Book Review-“G” is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street

Robert Bogue August 10, 2015 No Comments

I mentioned in my review of Presentation Zen that I got conflicting input on how to design my slides for my recorded training and that I started doing some research. It makes sense that I’d look at a book like Presentation Zen but in truth it’s this same quest that caused me to read “G” is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street. To understand why I’d read about Sesame Street you have to understand that they’re the first television program that used formative research to inform how they would develop the program. Of particular interest to me was a vague memory I had about how Sesame Street measured how children’s eyes were – or were not on the screen watching the program. This data was used to demonstrate which segments were engaging and which were not.

Eye Tracking

If you want to know what users look at first, for how long, and what they look at next, you need to do eye tracking. The discussion I had with one of the respected designers I consulted with proposed a pattern for scanning the design of the slide which didn’t match my understanding. The concern expressed was that my appearance as a “floating head” on the slide would be too distracting. I maintained – and still maintain – that folks will process the “floating head” last after they’ve processed the static elements on the slide. I had hoped that I’d find research on the topic but alas there doesn’t seem to have been any good research on the topic. I presume this is due to the fact that video presentations are just too new a technology for folks to be able to have tested scenarios like this.

I had hoped that by reading about Sesame Street I could glean come awareness of their techniques that I could apply to my presentation design. Unfortunately, the measurement they were doing was much cruder. They only cared whether the child was watching the screen or not – not necessarily where they were on the screen so this book was of relatively little value in my quest for eye tracking. However, it turns out that there are many other interesting items that came from the book that are useful.

To close the eye tracking discussion, there are now hardware trackers that leverage infrared light to measure where eyes are looking. I’ve ordered a device that is reported to do eye tracking and will report on my results if I get it to work. It turns out that much like micro expressions (See The Titleless Leader, Social Engineering, Trust Me, and Emotional Awareness for more) that eye tracking requires a much higher sampling than the typical 30 times per second that a standard web camera can do. As a result custom hardware is required. It will be very interesting to see how to combine pupil dilation (which was discussed in Trust Me but not in my review.) and eye tracking to provide a picture of how people are looking at material – and how hard they’re thinking when they’re looking at it.

Sesame Street Background

Sesame Street was designed to combat the war on poverty. It is well known that education can account for a large degree of the potential earning of people. It was also known in the 60s that children from lower income families were arriving at school at a disadvantage. Their more wealthy classmates were entering with better basic skills and as a result even walking into kindergarten low income children were already behind. The urgency for Sesame Street was driven by research by Benjamin Bloom that one half of a child’s lifetime intellectual capacity is formed by 5 years of age. The proposal was for the production of a program designed to educate children – particularly those living in poverty. The Children’s Television Workshop – the company that owned the Sesame Street program and brand – was designed to test what worked with children and teach them in the way that worked best.

The program was timed with the formation of the first public television network – which was completed in 1969 — just in time for the premiere broadcast. With the bringing together of funding for an educationally rigorous program and a network to distribute it Sesame Street rose to popularity relatively quickly. (There are some notes about the need to educate parents how Sesame Street was a different kind of educational program but the growth was still meteoric.) The key to the effectiveness was the concept of formative research – which was a term only coined in 1967.

Formative Research

Most research is done in laboratory conditions to solve an academic problem or are conducted after the conclusion of a program to determine its effectiveness. Formative research is different because it’s done during the development process and is designed to help you learn more about how to accomplish the outcome – rather than measuring what you’ve already done. This concept was radically new in 1967 and no one really knew how to apply it to the production of a television program. Ultimately it worked well particularly to test the assumptions that the experts in the industry were saying in the late 60s and early 70s. For instance, originally Muppets were never seen on “the street” with live human actors for fear that the children wouldn’t be able to distinguish fiction from reality but formative research showed that children were much more engaged with the Muppet segments than the “street” segments – until Muppets were added to the “street” segments with the live actors.

Formative research has to be quick so that it can be applied to the problem being researched – but it can’t be sloppy. Formative research doesn’t necessarily have the publications attached to the research that a traditional, evaluative research program may have – but it can certainly have more impact. It’s like the concept in agile of maintaining documentation without ceremony. You still have to do the same things but you do them in the most expedient way possible.

Agile methodologies owe another debt to the concept of formative research as well. That is the concept of a spike. A small simple test that demonstrates whether something works or not. This is effectively formative research taken to the development world. It seems like we can still learn from Sesame Street – and more than our numbers and letters.

Family is Love

One of the findings of Sesame Street that the key distinguishing factor was love. Though they developed many key phrases – such as “down on the floor moms and dads” – the profound statement about families was that they loved. If there was no love then there was no family. For Children’s Television Workshop their other activities including books and magazines were an extension of their desire to improve education for lower income parents and part of that was supporting these parents in their ability to demonstrate their love for their children and to teach them. As a result CTW created a parent companion magazine which was bound with the child magazine which helped parents connect to the same content that their children were reading in the child magazine.

As How Children Succeed noted, the more safe children feel the more comfortable they are exploring their environments and the more they explore the better off they are. Helping children feel safe is one of the functions of love as was discussed in Spiritual Evolution – we learned moral concepts like love because they were – and are – necessary for human survival.

Bringing Sesame Street to Work

While my original mission of finding some tips for eye tracking and formative research of my own were thwarted, it was great for me to see how the cultural icon that I grew up with – literally as I was child of the 70s – came to be, what its intent was, and what was learned along the way. Perhaps we’re not done growing as adults of the Sesame Street generation. Check out “G” is for Growing and see if you agree.

Book Review-Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Robert Bogue August 3, 2015 1 Comment

I’m no stranger to presentations. I’ve averaged over 50 presentations a year for several years now. So on average every week I’m getting in front of a crowd with the privilege of sharing my experience. As a natural consequence of so much presenting you’ll learn a thing or two about the art of connecting with your audience. However, I’m always looking to improve my craft. Years ago I was getting trained for standup comedy and improvisation. (See I am a comedian.) With the recent changes to the video studio, I wanted to find a new look for my branded presentations. I needed something that would accommodate me being overlaid on the slides and something that looked good on the TV on the set. That led me to a set of conversations with experienced presenters and designers – with a lot of conflicting advice. Anytime that I get conflicting advice, I realize it’s time to do research. I started with Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. Along the way I didn’t find the answer to what to do about design of my slides – but I did find that there some answers that I already knew.

Following, Detaching, and Fluent

There were time honored ways of teaching before Gutenberg created the movable type printing press and suddenly made explicit knowledge much easier to transfer. There was a time when the best way to learn something was to work with a master in a craft until you mastered the craft and could lead your own shop. For centuries we studied in the familiar apprentice, journeyman, and master model. We’ve largely abandoned this model of teaching and learning. Instead we focused on “book learning” where we value the ability to recall what was covered in a written form. Despite Bloom et al.’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, little of the way that we teach today is focused on doing. There are the occasional pockets of educators trying experiential learning, however, the staple of the educational system today is lecture and reading.

However, we’ve lost the simplicity of apprentice, journeyman, and master. From the perspective of the action, this is following, detaching, and fluent. The apprentice is following the instructions of a master or a journeyman. They do only what they’re told and only when they’re told. They’re learning the mechanics of the craft. Journeymen have the basic skills mastered and know what the rules are they need to follow. They’re being directed by a master but are competent enough to work autonomously most of the time. Obviously the masters are folks who can direct the work of others but more than this masters understand the principles on which the rules are formed. They’re not focused on the mechanics of their craft. They’re focused on the art of the craft.

Presentation Zen quotes Zen scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki saying “The first principle of art is not to rely on tricks of technique.” To me this passage was a clear focus on how you have to learn more than just masterful practice of a single skill. I recently was invited to a Toastmaster’s meeting and I was impressed at the precision with which the group was run. The structure and the guides clearly worked for providing the basic scaffolding that is necessary. More than that the scaffolding reinforced practice – which is necessary. At the same time I saw a reliance on the rules that made me wonder if techniques were the key to good presentations. I can tell you that in my experience that isn’t the case.

Making a Connection

One of the things that is too often overlooked in presentations is the connection between the audience and the presenter. Too often the relationship that exists between the presenter and the audience – no matter how brief – is ignored. I know from my experience that folks who have been in my audiences have approached me years later to tell me how they enjoyed my sessions. Most of the feedback that I get now is that my sessions are the most interactive experiences that listeners are in – that’s no accident. I make a point to make my sessions interactive.

In presentations it’s the slides that get the best supporting actor role. They’re there to make it easier for the listener to connect with the presenter and the content. Good slides help to build the connection to the presenter – they don’t usurp the presenter. We’ve all seen presentations where the presenter could literally disappear off stage. We could read the slides and get just as much meaning as with the presenter there. This is a very sad state of affairs.

Good presentation cannot replace the presenter. They shouldn’t be delivered to attendees to review while the presenter is on the stage (See Efficiency in Learning for split attention.) Slides shouldn’t be able to carry the entire message after the event. If learning is the goal – rather than inspiring – then a separate set of educational materials should be produced and delivered.

Signal to Noise Ratio

Michelangelo was to say that to form his classic David sculpture that all he had to do was remove what was covering it. He said that the beauty was there all along. He didn’t create it, he uncovered it. Such is true in the development of our presentation materials. We must remove all of the distractions and coverings which prevent our listeners from hearing our central message.

In communications this is called a signal-to-noise ratio. The greater this ratio the better the reception. Our goal is to get as much signal-to-noise ratio as possible and that means ruthlessly removing anything that doesn’t contribute to the message. It’s an exercise in “less is more.” We can amplify the signal by reinforcing it with visuals – but we run the risk of creating distraction and noise. Many authors have been quoted with variations on the theme that “I would have written a shorter letter if I only had more time.” That is that refining to the core central message is harder than simply writing whatever comes to mind. It takes effort to decide which topics that have been painstakingly researched and considered just can’t be a part of the final presentation.

The Silence of the Mind – Solitude

When I’m speaking to audiences about knowledge management I frequently show a progression from data through information to knowledge and ultimately to wisdom. I move from symbols to insight. This progression represents the comfort and peace that someone has developed with the external stimulus in their worlds. That peace doesn’t come from constantly running and striving to get to the next thing. The peace is a side effect of time to reflect and consider. Presentation Zen shared the Taoist proverb “We cannot see our reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.” In order to raise our presentations from the mere regurgitation of data to a way to help others make sense of that data we have to have the time necessary to pause and reflect.

While the silence can be literal silence in the place that we’re in, more often it’s quieting our mind so that we can focus on one thing or set of things. I’ve been able to find a silence in my mind to ponder things in the middle of extremely noisy environments. Some of that I accomplished by putting earbuds in and listening to music that could drown out the external noises but more than that, I could make a decision to focus on one thing for a while.

Presentation Jazz

One of the things that I know about presentations is that my best presentations are like good Jazz. That’s where the audience and I are in sync and we’re producing an experience together that we all were a part of. I’ve often ended completely off my presentation “script” (which is really just a rough plan). We’ve talked about topics that I had no intention of discussing but it worked well. Jazz musicians in addition to knowing when to not play are good at developing that connection with the other musicians and “getting into a groove.”

Once I was running audio for a church performance with a rock band. I distinctly remember the moment that the band really locked on to one another and started playing together. It was an amazing difference that from a technical perspective was probably imperceptible. Everything just started to line up. That’s what a good presentation is. All of the elements – the delivery, the supporting materials, and the audience – being in perfect harmony for just a moment.

I may not have the answer to how to create the best presentation materials – but I did rediscover my own Presentation Zen.

Book Review-Chasing the Scream: The First and the Last Days of the War on Drugs

Robert Bogue July 27, 2015 No Comments

I was drawn to Chasing the Scream: The First and the Last Days of the War on Drugs through an article that I was forwarded. The article spoke about alcoholism and criticized the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous which I had seen be very successful for various dear friends of mine. I didn’t agree with the conclusions the articles made but I was also intrigued because it seemed like the stories that the article used were real and true. It seemed like there were some darker sides to recovery ministries and 12 step programs. I wanted to know more. I got a little more than I bargained for.

Curious Questions

When you’re struggling with someone that you care about who has become addicted to some substance there are hundreds of questions that rattle through your brain. Why them? What about them makes it so they are addicted to the substance or behavior when so many other people get along just fine? After all, we’re a nation of alcohol. We’ve got beer commercials. Sonoma and Napa counties in California are bursting with wineries. Even in the Midwest wineries aren’t far away from me. It seems like nearly everyone drinks alcohol so what makes it so that some people have to have it?

I remember a friend’s mom always with a tumbler in hand when I’d visit. They had hard liquor sitting out on the buffet and she’d take a drink casually as I was there. Growing up I didn’t think anything of it. Through conversations with my friend and later reflection, I realized that she was a functioning alcoholic and had been for some time. A functioning alcoholic is addicted to alcohol but they manage their addiction such that they don’t lose their job. They don’t crash their car. They don’t do anything that you expect from a typical alcoholic.

This just raises new questions. So even of those who are addicted to alcohol there are some who manage to keep the threads of their life together and there are some who are unable to keep things from unraveling, how is that? What could be done to help more people not get addicted – and for those that can’t avoid addiction how can they be helped to maintain some semblance of a life?

Bubbling Pains

I had learned through some recovery programs and research that addictions are really the bubbling up of pains that we had developed through our experiences. I learned that if you could find a way to heal the pains that the addictions would go away – perhaps not completely but certainly substantially. What I didn’t know, however, was that the nature of addiction as I knew it was a lie. It was a convincing lie but a lie none the less.

While I was growing up my mother smoked. I always wanted her to quit. However, it wasn’t until after I left the house that she was able to kick the habit with the help of nicotine gum. What I learned from Chasing the Scream was that my mom was one of the roughly 17% of people who are able to quit smoking based on nicotine gum. I had to let that sink in a bit. Only 17% of the folks that were addicted to smoking – reportedly addicted to the nicotine in cigarettes – could stop when given a much safer way to get the nicotine they were reportedly addicted to.

So the chemical dependency theory – the theory that people are literally chemically addicted to the substance could only account for 17% of the cases. This was confusing to me because I had been told that it was the chemical addiction that drove addiction – nearly exclusively. Having statistics in hand – what I had already learned about addiction not being about the substance but rather about the person started to make more sense.

More pieces fit into place. Why do people who quit smoking gain weight? It was an excuse used by some folks to not stop smoking for fear they’d gain weight and not gain ground on being healthier. If you understand that the addiction causes – the pain of childhood – are still present even if you remove the chemical, it makes sense that addictions are just traded for more socially acceptable ones when pressure is applied. We can stop smoking or drinking if we receive enough pressure – but we do so by indulging another more socially acceptable addiction like eating.

It’s no secret that America is overweight. We’ve got a love affair with food that we just can’t get away from. Perhaps this is because our parents rewarded and soothed us with foods like ice cream but perhaps it’s something more. Perhaps it’s because we use food to feel better about ourselves.

Escaping Reality

For most addicts the addiction serves to create an escape mechanism. Outside of the addiction they feel the pain – or pains – in their world. Inside the addiction the pain is hidden – at least for a little while. It’s possible to feel OK or even good about oneself in the altered state of reality in the addiction. Whether it’s the mind altering effects of alcohol and drugs or the mild euphoria of a good meal or a sexual encounter, the addiction creates an opportunity to escape the pain. The only real problem is that most addictions cause further pain in one’s life.

Alcoholics have hangovers. Drug addicts have withdraw symptoms. Overeaters have to face the scale. Shopaholics have to tackle their credit card bills and mounting debts. Sexual addicts have to face the risk of disease. So the deeper and more pronounced the pain the greater the need for the escape – and the greater the negative impacts are felt. Escaping reality only works for short periods of time.

Did Prohibition Work?

While neither advocating nor resisting the idea of legalizing drugs – having myself never partaken of illegal drugs – I became curious about how effective it was to tell a society that their escapes would no longer be legal. In the United States we have a perfect experiment on what happens when you take something that was legal – alcohol – and make it illegal. Our attempts to restrict alcohol is perhaps one of the most dismal failures in our nation’s history. Never before had we created a constitutional amendment to do something and then just years later completely reverse and repeal what we had worked so hard to get amended. We learned so painfully that the experiment didn’t work – and yet we were doomed to repeat it.

It turned out that during prohibition alcohol didn’t really stop flowing – it just moved underground into speakeasies. It became relatively well known that it was happening and relatively out of the hands of the police. It built the empires of gangsters like Al Capone who were able to make large sums of money on alcohol as they could charge a premium for it because it was so risky. Capone and his contemporaries increased the violence in the streets of Chicago and elsewhere as they competed for the lucrative and hidden business of alcohol distribution. So the prohibition of alcohol quite directly created the violence and gangs and power in the underworld because people wanted their escape – whether it was legal or not.

An unintended side effect of prohibition was that alcohol got harder. Instead of wine and beer patrons switched over to harder stuff. They switched because if you’re doing something illegal you want to get the most bang for your buck. To do that you needed to sell harder stuff. When all you had was hard liquor then people would buy it. As a result many of the folks who were consuming drinks that were 3-6% alcohol by volume switched to stronger stuff – along the lines of 50-75% alcohol by volume. That’s an unintended consequence. (You can learn more about unintended consequences in my review of Diffusion of Innovations.)

The other challenge that was created by prohibition was that the cost of alcohol soared. Because the risks associated with producing, transporting, and selling alcohol the costs were substantially higher. While this fueled the empires of folks like Al Capone is crushed families where someone had an addiction to alcohol and still felt like they needed it. The money that drove the system came from the hurt people who were trying to escape their pains. Ultimately they ended up creating more pains based on the financial challenges that were being created.

In the end, we know what the impacts of prohibition were but we can’t say if it made a real and measurable impact on alcohol consumption – but we can say that it didn’t have a long term effect because alcohol consumption rates after the repeal of prohibition gradually returned to the same rates as the pre-prohibition era. However, the real goal of prohibition wasn’t stopping the flow of alcohol. The real goal was the reduction of human suffering caused by alcohol. We wanted to free the addicts and prevent the side-effect problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption. On this measure we’re relatively certain that we didn’t achieve the goal, we in fact created more suffering related to alcohol than we had ever stopped.

Changing Strength

What if every time you put gas in your car you had no idea whether it would get you two miles or two thousand? How would you plan your trip if you never knew how far it would go? This is the problem faced by drug addicts every day. It’s impossible to know whether the drugs that they’re doing are pure – or how pure they are. Did they buy something that was mixed (cut) with something harmful to them or was it pure? Pure drugs would seem ideal – but not if you’re used to watered down versions and you accidentally give yourself too much. What about the “additives” that are mixed in to reduce the effectiveness while maintaining the same volume? What was to prevent someone from mixing in rat poison? While this seems like perhaps an odd idea, there are stories on the news everyday of people doing unlicensed cosmetic procedures with chemicals which kill people.

It’s commonly understood that the industrial revolution was driven by steam power – and that’s partially true. However, the big deal is standardization. Instead of nails and screws being whatever the person making them could do it was possible to introduce standards. You could have a quarter inch bold with 20 threads per inch. This standardization made it possible to have interchangeable parts and there by dramatically reduced the challenges with fixing problems when they arose.

The standardization of dosages has a similar effect. If you know what to expect you can plan for it. Without that standardization it’s so easy to misdose a drug – and to overdose.

Enforcement

Have you heard the stories of women getting out of speeding tickets either by batting their eyelashes or by crying? It’s an urban legend – true or not – that women can get out of speeding tickets by either flirting or by crying. This creates the idea of selective enforcement. In a utopian world everyone who was speeding would be treated the same way. However, as this urban legend points out that may not be the case.

Similarly the situation with drugs is that while the usage maybe uniform across the entirety of society there is selective enforcement around minorities and the poor. Chasing the Scream makes some compelling arguments that this has always been the case in the war on drugs. We’ve always more aggressively targeted minorities for enforcement because they’re the least likely to fight back.

Creating an Addict

If you’re trying to figure out why some people become addicted it may seem odd that you’d ask how to create an addict – however, if you’ve seen people slip into an addiction it’s hard to avoid the awareness of how an addict is created.

Above we discussed the bubbling pains that are the root from which addiction springs. How would you create those pains in the first place? Because if you create the pains that lead to addiction – you in essence have found the way to create an addict. I’ve seen this story play out – quite accidentally – several times.

To understand how to do this one has to understand the nature of shame and guilt. Perhaps the best resource for understanding shame and guilt is Dr. Brene Brown. In her book Daring Greatly she discusses the differences between shame and guilt – and how they impact us.

Shame is about feeling bad about who we are. That is – we are bad. Guilt is the related cousin to shame. Guilt is that we feel like we have done something wrong. If you can create guilt or better yet shame then you have the ability to fuel the forces that create an addict. So how do you go about doing that?

Well, you could make drugs illegal so that using them was a crime. You could send the message to society that drug users are somehow less human – they’re defective and broken. (Though my review didn’t highlight the coverage being less human Emotional Awareness discusses the impact of making others less human.) You can reinforce the message that well-adjusted people don’t need drugs so that only those who were not able to cope used drugs.

It seems to me that these are exactly the messages that were and are being used to “fight the war on drugs.” Ultimately if someone is sent to prison it’s not just their possessions that are left at the front door – it’s their humanity. What could be more demoralizing?

Most Addictive Substances

If you were to pick the worst drug – the one that causes more misery and more pain than any other drug – what would it be? Would it be meth as it rots the teeth and bodies of its users? Maybe it’s heroine and the deaths caused by overdose? Does pot make the list because of its tendency to mellow out the user there by robbing them of desire to do things?

As it turns out when the research is done for the most addictive drug and the one that causes the most pain the winner isn’t any of the hard drugs that we were told cook our brains. The winner is alcohol – the drug that we tried to make illegal and the experiment failed so miserably that we had to repeal a constitutional amendment.

Rat Park

Do you remember the old public service announcements “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs” campaign? It was widely used and effective at scaring parents and teenagers alike about the impact of drugs – never mind the fact that both parties were in large numbers over consuming the most dangerous drug – alcohol. At the time of this campaign there was also one that showed rats in a cage killing themselves by over consuming drug laced water. It spoke of the only substance that rats would overconsume to the point of death.

The problem is that this was based on research where the rats were placed in solitary confinement with not a thing to do. The rats didn’t have a reason to live. Ok, perhaps rats don’t think about such existential things – but maybe they do. It turns out if you rerun the experiment with toys and other rats – they don’t over indulge in drug laced water. Instead the rats experiment with it and then decide to drink the regular water.

Over and over again with different animals we see behaviors where the animals use drugs to cope with pain. We see that if you have a good environment there won’t be any drug use but if a mate should die or there’s no reason to continue – the animals will remain in a stupor or will drug themselves to death.

The Start of the War

It’s hard to build an empire when the shores of that empire keep eroding away. Henry Anslinger was appointed to a position in the prohibition department as alcohol prohibition was being repealed. Talk about eroding sands. So what’s a guy to do when the base you’re standing on is eroding? Jump to another island or in this case, create another island.

As it turns out the drugs that are so evil now are drugs that we’ve had available for a long time. Coke’s original recipe included cocaine – and it was legal. However, one can hardly build an empire on controlling the use of substances if they’re freely available. As a result, Henry Anslinger set about on an unrelenting campaign to create the perception that drugs were evil.

It turns out that the public was an easy mark in this situation. The public wanted to believe that their children – who were experimenting with drugs – were fine, healthy young adults without any scars from their upbringing. They wanted to believe that the drugs themselves were to blame for the addiction and pain. They didn’t want to accept that for drugs to be addictive there has to be an underlying pain.

So when Anslinger sold them on the idea that their poor children had no choice, the drugs were too powerful for them to resist – and that they had to protect their children from them, parents were all too eager to accept this perspective.

There was, of course, the need for the standard propaganda. There was the need to suppress dissenting opinions and ensure that the only message that was making it out was that drugs are evil. However, this is no different than the propaganda about the views of the Nazi party as Hitler rose to power.

The Fear of Them

Of course there was more to the propaganda than just parents wanting to believe that they weren’t to blame for their children’s drug addictions. There was also the need to quell the fears that some other racial group would rise up and overthrow the power system in place. Blacks, Mexicans, and Asians were all feared. They were all threats to white supremacy and rule.

Stories weren’t created about how drugs created super-human beings which not even a bullet could stop. The stories – like good comedy (See I am a comedian.)– had their root in reality. There were drugged people who were committing crimes and doing seemingly impossible things after being mortally wounded by a bullet. The stories were real but the causes for the unnatural ability to continue after being shot weren’t necessarily because of the use of drugs. While it’s not clear what the causes were, it’s clear that the stories were retold and spun in such a way to increase fear about minorities who were using drugs and being violent.

The propaganda was designed to vilify and isolate those nasty minority drug users from the high moral white folk whose children were at risk.

Turf Wars

In most situations when you increase enforcement of laws the target of that enforcement goes down. If you focus on speeding the number of folks speeding goes down. However, if you focus on drug dealers – the amount of drug dealing doesn’t go down. Why? To answer that we have to understand and accept economics. Economics isn’t the study of money. It’s the study of how people behave with regard to money.

We believe in the law of supply and demand. The more demand and the smaller the supply the higher the costs. This law is in operation for drugs. We’re not changing the demand for drugs with increased enforcement we’re changing the supply – the demand remains constant (or relatively constant.) When the supply is temporarily cut someone else jumps in to fill the void.

The same system of supply and demand that during prohibition created Al Capone created and continues to create dealers today. As the dealers fight for more control their turf wars are the battle.

The End of the War

Today we’re seeing more relaxed attitudes about illegal drugs – states are making it easier to get marijuana. In some cases it’s legal for medical reasons. In other states it’s just legal all together. While as a nation we’ve not begun to repeal our drug laws the tide is definitely turning towards the legalization of more drugs than we’ve seen in decades.

At some point there needs to be an end to the unnecessary suffering that is being caused by the very laws that were designed to protect us from drugs. There will come a time when we’ll stop Chasing the Scream.

Book Review-On Death and Dying

Robert Bogue July 26, 2015 No Comments

When my brother died, I experienced grief in a different way than I had in the past. I was suddenly in a situation that no one should ever have to go through – the death of a sibling. As a part of trying to process that my wife suggested that I read the classic book by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross titled On Death and Dying. It’s a classic because many in the medical profession find it as standard reading in their coursework. Kubler-Ross was a doctor working with seriously ill patients and she developed a model for how patients deal with the news that they’ll be dying. This model is often used by medical professionals as they attempt to help people cope with their own eminent death and the death of someone close to them.

The Model

The model is somewhat straightforward as it sees the process moving through five stages:

Denial and Isolation
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

In each person the length of time in each stage is variable and it’s possible to move backwards through the stages just as you can move forward through them. However, at a high level the process is of someone moving through these stages.

Undiscussed Stages

So while the five stages above are the official stages, there is a recognition that there are some other things that occur as a part of the grieving process – they’re just not a part of the normal and sustained flow of processing the news.

Shock is the initial response. It’s what happens when someone dies – or when you’re told that you have a terminal illness. This response isn’t listed as a formal stage because it’s quite quick. Shock can only last a short time because of its very nature.

Similarly, there’s an overriding sense of peace and reassurance provided by hope. This isn’t to say that hope is denial – that the end won’t come – rather hope in this context is that there’s something more to come. This can be that there is an afterlife where the person who is dying will be reunited with their loved ones. This overriding hope can be that something good will come from what is happening perhaps in the context of a new cure to help someone else – or at least a better understanding of the disease to minimize someone else’s pain.

I believe that hope is the most powerful drug that we’ve been given on this planet. It’s free. It comes in convenient “thought” form so it can be transferred and administered easily. I’ve spoken numerous times about the placebo effect that doctors try to eliminate in studies and how powerful it can become. Most notability I spoke of the link between the placebo effect and hope in my review of The Heart and Soul of Change. The short is that finding a way to develop real hope that there is a bigger picture is powerful in helping people survive – and helping them die peacefully.

Denial and Isolation

No one wants to believe bad news. Our egos are wired to believe that we’re great – that we’re at some level invincible. I mentioned a book – The Ego and Its Defenses – when I wrote my review of Change or Die. One of the 22 major defenses of the ego is denial. It’s no wonder then that denial is one way that we keep the reality of the situation from reaching us. The goal of denial is to protect us from something that our ego cannot accept like skipping a stone across the water. It helps us to “not let in” the reality of our own mortality.

The unfortunate thing about this is that our friends, our physicians, and the other people in our lives will continue to remind us of the reality of the situation. They’ll seek to help us move through our processing of the situation and to avoid getting stuck at denial. This can sometimes lead our ego to drive us into isolation as it struggles more mightily to avoid accepting the reality that we can’t process yet. The unfortunate thing about this is that we derive our strength and health through our relationships with other people (as I mentioned in my review of Change or Die.)

Here lies a delicate balance. It’s a balance between being present in someone’s life and allowing them to accept the normalcy of life while not accepting their denial. I know from my own experiences that simply being present and being willing to talk about any other topic is helpful and psychologically healing as it allows people to build the strength that they’ll need to move to the next step in the grieving process.

Anger

I mentioned in my review of Emotional Intelligence that the Buddhists believe that anger is disappointment directed. One of the most challenging parts of folks dealing with this stage of grief is that the anger is often misdirected and the targets of the anger are often random and change quickly. It’s natural for a caregiver and a loved one to become the target of the anger quite quickly. For instance, a doctor or a spouse may become the target of anger because they didn’t prevent someone from smoking and they developed terminal lung cancer. While the anger might more appropriately be placed on the person themselves the ego won’t allow that so it uses another one of its defenses, displacement.

Anger is often viewed as a negative emotion – however, anger is probably more accurately described as a powerful emotion. Anger can drive action. Anger can cause behaviors. Whether anger is positive or negative is really a function of the kinds of action – and specifically behaviors that it causes in someone. If anger motivates a person to write their memoirs – great. If it motivates them to go around throwing things and punching walls – well, that’s less great.

Bargaining

If your ego has managed to allow through the idea that death is eminent, the next step is that we’ll try to bargain. If we pray to God and agree to dedicate our lives to him then perhaps we can be spared this unfathomable outcome. We’ll try to persuade our physicians to try everything possible – including unproven approaches in the hope that we’ll be able to be spared the outcome that we so fear and dread.

It’s in the bargaining stage that patients use the phrase “do everything” to save them – or more commonly parents of a critically or terminally ill child will say “do everything” possible to save their life. However, the problem with this is that we often are willing to make the bargain before we realize the consequences.

Still bargaining seems like an effective approach for a while. Once it becomes clear that this approach won’t work, however, it is quickly abandoned.

Depression

Once death becomes fully real in the mind then depression sets in. The ego’s defenses aren’t limitless. They’ll eventually be exhausted. Depression is an indication that the defenses are gone – or are nearly gone. Depression is the first reaction of a mind that has become aware of the reality and gravity of the situation. A person here isn’t quite ready to accept their fate. They’re just more fully accepting of reality.

Depression can last right up to the final moments – as can any other stage. Depression is however close to a moment of peace. Helping folks through depression can be challenging but the results are very rewarding.

Acceptance

Though not everyone gets the pleasure of reaching the acceptance stage those who do are rewarded with a sense of transcendental peace. It’s not that they’re denying reality or that they don’t understand the meaning of death. Rather it’s that they’ve accepted that they cannot do anything to change the probable outcome. Unless a miracle happens – and that’s what hope is for – death will come.

Easing Suffering

When you’re not in the bull’s-eye of the death – meaning that it’s not your own – or in the inner ring – meaning it’s one of the few people who were closest to you – then what is your role in the death? (See Dunbar’s number for more about proximity and social connections.) The answer is to be supportive and to relieve some of the suffering. The question is how do you do that?

One component may be allowing for the person who is suffering to be where they are. In How to Be an Adult
Richio speaks about five things that we all need. Among these are acceptance – accepting the other person’s reality even if it doesn’t match ours – and allowing – permitting the other person to live their life without control. These are key skills when working with people who are struggling.

I’ve seen great pain caused by relatives and friends who aren’t willing to accept that a loved one is ready to die – or that they may even want to die. This approach – which I believe is driven by their pain – doesn’t demonstrate acceptance of their reality. Nor does it allow the other person to be as they want to be.

In Graphic

On Death and Dying provided one diagram which demonstrates so clearly how the stages aren’t linear that I felt compelled to reproduce it here:

This shows how the stages generally flow – and how someone can alternate between stages.

If you’re interested in being more supportive and helpful to those around you who may be dying, perhaps you should read On Death and Dying.

Practical SharePoint Development for the Core Team and Beyond

Robert Bogue June 30, 2015 1 Comment

If you’ve been reading my blog over the last several years you know that I’ve got a ton of technical posts including posts about both infrastructure issues (like claims, Kerberos, and performance) as well as development concerns. However, lately I’ve left the technical blog posts to some of my contemporaries. While I’ll occasionally blog (or log) my technical issues, their root causes and resolutions, I’ve been much more focused on the business and organizational issues of SharePoint. However, this post has to unify those views. Customers are coming to me and asking whether they should be doing SharePoint App development – and when. (Complicating the matters are that Microsoft has renamed SharePoint App development to Add-in development and has released another model for development for Office 365 applications.) While the answers are simple in some cases, they get complicated fast. However, there are answers to the questions.

In the Beginning

On the first day of SharePoint there was the SharePoint 2001 based on ASP (not ASP.NET) and it was not so good but we customized it to make it acceptable. On the second SharePoint Day we got SharePoint 2003 and the ability to use ASP.NET (and the SQL based file engine). It was good because we could customize it and add our .NET goodness to it. On the third SharePoint day we got SharePoint 2007 and the package solutions and it was too good. Suddenly everyone wanted to be able to develop their applications on the SharePoint platform. As a result many of the support calls Microsoft received were because of poorly performing code that customers had written. On the fourth SharePoint day we got SharePoint 2010 complete with its Sandbox for code we didn’t trust. The problem with this is that while it worked for corporations who had rogue development organizations internally that weren’t controlled by corporate IT, it didn’t work at the scale of the cloud. There were some things which couldn’t be protected against. On the fifth day of SharePoint we got SharePoint 2013 and the brand new model of development – Apps. From a hosting perspective, Apps are great. No code ever runs on the server and therefore it’s not possible for applications to bring down the server. (Again, Microsoft recently renamed this type of development to Add-ins.)

All would be good if Sandbox solutions and Apps could use the same skills the developers already had, the same coding styles, and could solve all the same problems. The problem is that this isn’t the case. Sandbox solutions had a set of limitations based on how they were implemented. For instance, you couldn’t access the page object to include script you needed. Apps are substantially different than solutions development – either full trust or sandbox. And that’s where the rub comes in.

Smart car or Semi-trailer Tractor

The problem is that the SharePoint solutions were a Semi-trailer Tractor. You could do anything with them. You can pull along branding, custom solutions, recurring timer jobs, configuration, etc. However, if someone fell asleep at the wheel it caused a multitude of problems from performance to stability and even in some cases data integrity. That’s why the Sandbox solution was designed. What if we could get folks into a big pickup truck? They couldn’t carry as much, they wouldn’t be able to do as much – but at least if they fell asleep at the wheel – or if they were malicious – they couldn’t do as much damage. The problem is that the available damage wasn’t tolerable at scale.

On the other end of the spectrum is something like a Smart car. When I see them on the street I tend to comment that there goes half a car. They’re efficient, small, and are quite capable of transporting two human beings from one location to another. Federal census data from 2009 indicates that 76% of American workers drive to work alone. If 3/4ths of the time you don’t need to have any passengers – let alone carry cargo, why would you drive around a big Semi Tractor and Trailer?

The way that you drive a Semi-tractor trailer is different than the way that you drive a half a car.

Differences

The car to semi analogy breaks down when we start to think about how they’re actually technically different. Certainly the capabilities are different and they’re optimized for different things. When used for what they’re designed for they’re both great answers. However, in that analogy both drive fundamentally the same way. There’s a steering wheel, gas, and a break. The Semi might have manual shifting and the Smart car an automatic transmission but fundamentally they behave the same. However, the way that Apps (and Add-ins) are designed and the way that traditional solutions were designed are substantially different.

Consider that there are two ways to balance a budget. One way is to increase your income from another job, a second job, or working more hours. The other way is to downsize your house, replace your car with a less expensive solution, cut out cable, and eat less expensively. Which approach is right? Both. They’re just two sides of the same coin. Both of these aren’t really equal, however, because it takes a disproportionate change in income compared to the same reduction in expenses. Said more plainly you have to change your income more dramatically than the same amount of savings. Why? Because of taxes and other ways that making more money doesn’t return 100% of the gain to your bottom-line budget.

Apps are a similar situation. There are some great new benefits but they come at a cost and they create new limitations.

Costs

Apps are more difficult to write. Full stop. They are. Both remaining paths to writing apps are. Some of that is due to skills and tooling but some of it is inherent in the additional complexity of Apps. Apps fundamentally come in two categories. The first category is a provider hosted which are hosted on another server somewhere and SharePoint just communicates with the other server. The second category is a SharePoint hosted application which is all client side scripting (JavaScript.)

Provider hosted applications can be built in whatever technology you want so in that sense there aren’t new skills to learn to build the application. However, the challenges exist in managing the communication with SharePoint which requires a deeper knowledge of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), certificates, encryption, and identity management than most developers (SharePoint or not) have.

SharePoint hosted applications must be built with client scripting technologies – which effectively means JavaScript. Unfortunately, working in JavaScript is much slower and more difficult than working in a traditional server compiled language. The very dynamic nature of JavaScript means that it’s difficult to check for syntactic errors at compile time and so even seasoned developers find themselves spending more time debugging code than normal.

Somewhere around here I fully expect folks to tell me that developing in JavaScript is just as easy as developing in C# or that they’re as efficient at JavaScript as they are with a compiled language. I appreciate they believe this, however, the research and data as well as my personal observations don’t bear this out to be truth.

Limitations

SharePoint is a portal platform. Though portal was dropped from the name many editions ago, it remains a product that’s designed to bring resources from disparate sources together. On the super easy side this is done by placing links on the SharePoint page to the other applications that users need. However, in many cases this isn’t sufficient to get the kind of view that users need of their environment. In the past SharePoint web parts have been the windows to the information stored in other systems. Some amount of code would fetch information from a back end system and display it on a page. Several different web parts could be added to retrieve data from multiple back end systems. That’s great but it required code running on the server.

In the App world where this is no longer an option, you can’t directly fetch the information and add it to the page on the server. You can use client-side techniques to inject that content into the page but this has potential side effects. Or you can use technology we tried to eradicate in the 1990s – that is the humble IFRAME. IFRAMES are inline frames and have been a part of HTML for a long time. IFRAMEs have their own set of issues when used in a portal including communication between the host page and the IFRAME content, getting the consistency of look and feel, etc. Look and feel is interesting because IFRAMEs are outside of the processing for CSS and styles that are applied so it’s necessary to get the CSS into the IFRAME.

SharePoint App Parts are designed to handle some of these challenges including providing to the application the CSS used at the server. However, the problem of messaging to the host page of an app part isn’t fully resolved by the framework. As a result for dashboards and other situations where multiple parts on the page need to communicate and react to each other – like our old web part connections – App parts are problematic.

For provider hosted applications, you also have to make sure that the applications are accessible to the user wherever they are. If you’re hosting your own applications and users access SharePoint from outside your network – you’ll have to make the applications available.

Benefits

What benefits to Apps offer? Besides the obvious advantage of not having untrusted code running on the server, there’s the advantage of being able to develop in any language you want. Sure there may not be a pre-made Python or Ruby library for connecting to SharePoint as an application but it’s technically possible to do. If you’ve got an army of developers who write in Java and need applications to plug into SharePoint, Apps are the way to go.

If you’ve got a Java based system that you need to connect to and you have developers that understand that system the effort to make the app work in SharePoint may be less effort than trying to teach .NET SharePoint developers how to access the data and functionality in the Java system.

Which Way Do You Go?

Right now if you want to use office 365 you have to write a Sandboxed Solution or an App. Microsoft has said that the sandbox will be deprecated from Office 365 “soon” so it’s not an area to make further investments in. However, all of these statements apply to Office 365. If you’re going to be running SharePoint on premises then you can use full trust solutions, sandbox solutions, or Apps. So when you’re in an on premises environment it doesn’t matter which way you go. Leverage apps where you need to get cross-platform support.

Complicating this are Office 365 Apps which only work on Office 365 but provide a unified API across the Office 365 services. If you’re doing Office 365 these Apps are fundamentally similar in technology to SharePoint Apps – or add-ins – but use different APIs and are published differently. They’re published into the Azure AD that backs Office 365.

Complicating Factors

One of the complicating factors for deciding to develop Apps is that the application lifecycle management doesn’t really work. For SharePoint Apps (Add-Ins) you can’t migrate the configuration and data from environment to environment with Apps enabled. You have to reconfigure the apps in each environment. This can be problematic no matter how you manage your configuration. For provider hosted applications there’s the added issue that you compile an App package and it has a fixed URL endpoint so all of your SharePoint environments will point to one target provider application – in development, quality assurance, and production environments.

The work around to this is to leverage a build server that creates separate packages for each environment on the SharePoint site. However, this is more sophisticated than most software development organizations I’ve seen.

Office 365 Apps have some tricks that can be done with Azure hosted apps and deployment slots that allow you some level of control over which environments point to which versions of the App. However, these controls are still relatively minimal.

So basically this creates a fork in the road. If you’re going to be on premises you’ll want to continue full trust code. If you’re on Office 365 you’ll want to create Office 365 applications. If you’re walking the fence you may want to deliver SharePoint Add-ins that can run both on premises as well as in Office 365 – but this is a somewhat unique case – that I wouldn’t generally recommend.

Book Review-The Great Evangelical Recession

Robert Bogue June 23, 2015 No Comments

Too many folks I know have decided that the world is going “to hell and a handbasket.” I for one am intrigued by the term and the idea that after centuries of human progress we’re suddenly plunging towards our demise as a society in what amount to the blink of an eye. Rarely does a week go by when I don’t hear about another family torn apart because they don’t eat dinner together. Perhaps it’s the growth of the Internet. Maybe people are texting too much. Maybe we’re not connecting with each other as much socially as was pointed out in the book Bowling Alone. It’s in this context that I read The Great Evangelical Recession. I don’t lead a church. I’m not an elder or a deacon. I’m just interested in the factors that influence our society. Also, I’ve been “standing close” to more than one Christian organization – close enough to see the ugliness that is there and to desire to understand it better.

The Reality of Measurement

Perhaps one of the most interesting things when you look at a book describing the growth – or shrinkage – in the church is looking at what metrics are being used and how those metrics are leading to incorrect conclusions. If big churches are growing then shouldn’t it follow that the church is growing? Not necessarily. Compelling evidence seems to suggest that while big churches are indeed growing, they’re doing so at the expense of smaller churches. The easy to capture data – from the big churches that have the resources to respond to surveys and are large enough to be found –shows growth when there is in reality shrinkage.

It’s a warning to make sure that as we’re picking our metrics that we’re picking metrics that accurately measure what we’re trying to capture. The United States isn’t – despite popular belief – a Christian nation. Evangelical Christians reportedly make up 7% to 9% of the population. More concerning is that even those in this group are in many important ways indistinguishable from their non-Christian friends.

Killing Trees

Dickerson says that trees are killed by two things:

Disease from within
Forces from without

I’ve been standing very close to different kinds of diseases inside many Christian organizations. I’ve seen fundamental attribution error (For more about fundamental attribution error see The Advantage, Switch, and Beyond Boundaries.) I’ve seen self-righteousness. I’ve seen legalism win out against love. So while I believe in the Church. I believe in the message left behind to love one another, I’ve seen many examples where this is lost on the machine that is the Christian organizations I’ve been a part of including churches and para-church organizations.

A long lost good friend of me says that churches are hospitals for the spiritually sick. Is it any wonder then that they suffer from the same kinds of challenges and lack of love that all organizations suffer from? It’s sad – but is it any wonder? Knowing that we as a Church aren’t able to heal our hurting members and that they continue to hurt others. One of the things that is said in recovery circles is that hurting people hurt people. We’re tripping all over ourselves hurting each other instead of building each other up and surrounding them with love.

The forces from the outside are important – but in my opinion – they’re not nearly as damaging or influential as we’d like to believe. I’ve read quite a bit about millennials and how they behave and how they think. The conclusion I’ve reached is that there is no conclusion. Some folks say that millennials are radically different than any other group in history. Conversely other studies show that millennials behave fundamentally similar to previous generations – at that time in their lives. So while there are factors that are impacting the church from the outside – they may not be as strong as we may want to believe they are.

Facebook Friends

When Robin Dunbar came up with a theory which equated the brain mass of mammals to their number of social connections there was more than the simple linear distribution. There’s also the idea that humans need a handful of close – intimate – connections and a larger set of important connections that would cause substantial but not catastrophic impact if they were lost. In the concentric rings around a person there are other levels as well. I believe the furthest in orbit may be the Facebook Friend – that is those people with whom you’ve initiated or accepted a Facebook Friend request. These folks have a connection with you but it’s so light that if they were to defriend you it might take months or years to notice – or perhaps you would never notice they’re gone.

We live in a more isolated world than any time in history – while at the same time being in one of the most connected times. From a communication standpoint we’ve conquered most of the challenges. I can do video calls with a friend quite literally on the other side of the world while simultaneously communicating with other colleagues as well. The Pony Express is a distant memory relegated to history books in a time when messages flow so freely and so quickly. We’ve let go of our requirements for atoms to move from one place to another to communicate we’re now moving at the speed of electrons – and for at least some distances, photons.

Despite all of this communication capability we communicate with each other less deeply than we ever have. We’re forming fewer intimate relationships. We’re building more diverse but less dense networks. The neighborhood communities discussed in Change or Die are all but gone. The bowling leagues and social clubs have given way to Facebook Friends and a much more diverse but more broadly connected set of friends.

The Amish are known for building barns together. We live in an age where getting someone to come over and help us move furniture into the barn can be difficult. If your parents would happen to die – whom of your friends – regardless of how far they live away – would come to support you in your time of loss? Isn’t that one simple way to measure the value of a friend? Isn’t the real standard how far they’re willing to go to support you in your times of need?

Attitudes of Grace

As one might expect The Great Evangelical Recession spends a great deal of time speaking about the affront that the church faces. The metrics are public opinion about traditional evangelical Christian values such as gay marriage. In some respects the book reminded me of the movie God’s Not Dead. In the movie Christianity is seen as a weakness by a philosophy professor. The book shares that professors in colleges are confronting the traditional evangelical Christian values.

However, through all of this I kept reflecting on Heroic Leadership and how the Jesuits faced their world differently. They treated their foreign hosts with grace, dignity, and respect. They focused on the essential components of the message. In the Christian context Jesus made this crystal clear – the answer is Love – Agape Love. Complete love for others. Buddhism calls this compassion – love for others. To me it’s all the same message repeated differently.

I can’t help but wonder how things would be different for the 53% of people who held unfavorable feelings toward evangelical Christians if they lived more out of love and grace than out of judgement and hate. (See The Marketing of Evil for more about hating needlessly.)

In the end, the recommendation of The Great Evangelicgal Recession is to focus on love for all others whether they agree with our beliefs or not.

A Different Kind of Church

The vision for the church is different. It’s one where we band together to ward off attackers. It’s a vision where volunteers are the core of the church rather than the paid staff and where workers who have traditionally been paid by the church get secular jobs and spend the rest of their time working on Gods mission. They’re fully committed to Christ and simultaneously living in the world. Whether it comes to pass or not, it sounds like something that Christ would approve of – he was a carpenter and many of the disciples were fishermen after all. Maybe it’s worth learning more about The Great Evangelical Recession.

Book Review-The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom

Robert Bogue June 15, 2015 No Comments

Rarely do I read a book that increases my level of anxiety. Rarely am I so conflicted by a message that I decide to skip the process of writing a blog post for it. You see, writing these blog posts are a part of my process for understanding and incorporating what I read into my consciousness. I purposefully broke that process in early 2013 when I didn’t write my post about The Marketing of Evil. The fundamental premise of the book is that we’re being manipulated as a culture to a different set of values. Two years after having read the book I don’t know that I’ve reached a conclusion as to whether we are or aren’t being manipulated. I also haven’t figured out whether I think those manipulations have an evil purpose as the book implies or if the manipulations are just the natural outcome of learning more about how we think.

Target #1: Gays

The book openly targets the topic of how we feel about homosexuals. They speak of the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s and how this was a roadmap to making homosexual people more socially acceptable in America. The conflict I feel here is that the author, David Kupelian, and many of the evangelical authors of today are somehow missing the obvious point of Christianity. If Jesus said that the greatest commandment is love and America is a so-called Christian nation, why then is it necessary to write a book to conquer hatred of Gays? I have good friends who are openly gay. I have friends who are less-than-open about being Gay and the truth is, I just don’t care. I love them like I love all my brothers and sisters in Christ. We’re all called to love all people – above all of the other perceived commandments.

There’s an undercutting us-vs-them mentality that Christ fought during his life on earth. The idea is that they are trying to pervert us into thinking their ways. However, my homosexual friends don’t judge me for my heterosexual behavior – while that sounds silly consider that many folks do just the opposite to homosexual people.

Target #2: Marketing

Economics isn’t the study of money. It’s not the study of economies. It’s the study of people’s behavior when money is involved. If you want to really understand how irrational we are take a look at The Ultimatum game (or look at my review of Drive). When you look deeply into how people think, how they make decisions, and what drives them, you’ll see that our beliefs about how rational we are in our thinking breaks down pretty quickly.

In Demand, there’s the story of ZIP Cars where there’s a discontinuity in subscriptions between a five minute walk to reach a car and a ten minute walk. For those looking for personalized transportation needs inside of densely populated cities a five minute walk to a ten minute walk shouldn’t make much of a difference – but it does. Sources of Power explains that we don’t make rational decisions. We make recognition primed decisions. We recognize something about the environment and pattern our response off of that. We believe our rational rider is in control when instead it’s the unpredictable elephant that our reason is sitting on that is really in control (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis for the Rider-Elephant-Path metaphor and Thinking: Fast, and Slow for more about our ability to deceive ourselves.)

Marketing is then our ability to leverage what we know about the human psyche to get people to be more aware of our products and services and to encourage them to purchase. This isn’t inherently a bad thing if you believe that the service that you offer will be of value to the person that you’re marketing to – but let’s break it into the two components. First, there’s the component of making the public aware of your service. The second component is convincing them to buy.

It would seem that making someone aware of what you have to offer would be easy. You put a sign up at the edge of your neighborhood and suddenly everyone in the neighborhood would know that you’re having a garage sale. That works well for small communities (like neighborhoods) where the advertisement is novel but what if you’re trying to sell toothbrushes to a global audience? As it turns out no matter how you reach out to the public they may – or may not choose to pay attention.

The reticular activating system (RAS) is responsible for regulating your sleep and awake cycles and what you pay attention to – and what you don’t. (See Change or Die for more on the RAS). It turns out that marketers have known for some time that getting the RAS to key in on your message is difficult. It’s one of the reasons that we see so many novel – or edgy – ads. The novelty of the ad is what tells the RAS to pay attention – that’s what it’s designed to do. Guerilla Marketing quotes Thomas Smith from London and his instruction to make 20 impressions to get someone to buy – and that was in 1885. You can imagine how many impressions that it takes to get someone’s attention in the information overload age we live in. (See The Information Diet and The Paradox of Choice for more on Information Overload.)

So despite the appearances of being easy – it’s not. However, few people are concerned about the ability to help make people aware of your product – as long as you’re not paying telemarketers to call during the dinner hour (that fewer families get these days.)

Where it gets muddy is when we start speaking of encouraging people to purchase our products. In fact, some techniques for marketing have been outlawed. Subliminal advertising for instance is prohibited because of its effectiveness and the relative difficulty that people have in protecting themselves from it. The basic idea is that a film is played at 24 frames per second. If you put a message or an image on a single frame every few seconds, people won’t be able to consciously register it. They won’t know they’ve seen a message. However, their subconscious will have processed the image and the underlying “instruction” will be processed by the subconscious and it will be leaked up into the consciousness. In the case of our theater example there was a sharp rise in concession sales after inserting frames into the film encouraging folks to consume soda and popcorn. It didn’t take much of a push to get folks to indulge in these concessions.

The tricky part here is that in this case those folks who purchased but wouldn’t normally have purchased from the concession stand are unaware that they’ve been instructed. They believe they really wanted the popcorn – and at some level they did. Consider that the best techniques are those that leave the person being manipulated unaware that they’ve been manipulated. (See Social Engineering for more.)

So at some level we all agree that manipulation of us to the ends of compelling us to purchase something that we don’t want is bad. The tricky part is that done correctly, marketing makes us feel like we wanted to purchase it all along – well, our ego wants to defend itself so it will say that we wanted to buy it anyway. What if the marketing is for something like wearing a seatbelt – where the outcome is that more people are saved because they’re wearing seatbelts? Most folks would say that the ends justify the means. As I said, the waters are murky.

Target #3: Education

I’ve got my own criticisms of traditional learning. I agree with Glassier that children needs classrooms and Schools Without Failure. (Glassier’s work on Choice Theory is also an interesting read.) I don’t believe that we work high enough on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. I believe we focus too much on recognition and recall and not enough on problem solving and critical thinking skills. However, I stop short of thinking about education as a conspiracy to turn our children into mindless automatons. There has been a rise in the creative class – people who work heuristically rather than following a fixed set of steps. (See Drive for more on heuristic vs. algorithmic work.) So at the same time when we’re supposedly crushing folk’s ability to think independently we’re asking more and more people to do exactly this. I’m lousy at conspiracy theories in general but here I’m absolutely stumped how this is supposed to work

Paranoia Will Destroy ‘Ya (Or Keep you Alive)

We’ve been wired through natural selection to keep an eye out and look for things that can harm us. It’s better to mistake nothing for a lion in the bushes than the other way around. As a result we’ve got a bit of paranoia that comes to us honestly. However, at some point you have to believe that there are enough honest people that we’ll keep moving our society forward. Perhaps The Marketing of Evil exposes some places that this isn’t true – or maybe it doesn’t. It’s up to you to decide.

Book Review-Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

Robert Bogue June 8, 2015 No Comments

I’ve never considered myself particularly gifted at mixing audio for live performances. I’ve been a servant who has done them. There’s been more than a few worship services that I’ve supported over the years where I’ve been doing the mixing. However, I’ve never considered it to be a gift of mine. Experience has taught me how to use some tools to make things sound better and how to keep myself out of trouble. However, perhaps the most useful thing that running live sound has taught me is that you can listen through the noise and pick out a single voice or a single instrument. If you focus your attention on it you can hear how hard the keyboardist is playing – or pounding — the keys. You can hear when the electric guitar starts to muddy the vocals. You can hear when the electric bass is too loud – or too soft.

However, most folks don’t hear these things when they’re listening to music. They simple don’t listen with the intentionality of figuring out how to make the music better – and why would they? If you can’t change the music why try to find specific things in it? Most of the time we go through life just enjoying the music. We sit back and if we get a little bad with the good so be it. If we need a little more rest or feel a bit too stressed, it’s not a big deal. However, for some just listening to the music without being intentional isn’t a happy thing. For some the happy song isn’t so happy. This is at the heart of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. That is that it’s possible to focus your attention on parts of the music of life that make you happy. You can breathe them in more deeply and in doing so improve your happiness in life.

Feelings that Grow into Moods

If you’ve spent much time with babies you know that some babies just seem happier – and some of them are just – well – less happy. There’s something to them from the very beginning. This is what the Happiness Hypothesis would call winning the cortical lottery. They’re naturally born with a higher happiness “set point” than others.

As children grow older it seems like they’re all moody as hormones and the creation of new neurons seems to push them from mood-to-mood over days and weeks. Through the storm of these moods you can still see the child’s natural happiness “set point” coming through like the harbor that they always return to when the storms are done. Moods are much less permanent than the neurological happiness “set point” but are still able to hang on for days, weeks, and sometimes even months.

Compared to the relatively stable foundation of moods, feelings can feel like a plastic bag caught up in the wind, moving wherever the wind blows. Feelings seem to mostly fit into the space of the mood. Rarely do you have a sullen mood and a feeling of intense joy. There’s just something incompatible between a positive mood and a negative feeling – and vice versa.

This is the order we often think of happiness. We consider it from the perspective that our feelings are cast upon us – that we don’t have the capability to change them. If you believe that you are helpless and can’t change your neurological set point why even bother to try to become happier? Well, Mindset points out that our situation isn’t nearly as fixed as we believe it to be.

What if the flow occurs – sometimes – in the opposite direction? What if by directing your feelings you impact your moods? What if your moods become so long that they actually change your happiness “set point?” This is, of course, the point of the book that you can learn skills to direct your feelings which will lead to better moods and ultimately a shift in your neurological happiness “set point.”

Pack Your Happiness

What if instead of just unconsciously listening to the music of life you started to actively look for the happy things in life? We’re not talking about just the top of the mountain type happiness experiences. I’m talking about the everyday moments of warm-heartedness that we often look by. Consider the smell of your favorite coffee brewed by your spouse just because you like it. Perhaps it’s the sun on your face as you sit at a stoplight on your way to work.

You can choose to focus on the traffic or you can focus on the warmth of the sun. You can find happiness in little things or you can find the negative. Your reticular activating system (RAS) is the part of your brain that controls attention along with your sleep-awake cycle. You can teach it what you want to focus on more. Consider the last time you bought a new car. Before you started shopping you probably rarely ever noticed another car on the road like the one that you wanted. However, once you started the process and decided on the new car, you likely saw many more of them. It’s not like the car suddenly hit the streets. It’s that your RAS started focusing you on them. (You can see more about RAS in Change or Die.)

Hardwiring Happiness is about choosing to focus on the things that will bring you joy.

Love

There was once a time when folks sold untested and unproven medicines – snake oil – to cure a variety of diseases. Now we have the Food and Drug administration to oversee manufacturer claims about effectiveness of their drugs. Strict regulations have curtailed the outrageous claims that some manufacturers were making and have – generally speaking – made it easier to know that a drugs claims are backed up by some level of research. (Despite this there are still many findings in prestigiously published research that are reversed on further review and study as was discussed in The Heart and Soul of Change.) One thing that is challenging for the Food and Drug administration to test or regulate are feelings like compassion – or said differently love.

While hope may be the primary ingredient in placebo (as was discussed in my review of The Heart and Soul of Change) , Love is like the daily vitamin. It’s not associated to specific resolution of pains but is amazing at improving your overall health. The Bible says that “Perfect love casts out fear.” We’ve learned that fear, shame, guilt, and other “negative” feelings are detrimental to our health. Daring Greatly brought us face-to-face with the shame and guilt we all carry and how that shame and guilt can bring us down. Love – including self-love and compassion – is the general cure for the maladies caused by these emotions.

From giving and receiving love we develop a sense of peace and joy that leads us to a long-term happiness. We unconsciously expect the law of reciprocation. If we give love then we are more likely to expect that others will do the same. And for us love is like that blanket insurance policy. We don’t have to go it alone if others love us. It becomes more ok to fail and less stressful. It’s no wonder that love can have such a profound impact on our happiness.

Neural Darwinism

From a neurological standpoint there’s a battle going on. It’s not the survival of the fittest that Darwin discussed. It’s the survival of the busiest. That is to say that the neurons that are the busiest are the ones that are the most connected to the rest of the brain and the rest of life. Instead of being off in a lonely place with few roads, the neurons that you fire tend to wire. That is they build pathways between themselves and other neurons and make it easier to get back to them in the future.

What this means on the journey of developing happiness for yourself is that if you want to be happy you should make a point of encouraging happy thoughts. Some may say that they don’t have happy thoughts but that’s not true. We all have happy thoughts and sad thoughts. We can all focus on, enhance, and amplify the time we spend thinking about happy thoughts and in so doing create a long term bias towards them.

Consider the idea of addition and subtraction. For most of us we’ve overlearned our addition and subtraction tables. (See Efficiency in Learning for more about overlearning.) Because we overlearned them we rarely think about them when we’re doing a task that requires basic addition and subtraction. They’ve become so wired into the rest of our brain that they’re automatic. (See Thinking Fast and Slow for more about System 1 – the automatic system.) We can learn happiness the same way so that it’s automatic and doesn’t require a thought. However, just as learning our addition and subtraction tables took effort at first to get it ingrained in us, so too must we focus on learning to soak in happiness until it becomes automatic.

Leaning a Ladder against Happiness

There’s not a direct line between our circumstances and how we feel. In truth, there’s a ladder. Chris Argyris created a metaphorical ladder of how we take the information through our senses and create meaning – and judgement from it. (I discussed this in my review of Choice Theory as well.) While most folks want to blame their circumstances for their level of happiness I can tell you that in my own experience and in the research I’ve read from Stumbling on Happiness to The Happiness Hypothesis and beyond, people in the same circumstances see things differently. They focus their attention on additional data – they apply meaning to the data they have – build assumptions – and so on.

I can tell you that I’ve seen people transform their attitude through recovery/care programs. From the time where they’re unhappy to the time when they are happy their objective circumstances haven’t changed. Their finances may be out of control, there may still be impending doom in their marriage but their attitude changes and they become happier because of how they choose to view things—not because things have changed.

The point here is that it’s not your circumstances that controls your happiness – it’s how you choose to see your circumstances.

Desire to Be Happy

So the key to being happy is to truly desire to be happy. Some will say that they strongly desire to be happy – and yet their behaviors say something entirely different. In recovery programs they tell you to believe behavior – that is you’re only really ready to stop an addiction when you’re ready to change your behaviors. (I’m not speaking directly about the addiction. I’m speaking more about dangerous behaviors that lead to indulging in the behavior.) The first step in a 12 step recovery program is to admit you have a problem. It’s that admission – or in this case determination – that drives the rest of the process forward. It’s great that you’re interested in being happy – but are you committed to becoming more happy. Are you willing to invest time in life giving activities that make you happy – or are you too busy to make time?

Good enough for now (Not seeking perfect)

One of the final factors that influences the ability to be happy is the desire towards perfectionism. Whether it’s perfectionism in ourselves or in the things that we do, perfectionism is hard work and a road filled with only disappointments. In the language of The Paradox of Choice we should seek to be satisficers – looking for good enough – rather than maximizers – looking only for the best. The trick is that there is no best. There is no perfect way. There’s only good enough for now. So go be happy enough for now – until you’re ready to be happier. The first step may be reading Hardwiring Happiness.

My Video Studio Version 2.0

Robert Bogue June 1, 2015 No Comments

It’s been a long time since I spoke at any length about my video studio. In fact the initial post about the studio and what I purchased was posted in January 2009. I followed that with a post in February 2009 with my Tele-Prompter-Scope (which I just retired from the studio). I’ve made incremental improvements in the studio since 2009 but many of the improvements had been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. However, the most recent set of upgrades are much more radical and as a result they really warranted some discussion.

What’s The Use?

Before talking about the upgrades it’s important to understand how the goals for the studio have evolved over time. Initially I thought I was going to be recording online training. While that’s still a goal it’s not the only goal. Really, I’m looking for a place that can be used to record a variety of video content including training, video podcasts, and training scenarios that include more than just me standing and talking.

The change in usage – or probably better described as a shift – means I needed to figure out how to get wider shots and it meant that I needed to plan for a wider collection of scenarios.

The Problems and Solutions

I hate admitting my problems but I have them. While the studio was great for most situations there were some things that I realized were challenging – and they were challenges that I wanted to deal with. I want to walk through some of the problems I faced in the studio and what I did to resolve them. At a high-level I had a few minor audio quirks to deal with and I had some rather significant video changes to support the idea that I’d be recording training by myself – and that I’m not perfect. I needed to get to two relatively similar looking camera shots so that I could stumble and do a transition that is visually appealing. This is something I hadn’t considered when I initially setup the studio. I assumed that I’d just rerecord that section but as sections got longer rerecording everything became a bit more challenging.

Audio

I had already dealt with many of the audio concerns over the years. Mostly I did this by adding ATS Acoustic Panels. Why ATS Panels? I had my assistant do the research and these panels had the best cost/performance ratio. There were other panels that had higher sound reduction – but none that had a better cost/reduction ratio. Ultimately I ended up covering the ceiling with the panels and having some on the walls as well. The ceiling mounted panels are actually on suspension wire so they will get a slightly better sound suppression. You can see the panels (two different colors) lining the walls and ceiling in the picture.

Along the way I also picked up the successor to the Zoom H4 Handycorder – the Zoom H4N. I really never used it in the studio – I was using it for some live shots but it is really nice—and is easier to connect than the Roland Edirol R-09HR I was using. The Handycorder has hybrid XLR / ¼” connectors that I can just plug into.

Rounding out the conversation about audio are two other changes I made that were interesting, first, I replaced the Line 6 Tone Port UX2 with a Focusrite Saffire 40. The real reason for this was that the Tone Port required software be running to function and the Saffire doesn’t. Of course, the extra six channels didn’t hurt. The Saffire also allows you to connect additional channels via an ADAT fiber interface so I picked up a Focusrite OctoPre MkII and connected it to the Saffire so I have 16 channels available. This too is not really designed for the studio. It’s really designed as a portable rig to be able to get multi-channel audio recorded.

The audio in the studio was as I mentioned really good. In part to improve the scene and in part to reduce noise, I added the rug you see in the image above. In addition to the wireless mics, I added a Rode NTG1 and a Rode NTG2 microphone to the studio. They’re essentially the same mic, but one allows for inline battery power and the other requires phantom power. I’ve mounted them above so they can record without a lapel mic on. I’m planning on using both lapel mics and recording from the shotgun microphones as well. This should give me four clean sources of audio.

Audio Sync

Audio Sync is something that you can get right if you really work at it. However, it’s tedious work and it requires patience to get right. It seemed to always take too long to do every time I setup another shot. The result was to purchase RedGiant’s PluralEyes. It does the synchronization for me. I did this some time ago and still love it. I do one solid clap at the beginning of the video and the audio sync is rock solid from then on.

Lighting

When I initially setup the studio I had one Interfit Photographic Super Cool Lighting Kit with two lights. I liked them but the Sony SDR-HD11 through the teleprompter really needed a bit more light so I picked up a second set. I also had some issues with shadows on the green screen so I had a custom made floor light made out of a 4 bulb fluorescent fixture. It adds up-lighting to the green screen and resolves – or mitigates the shadows caused by actors. The result is that I’m able to get a clean chroma key now – without too much fiddling. (This is a powerful statement because the Sony Vegas Chroma keyer is pretty lousy.)

Setting the Scene

I could record me standing for training and presentations but the studio didn’t really have a way to set a scene. So I added two director’s chairs and a café table. Doing that spread me out a bit more than I could comfortably get good shots against the green screen so I added some “wing” green screen fabric so that off-angle shots work. With that and the introduction of the rug, it feels like a real set now. I can switch out to one of the other backgrounds if I want to – and I can drop the green screen all together.

Camera Angles and Position

This won’t be a news flash but I am not perfect. When I’m recording I stumble and I don’t get this perfect. When you’re recording 20 minute modules for courses you’re going to make some errors. Some of these errors are normal and make the video feel more real but a few of the stumbles are going to be so big they’ll be distracting if left in the video. So I need to cut them out. This presents a problem because in video recording it looks weird to cut to and from the same camera and angle. I needed to have a separate camera to cut to when I stumbled. Along the way I had picked up a used Canon XH A1 as a second camera. It has a 1440×1080 recording rather than a 1920×1080 recording that most current high-definition cameras have – but it’s more than good enough for what I’m doing.

So I set the teleprompter on one tripod and the Canon XH A1 on another and wove their legs between each other and ended up with a roughly two foot spread between the cameras. The problem with this is that when I needed to cut to the second camera it always looked like I was talking to someone else. I wasn’t looking into the lens any longer. I needed to get the two cameras closer to each other. They needed to be so close that you couldn’t tell that I wasn’t looking at the camera when it was recorded.

The solution to the camera angle problem was to get the cameras closer together but the real question is: how do you do that? The answer, it turns out wasn’t easy. The obvious answer is to put the cameras side-by-side. That would mean putting both cameras behind the glass of the teleprompter. The problem there is that the camera body width – of the Cannon XH A1 is about 8.5″. That means that I needed about 20″ of horizontal glass space to get both cameras to fit. The existing teleprompter wasn’t big enough for that. So the next step was to decide how big to make the new teleprompter.

This led to a lot of math and work to determine what the best answer was and ultimately I decided that there wasn’t a great answer. The studio is about 15’x30′. Because of space behind the green screen and the editing bay being on the opposite side of the room I was actually shooting the scene at a distance of about 12′. Making the teleprompter bigger would mean that it couldn’t sit between the two racks it was sitting between. From a space management point of view, this was an issue. The solution was to rethink the problem.

The new approach to the camera angle problem eliminated the teleprompter all together and pushed the cameras back another ~8 feet. The additional distance from the camera means that my eye movements aren’t as noticeable even if I’m not technically looking directly at the camera. That also left me open to address some issues. I only had one camera preview monitor. So I added a second camera preview monitor. Because of the longer distance I needed a bigger screen for the slide preview.

I ended up with 2x 27″ camera preview monitors plus a 50″ program (PowerPoint) preview monitor. The next question was mounting. We’re now talking about three monitors of relatively large size plus mounting the two cameras. I looked a lot of solutions and finally decided on the overkill answer. I decided that I’d take box truss that is used for building stage lighting rigs and I’d use that as my stand. I selected a seven foot twelve inch box truss and then I got a 30″ base plate to attach it to. I decided to put it so that one of the points was facing forward so I could clamp everything onto the center.

The next challenge was how to mount the preview monitors to the truss. For that I started with some truss quick release clamps. For the 27″ monitors I used a three monitor vertical desk mount. This takes a bit of explaining. Buying nice mounts for the monitors that would tilt and swivel quickly would have been very expensive. With this solution I could cut the vertical pipe into sections and then attach the clamps to the pipe then the monitor mounts to the pipe. It gives me a great deal of fine control over height and also allows for a nice tilt able, tunable mount for the monitors. For the 50″ TV I used a Wall Mount and then adapted it to attach two of the quick clamps to it. (I had to put a larger hole in the bracket to accommodate the 10M screws on the quick clamps.)

The final component of the mounting was the cameras. I wanted to bring them forward and closer together since the truss is 12″ apart and I could really get the cameras closer. Here I used a set of L-Brackets that were affixed to the quick clamp then another L bracket affixed to that. I then used a mini-ball head to mount the camera on for fine positioning. The solution wasn’t awful but there was a fair amount of wiggle so I replaced them with some custom made brackets based off of ¾” box tubing. The benefit to the design here was that the box tubing provides a stable horizontal surface and I could design them with a counter weight so that the screw affixing the bracket to the quick clamp could be counterweighted so that there was less tendency to sag. They’re perfect and with the mini-ball heads I am actually getting the mounting so the cameras appear to be mounted to the top edge of the 50′ screen.

In the previous setup, getting the camera positioned correctly with the correct zoom was always tricky because you couldn’t tell what the camera in the teleprompter was actually shooting when you’re the only one in the studio. The weight of the curtain (to stop light getting in the one-way glass and ruining the mirror) and the micro adjustments in the positioning meant that you could get close to positioning but it would always “drift” a bit. I recorded several modules of courses with a bad video position that I had to fix because of this. Changing to the new tower – and eliminating the teleprompter more than resolved any issues I had with the cameras moving because I can literally see everything that’s happening.

Color Match

Having one camera behind one-way glass for the teleprompter and the other camera directly shooting subjects and having two different cameras – from two different manufacturers – resulted in a different color profile for the two different cameras. I did some work to get the two cameras to match in color and brightness and was able to get them closer together. However, getting the color profiles to be a close match turned out to be a much harder problem than I had anticipated. I’m sure I could have used software to solve the problem if I had to – but I knew it would never be perfect. I ended up shooting some color matching sheets and then comparing relative values to get some curves that were close… it was just a lot of work and I knew it would be hours of math and reshooting to get something that was barely passable (in my eyes).

The solution for color matching became easy. Get the two cameras the same and don’t shoot one behind a teleprompter and the other not. So I ordered a second Canon XH A1 and a Focus FS-5 (which is effectively identical to the FS-CV I had with the other camera). With two 3 CCD cameras that are white balanced to the same target the results are indistinguishable from one another.

Audio/Video Capture Issues

When I got the Canon XH A1 it came with a Focus Enhancements FS-CV hard disk recorder. (Focus Enhancements was purchased by Vitec.) The Canon is a tape based camera but has a firewire port capable of delivering 1080. The FS-CV records the video to hard disk. The recorder is great – except that occasionally it decides to drop just a few frames of video and audio when it swaps files.

The Focus Enhancements FS-CV and FS-5 are based on a 120GB 1.8″ hard drive spinning at 4200 RPM. I know this because I disassembled the FS-CV to inspect it after I noticed the dropped frames and audio. I decided that I could replace the 120GB drive with a 128GB KingSpec SSD. I needed to transfer the drive image from the old drive to the new drive but there are plenty of drive cloning tools for that – except that the drive had a ZIF connector. That meant buying a SATA to ZIF adapter so I could connect the drive to the computer to get an image of it. I copied the original to a virtual hard drive (vhd) I then took that image and put it on the KingSpec. The dramatic drive performance boost seems to have resolved the dropped frames and audio. One of the great things about PluralEyes (see Audio Sync above) is that it would show me the gaps in video when the recorder dropped frames – so after several tests I know that I don’t have this problem any longer.

That’s a Wrap – for now

That’s pretty much the list of upgrades for this round. I’m really happy with the results I’m getting and I’m glad to work out a few more bugs so I can focus on creating content.

Book Review-Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours

Robert Bogue May 18, 2015 No Comments

My wife passed along an article to me that Bob Pozen wrote for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement titled “What’s the secret to running effective meetings?” I was intrigued because I had recently written a chapter “Removing Innovation Friction by Improving Meetings” for the Ark Group book Smarter Innovation: Using Interactive Processes to Drive Better Business Results. That intrigue was enough to pick up his book Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours.

Eliminating Waste

Lean manufacturing seeks to strip out of the process anything that doesn’t add value. That intuitively makes sense. If it’s not adding to the product quality or the customer experience, why do it? A friend of mine was telling me about a film school he was running and as a part of that he had several groups. One of the groups was meticulously cataloging shots and aligning the audio with them. They produced a library of shots with great audio. Unfortunately, they did this prior to deciding what shots they wanted to use. As a result they were way behind.

In video production you shoot lots of footage that you think you may use but that you don’t know whether you’ll use or not until you put it all together. By simply filtering first to the shots they would definitely use (or probably use) they could have saved precious hours working on their project.

Pozen speaks about how many groups waste days or weeks at the beginning of a knowledge project gathering information without a clear sense of the key question (or questions) to be answered. Knowing what you’re going to use or potentially use can dramatically reduce your effort.

In another situation I was involved with a clinical study with a very long survey form. The participants were dealing with their health and everyone knew how serious their health condition was so they complied with the pages of survey every six months, however, there were numerous questions on the survey that were never analyzed at all. We failed the step of evaluating how we would – or could potentially – use the results of the data we were collecting.

Thinking Time

Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People implored us to put first things first. He exposed that there are two dimensions to evaluate things on. First, is its urgency – the dimension that most folks particularly multitaskers are suckers for. The second dimension is importance. That is what is going to drive the business or your world forward. If you spend all your time working on the urgent – even the irrelevant urgent – you’ll never have time to work on the important but not urgent. Take a look at the four quadrants formed by these two dimensions:

Few would say that they’re working on things in quadrant four. However, most would quietly admit they’re stuck in quadrant three with the urgent but trivial. The goal is to get to quadrant one with the important and urgent – long enough to get into quadrant two where things are important but not necessarily urgent.

Getting to this place requires the discipline to ignore things in quadrants three and four – or to delegate them. It means having the time to consider your strategies so that you can really understand what is and isn’t important. It’s time to think and time to clarify.

Notice the contrast that this time is time to clarify importance – not to gather reams of data that you may – or may not need. The only data that you should be collecting when you’re trying to determine a strategy – when you’re trying to determine what is important to your long term success – is the data you need to be able to determine the strategy. Don’t spend time tracking down details you won’t need if you decide to go another direction.

Wanted: Productivity Killer Perfectionism

There’s a certain allure to the idea of being perfect. There are many books about marketing including Platform and Demand that in their own way extol the virtues of trying to be perfect. They speak about not cutting corners. They talk about making sure that you have enough time to do things “right.” However, the trick is in defining what “right” is. Ultimately perfectionism locks you into a world where you’re invariably doing things that no one will notice or care about. Perfectionism is often about Must-be-seen-as (See Anatomy of Peace) and not about the work you’re actually doing.

I’m a master of overkill. From a doggie air-lock dual door system for letting the dogs in and out of my office while minimizing heat loss to the 1/10^th inch stainless steel stair noses that are on my steps so they won’t get scuffed or marred. I put in valves that shouldn’t be necessary – including the one that separates the feed to my office that allowed me to deal with a brass fitting underground failing and causing a huge water leak.

I’ve got a tendency towards perfectionism and yet there are still times when I can find solutions that work even when they’re not perfect. My desks, for instance, are made of file cabinets door frames and glass. They’re nice and functional but not necessarily perfect.

Jim Collins probably expresses the balance in Good to Great. The heart of the matter is the balance between being unwavering at your quest for perfection and the awareness that it may not be necessary.

Phases of Writing

When I’m writing a blog post there are three relatively distinct phases. In the first phase, I’m collecting the probable points that I want to make. It is headings or important quotes that I rapidly collect. Immediately following this I start writing those chunks out. I sometimes write them in a different order than I’ve put on the page and often I’ll rearrange the chunks as I’m trying to find a flow that works better. Finally, once all the writing has been done I’ll go back through and reread the whole post to make sure that it ties back together. Pozen mentioned that Ronald Kellog demonstrated that the three phases of writing – planning, translating, and revision – all compete for the same resources in the brain. The solution is simply to split the phases of writing into three blocks.

This idea can be extended to phases of meetings, or phases of other work. There’s a phase when you’re trying to get clarity on what you’re doing and there’s a phase when you’re doing the “real work” and finally a phase to review what you’ve done. Meetings can be well structured to follow this three point breakdown.

Not a Minute Wasted

There was a time while I was going to high school where I was literally going to high school for a half a day (to complete the required credit hours) and working 20 hours a week and taking 10 credit hours at the local community college. I can remember that time. It was hard work but I remember how it crystalized how to get things done. I’d bring in my college business communication homework and I’d do it in my debate class at high school. There wasn’t a minute wasted.

Ends and Means

In our industrialized world we’ve become obsessed with clock watching. We punch time clocks. We stare longingly across the hall at the clock waiting until we can punch out and go home. We’ve become focused on the 40 hour the work week and along the way we’ve forgotten to get anything done. We’ve forgotten about the lack of productivity during those 40 hours.

The real end, our real desire in business, is to get things done. More importantly we want to get things done that lead the business towards its goals – both financial and otherwise. I was taking a tour of a GM plant in Saginaw, Michigan while I was in school. I noticed some of the workers sitting beside their lines reading the newspaper. It was the oddest thing. I expected that the managers would be angry at the workers who were “clearly” not tending to their work. Maybe they were on break.

Our escort kindly explained that those were the most valuable workers in the plant. He further explained that when they were sitting idly by the line, it was running smoothly and cars were being produced. When they were working the line was stopped and no cars were being made. The managers were quite happy that the workers were able to keep their machines running without much intervention.

That’s real awareness of the ends desired – car production vs. the means – workers actually “working.”

Speaking in Public

Jerry Seinfeld once said “to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” I can’t count the number of people – including a number of folks on the speaking circuit – who have said to me that they could never do standup comedy. (See I am a Comedian) While I freely admit in the post that it’s a scary proposition, I can’t say that getting up in front of a group to speak is a fear – or even a concern – any longer. I’ve been doing it for years and so it’s just a part of the business. Though Mark Twain said “There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.” Hopefully you’ll allow that I disagree with the quote. However, I know through my coaching of others that it can be a scary place.

I think that there are two things that I can offer about speaking in front of others. First, Mark Twain’s quote is accurate for most of the population. If you’re scared of public speaking so is the audience. So my recommendation is to humbly acknowledge – but do not dwell – on it. Something as simple as “No matter how many times that I do this I still get nervous in front of a group so do you mind if I ask if any of you have any rotten tomatoes with you?” It acknowledges the fear and makes light of it. You’ve instantly connected with your audience and instead of it being you vs. them, it’s that you’re all taking a journey together.

The second tip is to play a modified game of “worst case scenario.” I say modified because the way some people play this game we’re all going to be flung into a black hole and die. That’s not exactly realistic or probable. To play worst case scenario you look for the worst possible case. For instance, it might be that they’ll throw tomatoes at you – though this is unlikely. So the worst case is you’ll get some free fruit – a bit bruised – but free. You could say that you’ll be fired. However, the likelihood of being fired for speaking poorly one time is pretty remote too. It’s more likely you’ll get some speaking training. So what’s the worst thing that can happen? (I’ll refrain from telling you the story of being rushed by a patron while on the comedy stage.)

The Ethics of Business

Do you believe that your organization is ethical? In 2011 only one in ten employees said they felt like their organizations were ethical. Part of the problem with this is that it allows for the least common denominator. If you have one manager in your organization who you feel is unethical you’re likely to say that the organization isn’t ethical. However, the other part of this alarming statistic is the relatively little weight that we offer to maintaining our ethical boundaries. Few people spend time understanding their values (See Who Am I) to know what their ethics are. And there’s no guarantee that your values and boundaries are the same as mine – so I may still not believe you are ethical.

Ethics are tricky business but having your team believe that the leaders are ethical has a real impact on employee satisfaction and retention so seeking to develop a sense of internal ethics can pay dividends in lower employee retention costs.

Plenty of Praise

Charles Schwab said “Be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” Frederick Herzberg in his classic Harvard Business Review article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees” ranks recognition as second only to achievement. We all want to feel like we’re good at what we do. (See mastery in Drive.) Extreme Productivity suggests that one way to productivity is through praising your subordinates even going to such lengths as sending mail to the parents of top executive’s parents thanking them for raising such amazing children.

Encourage Criticism

While the staple food for subordinates may be praise, the food that leaders need most is criticism. While it may seem like an opposite response from praise, one of the things that leaders don’t get enough of is constructive criticism and questioning. All too often subordinates are unable to overcome the power differential to ask their leader whether the path that is being marched down is the right path – or whether there are factors the leader may not have considered. Criticism is never something that people truly enjoy all the time. Leaders will invariably send the wrong message by wincing at some scathing criticism. They’ll invariably reinforce the cultural norms of not speaking up – unless they’re conscious about it.

While speaking with a friend he mentioned that his manager had recently had a change of attitude and had started asking about what she could do to improve things. When my friend started gently moving down this path the manager bristled and started to defend the situation and the decisions. The result was that my friend decided that it wasn’t worth providing constructive criticism because it wouldn’t be received well. As a result he’s quietly fulfilling his duties to the best of his ability and waiting for a better opportunity to come along. The opportunity that was created for him to share was too quickly shutdown and it’s unlikely he’ll open up again – to that manager.

Cows Path

Pozen ends Extreme Productivity by admitting that he never had a grand plan for his career. He worked hard. He made decisions that left his options open. He learned. For the most part in his career he went where the winds lead him. Leaving your options open is a very lean manufacturing thing to do. The idea of reversible decisions is an important component to lean. However, in an age where celebrities are quite willing to share that they’ve had a singular focus for their lives the idea that someone who has a measure of notoriety admits to just trying to make each day better is a refreshing change. In my career I’ve found that I ended up where I was based more on chance than intention.

While I don’t think that by reading Extreme Productivity you’ll instantly become as successful as Pozen, I do believe that you have to pour into yourself and that by reading Extreme Productivity will be doing that. It’s an opportunity to pick up a few new tricks, a new perspective, and maybe a few extra minutes to enjoy life.

Public Speaking