four making sure that each team had at least one person with the following characteristics:

  • Driver Social Style
  • Analytic Social Style
  • IN MBTI Type
  • ES MBTI Type
  • Experience in a design related discipline (architect, interior design, art director …)
  • Experience in technology (software engineer, IT specialist)
  • Greater than 5 years of work experience
  • New to the U.S. student (incorporate cultural differences into the designs)

The results of team formation were almost immediately obvious – both in terms of team energy and in terms of team performance.  Over the course of the quarter I received several positive comments about how well the assigned teams worked out:

“I have to say, this is a fantastic team – we are working together like we’ve known each other for years! I wish you could come to my work and pick a team for me there too!”

“You did a good job with putting the groups together. I was somewhat skeptical initially about the Myers-Briggs pairings but the results speak volumes. I’d say keep on that track.”

One of the sayings I live by is “communication is the results that you get, not the words that you speak.”  Based on the quality of the deliverables from the teams throughout the quarter this method of team formation works.  Since finishing the course, I’ve talked to several experienced organizational development consultants who confirmed that they use MBTI typing to form the working teams when they engage with a client.

Another variant of a personality indicator is the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.  In his book Please Understand Me, David Keirsey provides a wonderful ode to paying attention to the different ways we communicate and behave:

Keirsey Preamble to Personality Typing 

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. 

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view. 

 Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly. 

 Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be. 

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you. 

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right—for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeing waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

Posted in Quotes, Teaching, University, User Experience, Working in teams, WUKID | 4 Comments

Enemies of a Man of Knowledge

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Skip Walter

Often when I start a seminar or class, I start with Carlos Casteneda’s description of the four enemies for those of us who are life long learners.  This quote is a nice companion piece to the discussion of WUKID (wisdom, understanding, knowledge, information, data).

“When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives.  His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague.  He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning.

“He slowly begins to learn – bit by bit at first, then in big chunks.  And his thoughts soon clash.  What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid.  Learning is never what one expects.  Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly.  His purpose becomes a battlefield.

“And thus he has stumbled upon the first of his natural enemies:  Fear!

“And thus he has encountered his second enemy:  Clarity!  That clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain dispels fear, but also blinds.

“But he has also come across his third enemy: Power!  Power is the strongest of all enemies.  And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible.  He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks, and ends in making rules, because he is a master.

“The man will be, by then, at the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: Old Age!  This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he won’t be able to defeat completely, but only fight away.”

– Carlos Casteneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, p. 83-87.

So much of the role of a mentor, teacher or coach, is helping the student get past at least the first of the natural enemies – fear.  Creating a safe place to both experiment and challenge the student is critical to place them on the road to clarity.

Posted in Quotes, University, WUKID | 1 Comment

Where the Rubber Meets the Sky

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Skip Walter
“Experience is not what happens to you,
it is what you do with what happens to you.”
– Aldous Huxley

As Aldus merged into Adobe in the early 1993, I put together a “gift” collection for those colleagues I’d grown close to over the three years I had the privilege of being an Aldus Executive.  The collection was a set of visions, poems and stories that I had collected over the years.

So much of the business environment is filled with people who are operationally focused.  These folks are cut out of the mode of “where the rubber meets the road.”  I always seem to take the other fork in the road, the one “where the rubber meets the sky.”  My most valued moments are those when I envision a possible future and then go out and create it with a set of folks who love to make dreams come to life.

I’ve been fortunate to take those dreams and turn them into successful ventures for the companies I’ve worked for.  Aldus was a set of people who attracted me from the start.  Aldus was a company in which I hoped I could see my life goals come to fruition; where I could combine my mind, body, and spirit to create the next desktop revolution – interactive.  There was a heart in this company that continues to attract people with the spirit and zeal to help change the world for the better.  Doug Stuart, Aldus Engineering Director, first provided a glimpse of the Aldus heart when he pointed to the Yeltsin Poster that was used for advertising during my early interviews (I managed to keep the framed copy when I left Aldus and it hangs in my office).

Peter Gelpi, Sales Manager for Asia Pacific, described how he knows the Aldus vision and heart has had an effect on the world.  Peter relates, “I’m not really into the technology and design of desktop publishing software.  Where I get my real highs is traveling throughout the third world, and coming across PageMaker being used by ordinary people to communicate.  I’ve been in the wilds of China, India and Africa, and seen people using a bare bones PC when maybe they only have electric power a couple of hours a day.  Often they are the only alternative source of news to the controlled communications of repressive governments.”  Once Peter stated this I immediately envisioned a commercial like the Coca-Cola “I’d like to teach the world to sing..” advertisement with a nice catchy jingle and a montage of people all around the world using Aldus PageMaker in their native language to get their words out.

As I reflect on my time at Aldus, I often hear in my head a refrain of Harry Chapin’s, but with a slight paraphrasing from music to creating:

“Music was his life;
It was not his livelihood.
And it made him feel so happy.
And it made him feel so good.
He sang from his heart.
He sang from his soul.
He did not know how well he sang;
It just made him whole.”
 
Harry Chapin, “Mr. Tanner”
Posted in Learning, organizing, User Experience, Working in teams | 2 Comments

Sunrise to Sunset on a Northwest Island Day

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Skip Walter

We have the gift of living on an island in the Pacific Northwest.  It is a day like today that showcases all that is the best of Seattle.

I awoke this morning to the ferry sounding its foghorn waking me from a deep sleep.  As I straggled out of bed and looked out the window there was this layer of sunshine between the horizon and the slowly lifting fog bank.  As I grabbed a cup of coffee to come to the consciousness of a new day, I heard the low drone of the ferry coming out of the harbor.  It was time to grab the iPhone and capture several images.

Later in the day I remembered to look out the window (instead of at my computer screen) and realized it was sunset already.  Our favorite time of day is what we call “fire time.”  On a clear winter day, the sun sets at such an angle that the light reflects off the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle.  If you are paying attention and catch it early enough, you will see the reflections on the houses on Magnolia, then the orange light will move south to the tall buildings in Seattle and then finally migrate to the houses in West Seattle.

The added advantage of a clear winter night like this is that Mount Rainer will be out and we get to see the top of the glacier covered mountain go from orange to 100s of shades of white and gray until the sun finally sets.  And if we are lucky, we will catch a moon rise low over the city of Seattle and watch the moon glow on the Puget Sound.

Posted in Nature | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Human Centered Design – Moving from Research to Recommendations

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Skip Walter

I just finished teaching a User Centered Design Course in the University of Washington Human Centered Design and Engineering Evening Masters program.

This course is project based and this year’s project was to create a mobile application for a smart phone device (iPhone, Android Phone, or iPad) using the user centered design process.  Seven project teams worked for the quarter to produce designs that were desirable, viable and feasible.  Each of the seven teams did a great job and one of the teams even produced a functioning app that had both a smart phone component and a cloud based component.

However, the next to last class before the final presentations was frustrating for the students and very frustrating for me.  The questions that I was getting asked seemed to indicate that the students had not learned the core topics that are important to the HCD process.  While I deeply wanted to lash out, I restrained myself and slept on my frustration.

During this particular quarter, in parallel to the class I performed an exciting HCD user research project for a client to develop a next generation visual analytics software application.  I suddenly realized that a large part of my frustration was not with the students, but was with where I was in the project.  I was shifting from the research and analysis phase to the synthesis and recommendation phase.  I always get frustrated and hard to live with for the couple of days that it takes me to fully go through this shift to a different way of thinking.  Then I laughed when I realized that the students were going through that same phase shift – from the three different research activities with hundreds of insights to having to make a few specific recommendations for a mobile application that fits in a very constrained environment.

I sent the following email to the class:

As we switch from the analysis portion of the class project, we move into the sense making phase or synthesis phase.  This phase requires a switch in focus and thinking.

    • We need to remember why we wandered into this “swamp” in the first place.  What was your overall goal?
    • We need to look for the whole that is our project, rather than all the different insights and evidence and prototypes that we created.
    • We need to make some focusing decisions for our SPECIFIC recommendation.
    • We need to be able to communicate our recommendation in a way that leads to action.  This is the role of engaging stories.

There is a tendency in doing a final report to become a news journalist and present the sequence of work and the steps that you took, rather than switch gears into developing a compelling story for your recommendations.

In the book Minding the Law, the authors summarize the litigation process in three phases.

“So we take as the agenda of this book to make some very familiar routines in law-thinking strange again. We want to concentrate especially on three commonplace processes of legal thought and practice, to target them for consciousness retrieval. They are processes without which lawyers, judges, and students of the law could not possibly make do for as much as one hour: categorizing, storytelling, and persuasion. What distinguishes a contract from something “not worth the paper it’s printed on”? That’s legal categorizing. How do you describe to a court the circumstances surrounding the contract’s alleged breach? That’s legal storytelling. You tell the story differently-in a quite different tongue-depending upon whether you represent the plaintiff or the defendant in a breach-of-contract case. That’s legal rhetorics. Categorization, narrative, and rhetorics-the stuff of everyday life in the law. But life in the law is not lived in a vacuum. It is part of a pervasive world of culture. If law is to work for the people in a society, it must be (and must be seen to be) an extension or reflection of their culture. Therefore we shall have to explore as well what culture is, how it operates and through what instrumentalities. Obviously, lawyers are not the only ones steeped in these processes: nobody could live without them. Yet the ways of lawyers and judges and students of the law are specialized ways, often so ostentatious in their specialization as to suggest the esoteric flimflam of a jealous guild. We will want to examine these specializations with particularity, but without assuming that they are as unique as they often appear and profess to be. So, we need to ask, how do legal categorizing, legal narrative, legal rhetorics, and legal culture differ from-and how do they resemble-similar doings outside the realm of law?

“But our efforts to explore the processes of categorization, narrative, rhetorics, and culture will also lead us to use other techniques of estrangement. Perhaps the most powerful trick of the human sciences is to decontextualize the obvious and then recontextualize it in a new way. We will be about this constantly; and if some of the new vantage points from which we examine the familiar rituals of the law seem remote-as when we view the United States Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion terminating the era of school-desegregation efforts in Freeman v. Pitts through the lenses of the dramaturgic structure classically used to write the quietus of Agamemnon and Julius Caesar-that Caesar-that will only be with the aim of getting far enough outside law’s enclave to see afresh what appears to be going on unseen inside.”

Over the years I’ve found this three step process to be a good way to summarize my research and persuade a client or investor to invest in the project to take it to the next phase.

One way to think about the journey that we’ve been on these 10 weeks is each team is part of a scouting mission.  We started with each team having an idea for a mobile application they wanted to build.    If we think of each team as a small company doing a startup or a research team within a larger company, the goal is to go out and explore your selected area and come back with a recommendation as to how to proceed.  You can think of your team as being on a scouting mission in exploring the territory.  A good scout tries to get a “map” of the unexplored territory.  They then bring that map back to the decision maker with a recommendation for which path to follow through the territory.  A scout has to think through how to present the evidence (the facts, the categorizations) of their search in a story that makes sense of the facts.  Then this story must evolve into a story of persuasion.  Not just make a recommendation, but persuade the decision maker that your recommendation should be pursued.

So the final presentation and briefing book are first and foremost about making a recommendation for why it makes economic sense (Value) to pursue building a desirable mobile application (Prototypes) for a particular category of consumers (User Research, User Experience).

Many of you have expressed frustration at how much more work there is just to make sense of what features to recommend, let alone create the viability and value components of the recommendation.  Welcome to the wonderful world of a human centered design consulting project.  There is never enough time.  On my current client project, I am swimming in the middle of a 150 pages of my observation notes, 100s of photos and 100s of sketches I’ve created over the three months along with over 500 pages in client artifacts.  This week I have to boil that into a 10 slide, 2 page document for a one hour meeting with the exec team to persuade them to hire an engineering team with a budget of ~$1M which could generate $25M the first year in incremental revenues.  The analytical part of me would dearly love to have 16 hours of time to do a workshop to teach them all the things I’ve learned about their business over these three months.  Yet, my research project is just one of 30 projects vying for scarce R&D dollars and more importantly scarce executive attention time.

Similarly at the recent ZINO Society Marketplace Forum, 12  companies gave a five minute pitch.  For an entrepreneur this is a form of cruel and unusual punishment.  How do they present their life’s work in five minutes?  They were vying for one of the four finalists for the $50,000 investment award.  In those five minutes they had to give us an idea of their product, their target segment, compelling user stories, the market opportunity, their competition, their financial projections, and the terms of the deal.  Facts, Stories, Persuasion.   Desirability, Feasibility, Viability.  Most of the presenters did a reasonably good job of it.

So at this point in the project you have to do two things.  You have to use your judgments as a design team based on the information that you have to make an evidence based (user research, prototyping) recommendation.  You then need a compelling story that is internally consistent and logical – for the user and for the entity that would be providing funding for the next phase of your project.  To do both of these you need to be as specific as possible – in terms of the features, the target customer, the benefits, and the value (for the consumer and for your hypothetical company or business unit).

Now comes the switch to communicating your research and recommendations in a compelling story.  Based on the “story presentations” you did in Class 8, each team has demonstrated the capability to come up with a compelling story.  In class 9 with the Marketing 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) exercise, we illustrated the importance of being specific on the value side.  All of the pieces are there.  I look forward to your presentations.

As I reflected some more on this shift, I decided to sit down with a wise mentor, Professor Jan Spyridakis, Department Chair for the HCDE Department.  As I described the phenomenon the class experienced, she related it to how her students struggle with good technical writing.  Her framework is that you have to think inductively in order to understand what you are writing about, but then you need to write so that the consumer can read deductively.  This framework is for the article as a whole and for each paragraph.  Her mantra is to “put the interpretation of the results at the beginning of the paragraph.”  She shared that for students this is always annoying and the hardest work.

So the next time you are on a research project and find yourself frustrated, check and see if  you are in the middle of having to switch from analysis to synthesis or from researching to making recommendations.  Take a moment to laugh and then step back from the work and do some exercises to help you shift from the left brain thinking to right brain thinking.  If you haven’t found your own ways to make this shift, Paul and Gail Dennison devised several exercises to help this shift.

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