Balancing individual safety and freedom of choice

Valuation as a topic has been on my mind of late and so when I hear or see it as a topic of discussion I'm easily drawn in.  Today it was a story, actually an interview by Steve Inskeep, on NPR with Raj Patel who recently wrote The value of Nothing and "says that cheap, market prices let us avoid paying the true costs of things."

His argument goes beyond referencing including the price of externalities--it's one of indirect consequences of how we may enjoy something and yet not recognize the potential for harm it comprises.  His example is about potato chips or other foods and the consequence of eating too many resulting in diabetes and obesity and the subsequent impact on all of our health care costs.  I haven't read the book, but I have been reading Deborah Stone on the Policy of Paradox and recognize that there is some natural contradictions in freedom of choice.

In other words, if we eat the potato chips freely do we also freely accept that it may lead to obesity and perhaps diabetes?  Stone makes a far more elaborate argument on basic principles such as liberty, security and how to negotiate that line between intervention to avoid harm and preservation of what in America we believe to be fundamental inalienable rights...

To quote from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Obviously,  how these things get balanced is very much a function of how Safety and Happiness are determined.

re-organizing

As I found myself ripping out of the New York Times, Paul Samuelson's lengthy obituary for future reference,  I found myself forced to confront old habits and my laggard adaptation of new technologies.  After all I am a creature of habit, and I continue to derive comfort from perusing the NY Times in its concrete fully delivered at my doorstep version.  I also enjoy the choices that the editors have made on story placement, including the choice of break in its continuity that forces me  put my interest into pause while I determine the level of my interest to either immediately flip further into the newspaper to resume reading or to glance about the rest of the page for further opening paragraphs before continuing on.


I've had an online subscription to the NYTimes for over a decade, and it's true that when my time is limited it's an easy way to get a glance at the news...but in spite of their offers to permit me to customize my home page or the digest that I receive daily to include topics of interest, I haven't.  I enjoy the serendipity of reading the paper as laid out by the editors.  Why you ask, especially if you've been to my home and noticed that I'm reluctant to throw away the paper until I've had a chance to at least peruse it, which means it inevitably piles up and creates a backlog, similar in size to the unread New Yorkers, that are also available to me online. 


In preparation for my family's descent I was forced to clear space and thus pack away my fully arrayed scribbles, magazines opened to specific articles and books that I've been reading as part of my ongoing research.  I organize globally very reluctantly, once put away or separated neatly I find it difficult to re-access. The ubiquity of new tools and technologies on the web offer solutions and repositories simple enough to use permitting both easy retrieval, tagging or reminders as to the contents' topics, and most advantageous ability to share these with others.

When I first explored delicious and digg, I honestly didn't fully get a good feel for its future value.  In part, because my scepticism exceeded the perceived value of the benefits.  After all how many times had I relied on a technology solution only to have it fully displaced and rendered obsolete and all the infromation lost. For example, I'm not talking about storing data on floppy disks though I could, I'm talking about diskettes that stored some very valuable code that I'll never be able to read in part because I didn't realize that the disk itself would in time be unreadable.  I didn't want to risk storing tags and precisous articles for future reference in a website that would disappear? 

Well Delicious seems to have had some stability and the benefits are now clearly flattening my skepticism.  I've been tagging much more actively and what's even better is having my own personal library at my fingertips.   Though the NYTimes prefers that you use their own storage files for articles, I routinely move them to delicious as I prefer one repository rather than multiples.  I'm not likely to give up tearing articles out of the paper, but you can bet that I'll also be tagging them.  I've also recognized that for sharing with various teams articles of interest, emailing them is ridiculous.  I have embraced using wikis and ushering as many of my ad hoc network committees to utilize a shared site.  I was able to instantly index using my tags on delicious to find articles of interest to share on collaboration and post them on a wiki site for further consideration of the group.  Using this shared workspace will allow us to keep track of comments and decisions without having to keep a stack of emails.  The technology is now got my attention and I'm doing what I can to give it more traction as ultimately it will save me from having to re-organize later. 

story sharing

I dropped into the IIT ID Design Research Conference for the express purpose of listening and learning and seeing what new strategies for myself might emerge.
I was not disappointed though I didn't get an opportunity to listen in on the talks, I did catch up with a couple of friends who summarized what I missed.
My intention was to talk to students in order to prepare for teaching in the winter. I wanted to learn firsthand what ideas were exciting them and to hear the language they use to express their own thoughts.

I owe a couple of thanks.
one to serendipity...it's never enough to think by merely being in a place at a given moment that something will come. Rather, so much of life and conversation is owed to how much we are willing to expose our thoughts, probe beyond the surface level of noise, whether visual or tactical and purposefully engage in a conversation.
secondly my hats are off to the student organizers who quite willingly were able to put me in touch with other students. I was able to determine that I could readily establish some common ground, engage in active listening and discovered great joy at the prospect of deepening relationships with the diversity of students attending IIT ID.

But this is all filling time and space and though I could go on, I want to share the art of questioning.

I met a series of students who asked logically, rationally what was my preferred methodology.
Since I don't have a design methodology and rather than use the canned answer "it depends," I opted to explore the question. I talked about collaboration, and found myself expressing what is often a barrier to collaboration...individuals need to be right and therefore unwilling to give up ground or to actual present a position. Conversely, if we were to openly listen to someone's tweak, question and challenge of our position, we might find new ways to incorporate the new aspects or dimensions of their input and arrive at a new shared understanding/new position.

But something more interesting ocurred. I listened to the students and asked if they really meant what they said about story...and of course one covered for the other making an honest apology for the other's misstatement. But as we deconstructed the comment, the other began to understand that story is too easy a metaphor and as a result not very evoking of a greater understanding. we than pondered story in a variety of genres and that's where it became clearer what and why story really is about for the individual ...the natural narrative.

learning in decision-making

People sometimes stumble upon the truth, but usually they pick themselves up and hurry about their business....Winston Churchill

For the last few days, I've had the pleasure of revisiting the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, research I first experienced as a graduate student studying with Hillel Einhorn. Thus, the reason I include the Churchill quote. Check out the article I wrote on this topic for smartpeople magazine

How and whether we make sense of information when presented is a function of the length and care exercised when we engage BOTH of our thought systems--the intuitive and the reasoning portions. The rapidity in which we reach a conclusion or recognize a person, situation indicates the likely absence of a full evaluation of all the information received as input. In contrast if we tried to more fully process the multitudes of input we acquire in any given moment, we would be momentarily paralyzed, incapable of making any decision irrespective of its magnitude. Plenty of our natural responses are involuntary..for example, walking while talking. One explanation of autism, expresses the inability of the brain to invoke the automatic response resulting in the inability of the brain to filter or suppress inputs based on their familiarity.

But when the input is a little less familiar, or we seek to engage our internal reasoning additional time and reflection is needed. It is also why feedback and engagement from more than one sensory input helps us further distill and draw deeper value from the information presented. Multi-sensory engagement, not mere passive input further aid and thus enhance our decision making ability.

Our rapid fire automatic response capabilities are often quite useful. Then again, the first answer, judgment or expectation that our brain provides may cut short the full contextual evaluation that may serve us better. By taking a few more moments, days or even weeks to evaluate the fit or association of the information we've obtained relative to the the context in which we encountered it may lead to a more robust "rational" decision.

Gut instincts represent an ability to think and process information quickly. In the case in which they reflect responses learned over time , they enable an autopilot function. In a crisis or emergency, the automatic, rather than the delayed, engaged information process is critical. For example, the nurse who recognizes heart attack symptoms quickly, the firefighter who can unconsciously react to subtle cues not overtly apparent to the casual observer or the inexperienced firefighter.

Acquiring experience is inevitable, but learning from the experience is not.

Raising Caine

Bill Maher has recently made a movie entitled Religulous...a contraction I suspect of religion and ridiculous...which in short his summary perspective on those who are of religious faith, or more pointedly believe in what he finds to be myths that are a little too incredulous.

maybe its the combination of religion and incredulous that led to the concoction of his title. Maher himself talks about the fact that he is merely doubtful ...not agnostic, not atheistic just doubts that there is merit in the teachings of a great many of the major religions that have captivated the American population. He does not explore the eastern religions but he does include islam.

The effort to question the rationality of believers amidst a seemingly irrational world in which so many violent /destructive behaviors are fueled by religion or religious philosophy is a worthy question. Are those of faith really exercising their logical faculties or have they merely put them aside for reasons of faith? The less surety or confidence in our own resourcefulness the more likely it appears we are to follow even the most absurd of stories that are the basic teachings of many of the world's religions. Adam and Eve created simultaneously with animals that existed in another era, or the story of immaculate conception or the story of Sodom and Gomorroh and Lot's righteousness in giving his daughters to save the angels...not exactly the most moral or defensible of tales.

But what he fails to offer is an alternative. It's one thing to point out the absurdity and another to strike out to create an alternative. Does he support a leaderless model for mankind...a ouiji board without any gimmicks way of moving forward in the world?

If there is a leadership model Bold enough to step us forward into the unknown, lead in the face of uncertainty is it collective wisdom? Whether you believe that collective to be a majority, plurality or system based on unanimity is an expression of our willingness to be like reeds, flexible or strong and fast like the cedars. Hey not my comparison, but one found in the book of ecclisastes. The poetryin this book of verse remains far more powerful than the provocations Maher has attempted, besides Pete Seeger and the Byrds made it more tuneful and easy to keep ever mindful.
To everything, turn, turn turn.......

grasping for a strategy

I attended the Illinois Institute of Technology Entrepreneur Center's monthly mixer in oreder to learn more about Threadless. Of course, I had forgotten that the Center brings the organization in but does not require any type of presentation. That worked out well.
I had the opportunity to meet someone who is in the product development business. We spoke about learning strategy and also a little about knowledge management.

I will do my best to repiece together the conversation.

Imagine that you are two weeks on the job and an emergency arises and your boss asks you to put something together on a topic you really don't have a handle on. There is of course a limit to how many questions you can redirect to your boss. You want to be able to assure your boss of that their decision to hire you was wise, and yet you don't feel wise enough to perform the task. You need more information and you have not yet met anyone in the company and barely have a good handle on what the various departments do let alone who in the organization would be helpful without exposing your ignorance.
In short, you need a network and you need information stat.

Scenario 1, you call your old network and find out what they know and lean heavily on them for information and links to resources and put together a frame that still doesn't have the imprint of an insider's perspective. This might be suitable, but the emergency involves an area of great sensitivity and it is not something that should come to light outside the organization. This greatly limits your ability to share enough information to others to really help you.

Scenario 2, the new organization has an internal online social network that you have not yet mastered. You decide that there's no time to waste and begin the process of learning who's who and their areas of expertise. you make lunch dates and set up a series of coffee meetings on the ruse of merely wanting to get to know them and see how you in your new role might be able to help them in their role etc.

After a few days, your boss has heard a report from one of his peers that you have become quite the social butterly and wonders what the hell is going on. They are old school and have been with the company for over a decade, are well connected and have yet to understand the new online network and in fact blew off the requisite training a few months back. He confronts you.

I'm not sure I like either scenario but it certainly does outline some of the ongoing barriers to infromation sharing both internally and also when leaning on outside expertise.

Is this familiar?
what are the right strategies for this person, and how should the firm support that strategy?
Please share your reactions and thoughts.

Getting off the Dime

Are you unable to move from a (stagnating) position? The dime is the (physically) smallest U.S. coin, making it difficult to grasp and the subject of metaphor.

In other words, "Getting off the dime" is more than telling someone emotionally paralyzed, unable or unwilling to decide to act, to change, but hasn't....

To be "on a dime" or "off a dime" most likely derives from an older saying: "This car stops on a dime..." where the rest of the original statement is usually omitted, "... and leaves a nickel change." If so, then "on a dime" would equate with being at a standstill, or making no progress at all. "Off a dime" and "get off the dime" would then be the same as saying, "get busy, start moving, make progress", etc.

A similar expression derives from Arthur Miller's usage of the phrase in one of his many plays. Although I couldn't track down the play itself (and therefore cannot be certain of this person's derivation), it is supposedly a line spoken by one of the characters to another who is emotionally unable or unwilling to move forward.

Further speculation suggests that the phrase, "Mister, have you gotta a dime?" (supposedly a common phrase uttered by more than a few down-and-outers during the Great Depression, and, according to the source you read, either the price of a meal or a bottle) is the truer source where this phrase springs. In this case, "on a dime" would be someone who's very tight with his money (support, goods, etc.); "off the dime" would be a generous soul; and "get off the dime" would equate with "stop being so nitpicky..."

Either way, the metaphor has entered the American lexicon and we can explore it practically as well as conceptually.