Gumption

Data "Mining" vs. Data "Oursing": On the Integration and Integrity of Data, People and Organizations (Len Silverston)

[The following article was written by my good friend, Len Silverston, founder of Universal Data Models, who is an inspiring thinker, writer and speaker, but not a blogger (yet). It weaves together many threads I've touched on about before -- radical transparency, us vs. them and the business value of openness, integrity, vulnerability and compassion -- and introduces a marvelously evocative and potentially viral new term -- "data oursing" -- that captures the essence of the siloing practices by people and organizations. He graciously agreed to let me post this on his behalf.]

How can we truly develop integrated information? Data management groups have struggled with the realization of this goal. Many of the people in organizations that I have witnessed have said (and I paraphrase):   

“We need to understand and implement best practices from other organization who have succeeded.”
“We need top level management commitment.”
“We need business buy-in.”
”We need to demonstrate value.”
“We need proper incentives in place to motivate people and organizations to share and manage information on an enterprise wide basis.”

It seems like these are all intelligent and appropriate statements that are important in developing more integrated information.

I want to share a hypothesis with you - one of the biggest issues in developing integrated information is data “mining” and what is really needed, at the core of this issue, is data “ours”ing. You may be thinking of data mining as in, “the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns”. I am not referring to this definition, but a new alternative definition for data mining meaning, “acting in a manner where this data is mine”  As an example, John did not share company information as he was “data mining”, declaring that the customer contact information was “his” own personal information that he collected and thus declared “this data in mine – not the company’s or anyone else’s”.

Data “mining” is a root cause of not being able to integrate data – data silos come from people silos.

While there is much written on the need for data integration, it also seems that people and organizations have had a great deal of trouble in integrating data. I have given talks to thousands of data management professionals representing hundreds of organizations and when I ask the question, “Who has successfully integrated their data?”, very few people claim huge successes. Why is this?

According to dictionary.com, the definition of integrate is “to bring together or incorporate (parts) into a whole” and the definition of disintegrate it is “to separate into parts or lose intactness or solidness; break up; deteriorate”. 

When people and/or departments within an enterprise act too often in a manner where “this data is mine” and thus are “data mining”, then people and organizations move towards separation and disintegration. When people move towards disintegration, data becomes disintegrated. Data silos come from people silos.

Consider one common example that occurs in many organizations. A sales person maintains data regarding their customer contacts. Perhaps there is an enterprise-wide customer contact database to facilitate sharing and synchronization to enable data consistency, cross-selling, collaboration, and more effective sales and service.   

Enter data “mining”. The salesperson may think “I understand the benefits of an enterprise-wide customer database but this customer data is mine!”.  I even brought in some of this data from a previous employer and this is how I make my livelihood for my family. I am doing a good thing by providing to my family and by protecting my personal customer contact information. If I share it with others who I don’t even know then they could mess it up, misinterpret it or misuse it.

This type of thinking makes a customer data integration effort very difficult and I believe that it is a core underlying issue that results in lost power for the enterprise. If we each think separately, our data will be separate. I have worked in many organizations where there are over 100 sources of inconsistent customer information and after many years of efforts, they have still been unable to integrate customer information across their enterprise.

This type of thinking happens in many different circumstances. Here are a couple, but this list could go on indefinitely.

• A department not wanting to share “their” department’s data into an enterprise data warehouse, master data management system, or enterprise data management effort. Sound familiar?
  
  
• Government agencies not wanting to share critical information about counter-terrorism. This illustrates that lives are sometimes at stake if we don’t appropriately share. For example, in the September 11th incident, there were two hijackers that were on the FBI’s most wanted list and another two hijackers who had expired visas and the airlines did not have access to this information. There may have been regulations, privacy, and security considerations that hindered sharing. But could we have shared this data more effectively and were there motivations of not wanting to share?

I want to stress that there are many good reasons and situations where people should not share data freely even in the above scenarios or, for example, in a human resources department that is responsible for securing sensitive information.

Be the change you want to see in the world

What can we do? Mahatma Gandhi said "Be the change you want to see in the world".  If we each share more and consider data to be “ours” as opposed to “mine” more often, then I believe we will move towards data integration as opposed to data disintegration.

Here is an exercise that you can do and that you can share with others to do:

- Identify one of your most valuable pieces of data.   
- Ask the question “Do you completely own it?”
- How willing are you to share it and under what conditions will you share it?

The point of this exercise is to experience the feeling of data “mining” and get a clearer understanding of how data separation occurs, our underlying motivations, enabling us to act wisely and influence an appropriate level of data sharing.

So I invite you to conduct this exercise with me. What is one of the most valuable pieces of information that you own? Look at this data that you declare that you “own” and that is “your” data. For example, I have spent decades of my life working on a repository of re-usable data models that my company publishes and licenses called the Universal Data Model Repository. I would consider this one of the most valuable pieces of data that I own. What type of data is valuable to you? Is it personal data, intellectual property, corporate data, confidential data or some other type of data?

Do you completely own it?  I am not saying that you don’t - it may very well be your data. However, is this data really “yours” and not “ours”? Are you absolutely sure that this is “your” data or is it “our” data? Could it be that others own it, for example, your employer? Could it be that no one really owns it? For example, is the Universal Data Model Repository of template data models something that I, Len Silverston, own? Or is it something that my organization owns? Under intellectual property law, my organization has copyrights and trademarks, so there may be legal ownership. However, others have
contributed many ideas to these template models for which I am so grateful. So at a deep level, are the ideas contributed by others owned by me? I must admit, that right now as I write, I feel a certain amount of discomfort (and data mining). Hey, I spent a great deal of my career on this repository of models! I own this. I have paid for this by paying others and with my time. So, data “mining” arises. I do have certain legal rights regarding this data and at one level there is ownership by my company, Universal Data Models, LLC.

On another level, I cannot personally claim ownership to many of the ideas and if I spend too much energy towards these being “my” ideas and “my” data, then they would not be as shared and integrated into the industry where they can be of greater benefit.

How willing are you to share “your” data or information? A thought that runs through my mind is that, ooh, the more I freely share “my” data the more I am at risk of losing power! For example, I may have to trust someone or some organization not to copy these models indiscriminately! 

Some people have said to me, don’t publish your ideas so easy, it is a competitive advantage to offer these through my consulting practice. My personal experience has been that sharing these models through books and publications has been so gratifying to me in so many ways and has benefited so many people and organizations around the world. Sometimes I charge for sharing this work and sometimes I don’t. Data is an asset. So when to charge and when not?  What do you need in order to share your valuable data?

The benefits of information sharing and data “ours”ing can be realized and cultures can be changed to produce extremely positive outcomes. For example, a Fortune Magazine article [Seagate's Three-Day Revolution] told the story of how Seagate Technologies returned to financial health based on a change in culture from being “divided into vertical silos” to “putting group genius to work”, a buzz phrase from Matt Taylor, who developed a collaboration process called DesignShop that was used by Seagate and many other firms to help change culture via Capgemini’s Accelerated Solution Environment.  As a consultant, I have been involved in a few remarkable examples of the power of sharing information and data “ours”ing. For example, in a large financial services organization, the healthy environment that was developed enabled an enterprise wide system where there was appropriate sharing of client information throughout the enterprise, as well as with the clients, resulting in much better service levels.

Invitation to Share

Perhaps the next time someone is reluctant to share their data in a data warehouse, master data management or data management effort, we can better understand the behavior and influence more powerful and collaborative behavior. 

I invite us to share more and be an example of moving towards data integration versus data disintegration. I invite us to see data more as ours and less as “mine”. I invite us to move from people silos towards people integration and thus move towards data integration. I also invite us to share ideas about this topic with each other. I welcome any feedback from you and any thoughts regarding how we can move from data “mining” to data “ours”ing. Thank you.

[Thank you, Len!]

Data, Judgments, Feelings and Wants: A Path toward Clarity

I was talking with some colleagues this morning about recognizing and resolving misunderstandings and [other] conflicts. I mentioned a few different perspectives and processes that I've used, and sent along some references. I've blogged about two of them before: the four agreements and love and logic. I was surprised to discover I'd never blogged about a third process, nor could I discover any other references for it on the web. It is the clearing process I learned as part of the Mankind Project.

The core of the process is distinguishing between data, judgments, feelings and wants, and recognizing that each person is simply a mirror for me (and I am simply a mirror for others). When I feel a "charge" about something that someone has said (or not said) or done (or not done), I can clear that charge by recognizing, articulating and processing four dimensions of the energy I'm feeling about the [in]action:

• Data: what are the observable facts involved in the situation: things that have been said or done (or not said or not done), by me or the other person(s)?
• Judgments: what inferences do I draw from those data, e.g., how do I judge the other(s), and/or how do I judge that he/she/they judge me?
• Feelings: how do I feel about those judgments and data, i.e., glad, sad, mad or afraid?
• Wants: given these feelings, judgments and data, what is it I really want (for myself)?

Learning how to distinguish effectively between data and judgments is a challenging (and ongoing) process. I often think of negative judgments such as "you don't respect me" or "you don't take me seriously" as data, but increasingly recognize them as judgments. Getting clear about the actual feelings is also challenging, as the surface level anger I sometimes feel is often a mask for fear. Early on, my wants often revolved around what I wanted from another person (e.g., "I want you to love me") and it is only with persistent practice that I can better realize the value of focusing on wants for myself ("I want to love myself ... regardless of whether I judge that anyone else loves me").

I've omitted a step from the list above, in which I may reflect on how the charge I feel is really about me (radical personal responsibility), and [when appropriate] to go back to the first time I felt the feelings and judgments that are creating the charge. This often occurs between the feelings and wants steps, but I can't think of a good one-word description for this step. It typically results in yet another example of "lessons are repeated as often as necessary".

The framework is powerful, and I've often applied it outside of MKP contexts. I was surprised that googling for "data judgments feelings wants" did not turn up anything I recognized as relevant to MKP (and hope that I'm not violating some principle in revealing the process here). However, the search turned up some interesting items, e.g.,

The Four Preferences: Do we rely on our five senses and want concrete, practical data to work with? ... Most decisions involve some Thinking and some Feeling. ...

ISTJ Personal Growth: An ISTJ's feeling of success depends upon being able to use their ... Their hyper-vigilant judgments about the rationality and competence of others may be a ...

As I've noted before, I'm an ENFP ... and although I haven't noted it before, my wife, Amy, is an ISTJ, and so this google-based serendipitous discovery of potential differences in perspectives regarding judgments, feelings and wants is rather illuminating (in my judgment).

Mutual Inspiration and the Wealth of Networks

I have been very slowly reading and digesting The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, by Yochai Benkler. It is truly a labor of love. The more I read, the more I am convinced that this is book is / will be a significant part of the canon for the paradigm shift represented by Web 2.0.  But it is not, by any stretch, an easy read -- I'm averaging around 5 minutes per page ... reminding me of the richness and density of materials I studied when I was a philosophy major at Ripon College (where my page reading rate was often even slower, e.g., for Heidegger and Sartre).

The Wealth of Networks describes how the increasing availability of tools for producing information, knowledge and culture is changing the nature of society. Participation in commons-based peer-production -- and sharing -- is an increasingly important component in the emerging networked information economy, to the point where it offers an alternative to the more traditional market-based proprietary production and transaction models that have characterized industrial society. As we enter the post-industrial era, the physical capital requirements that gave rise to hierarchical organizations of labor are diminished, enabling more people to participate in production -- individually, or through more loosely configured networks -- based on a greater variety of motivations (self-expression, religious or political fervor, hobby, community-seeking) than financial return on investment. Or at least, that's my current take on it, after reading about a third of the book so far.

Last night, as I was reading about Autonomy, Mass Media and Non-Market Information Producers in Chapter 5 (Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information and Law), I came across a passage describing three hypothetical storytelling societies -- the Reds, the Blues and the Greens (and I'm sure that any allusions to political parties or characterizations is purely coincidental) -- that I found particularly inspiring.  First, some background:

Among the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he or she alone decides which stories to tell.

Among the Blues, the storyteller is elected every night by simple majority vote.

Every member of the community is eligible to offer him- or herself as that night's storyteller, and every member is eligible to vote.

Among the Greens, people tell stories all day, and everywhere.

Everyone tells stories.

People stop and listen if they wish, sometimes in small groups of two or three, sometimes in very large groups.

Stories in each of these societies play a very important role in understanding and evaluating the world.

They are the way people describe the world as they know it.

They serve as testing grounds to imagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out what is good and desirable and what is bad and undesirable.

This focus on the importance of stories resonated deeply with me, as I increasingly see stories as the primary channel for interrelating with each other. In particular, the emphasis on everyone not just being able to listen to others' stories but to tell their stories is significant.  I've often read, thought and written about input, processing and output, and believe that output is crucial for effective processing of input. When I am reading something, an intention to write about it really helps motivate me to understand it more thoroughly, which is one of the many reasons I enjoy the practice of blogging. And, I'm only half way through the book, and I was already concerned that I'd be too overwhelmed by information, knowledge and culture overload by the end to write anything coherent (in a short space). So when I came across the following passage, I decided to post an entry just about this, and not worry (so much) about the bigger picture:

Since the stories play a substantive role in individuals' perceptions of how they might live their lives, that practical difference [between evening-only vs. anytime storytelling] alters the capacity of individual Blues and Greens to perceive a wide and diverse set of options, as well as to exercise control over their perceptions and evaluations of options open for living their lives and to exercise the freedom themselves to be storytellers.

...

Gertrude [a Green] has many more stories and storytelling settings to choose from, and many more instances where she can offer her own stories to others in her society.

She, and everyone else in her society, can be exposed to a wider variety of conceptions of how life can and ought to be lived.

This wider diversity of perceptions gives her greater choice and increases her ability to compose her own life story out of the more varied materials at her disposal.

She can be more self-authored than either Ron [a Red] or Bob [a Blue].

This diversity replicates, in large measure, the range of perceptions of how one might live a life that can be found among all Greens, precisely because the storytelling customs make every Green a potential storyteller, a potential source of information and inspiration about how one might live one's life. [emphasis mine]

That is, the Green society thrives [in part] through mutual inspiration! Yes! This is what really keeps me coming back to blogging. Although I write my blog primarily for my own benefit (and as I've noted earlier, in a post on unfolding through blogging, I'm increasingly aware that anything I say or write in any medium is primarily, if not solely, for my own benefit), I am always delighted, and often surprised, to discover that, occasionally, something I've written turns out to be of interest, use or perhaps even inspiration for someone else. And, of course, blogging offers a great channel for me to process the inspiration I glean from others' blogs, books and other media. Dan Oestreich's most recent post, about Leading is Not Acting: What Roles Do You Play?, incorporating comments to his blog as well as other bloggers' posts, is an excellent illustration of mutual inspiration in the blogosphere ... and offers some interesting insights into the stories we make up and tell about ourselves.

So this idea of mutual inspiration propelling the blogosphere (if not the entire emerging networked information economy that Benkler writes of) reminded me of mutual information:

In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information, or transinformation, of two random variables is a quantity that measures the mutual dependence of the two variables. [from Wikipedia]

Mutual information statistics underly many of the relevancy algorithms used in information retrieval and machine learning. As more and more people utilize various dimensions of the architecture of participation represented by Web 2.0, and the notion of a person as a user (consumer) is transformed into the notion of person as a participant (producer and consumer), perhaps these traditional measures of mutual information can be refined to capture and process mutual inspiration, as reflected in the cross-linking conversations that emerge in the blogosphere. I wouldn't be surprise if some elements of inspiration are already included in the information used by search engines, but I suspect there is room for an alternative approach that places greater emphasis on the stories we tell to and about each other.

Stumbling on Happiness: Simulation, Surrogation, Attachment and Service

Dan Gilbert gave an inspiring talk at Microsoft Research recently (before heading into Seattle to present to a larger audience at Town Hall), sharing some insights from his book Stumbling on Happiness.  Dan provided numerous opportunities to experience "learning through laughing" as he guided us through an engaging, enlightening and often delightful exploration into how well we tend to predict our own happiness (short answer: not very well).  I've been thinking (and blogging) a bit about happiness lately, and I find his diagnosis of the problems of misremembering the past, misperceiving the present and misimagining the future to be very compelling.  However, I don't find the solution he proposes to the problems of happiness to be entirely satisfying ... but will try not to let that disappointment taint my memory of the book or the talk.  Instead, I will invoke some other perspectives on the prospects for happiness, and muse a bit on how Web 2.0 provides tools that may help us stumble toward happiness.

Dan weaves together themes from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics -- complemented by numerous quotes from Shakespeare -- to support the following four claims regarding the way most of us approach, or stumble on, happiness:

• Much of what we know is dead wrong
• Much of what we predict is dead wrong
• Much of what we learn from experience is, at best, extremely compromised
• There is another strategy, but few are willing to adopt it

What we "know" is based on our memories, and the way we both store and retrieve memories is prone to bias.  Rather than store full-length feature films of our experiences, our brains extract relevant features -- typically, aspects that are unusual or unexpected, and involve strong emotions -- and store those.  When we later remember an experience, our brain acts as a "talented forger" and fabricates the missing pieces -- retrieving and reweaving -- which may or may not correspond very closely to the actual experiences.  Add to that the bias of feature selection that occurs when memories are stored, and one might reasonably question whether we really know anything at all (indeed, it was just this question that led me to abandon my study of philosophy toward the end of my college career in favor of computer science, a field where the problems seemed more tractable).

The gaps in memory are exacerbated when we use our past to predict our future:

If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls. Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick.

And so, we often unconsciously rely upon our subjective experience of the present to project (or simulate) how we are likely to feel about possible futures.  And our projections of possible negative futures do not take into account our psychological immune system, which enables us to be very creative in fabricating positive new perspectives in the face of what may have earlier appeared as devastating misfortunes: "when we can't change our experience ... we change our view of the experience".

Our inability or unwillingness to appreciate this resiliency leads us to avoid risks.  I'm [often] reminded of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem, The Invitation, in which she asks:

I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

Dan applies a more academic analysis to this question:

... most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.

In addition to our tendency to err in our assessment of future risks, we also err in our ability to learn from past experiences.  We tend to remember rare and unusual experiences, and then generalize based on the unusual aspects of infrequently occurring events ... ignoring ordinary or frequently occurring events ... and not taking into adequate account the range of events that have not occurred.  This may help us identify potential risks and rewards, but leaves us poorly equipped to assess the actual likelihood of those risks and rewards.

This brings me to one of the areas I disagree with the book: its warning about the "troubling consequences" that arise from "unrealistic optimism".  Imagining positive futures can lead people to overestimate the likelihood that positive events will occur, but I don't see why that is troubling, nor did the book shed more light on the negative consequences.  In fact, other psychological studies have demonstrated that visualizing success can be instrumental in achieving that success. 

I asked Dan about this after his talk, and he said that optimism is a matter of degree, and that an outlook that is slightly more positive than warranted is probably ideal.  However, given all the foregoing about how little we actually know about ourselves, correctly determining the correct level of optimism that might be warranted would seem to be problematic.  In another section of the book, Dan notes that

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

So if the brain wants happiness, it seems that the best policy may be to err on the side of positive extremism ... or to adapt a quote from Barry Goldwater, extremism in the cause of positivism is no vice.

After highlighting the many problems inherent in trying to simulate our future happiness, Dan proposes an alternate approach, based on the idea of a surrogate: rather than relying solely on our selves (and our fallible memories) to imagine how happy we will feel in some future state, we should capitalize on the experience of others by inquiring about the happiness of those who are already in the future state we are considering.  Of course, then the problem is figuring out which others we ought to consult in estimating our future, an objection that Dan anticipates, and responds to by noting that we tend to overestimate our uniqueness, and so are often unwilling to believe that others' experiences of happiness or unhappiness would readily translate into our own.

On the one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse the notion that our commonalities are far broader and deeper than our differences.  I also believe that focusing on differences reinforces the us vs. them (and, in particular, the U.S. vs. them) mentality that makes it easy to be hard on others.  And one of my favorite quotes is "strangers are simply friends who haven't met yet".

All that said, there is still a part of me that is attached to the idea that there are important differences in what makes each of us happy.  Dan notes a study in which a group of stuffed volunteers were asked to predict how much they would enjoy eating potato chips the next day; those who based their predictions on a report from a random potato chip eater (someone who had been there, done that) were more accurate than those who relied solely on their own imaginations (and stuffed bellies).  Unfortunately, I consider potato chips to be a poor surrogate for analyzing how one should make choices about bigger decisions regarding where to live, where to work, and whom to marry (or partner with).

Rather than get random reports from others who are experiencing the future states we are considering, we are increasingly able to get more specialized reports from the future by people who are like us in interesting and useful ways.  For example, the vast majority of media productions -- books, movies, television, music -- do not bring me happiness, and yet there must be critical masses of other people who do feel happy as they consume them.   If I were to make my media consumption choices based on random sampling, I do not believe I would be very happy.  Instead, I want to know what media people like me like.

The Internet is making it easier to find such people, explicitly or implicitly.  For example, the explicit ratings and reviews found on Amazon.com make it one of my favorite places to go for making my media purchase decisions.  While the Amazon recommendations, based on implicitly matching my explicit purchase history with others' purchase histories, often miss the mark, I have found that similar kinds of collaborative filtering techniques enable MovieLens to recommend  movies I typically am interested in seeing and MusicStrands to recommend music tracks I typically want to listen to.

Web 2.0 is ushering in an era where we can reveal much more about ourselves than our media consumption patterns (not to diminish how much these patterns do reveal about us -- I am always interested in scanning the bookshelves and CD collections of people I meet).  By offering more people greater opportunities to express themselves in words, photos and videos, we are in a better position than ever before to discover people who are like us, and thereby to find the people like us who have already had experiences that are outcomes of choices we are currently considering.

Dan makes many insightful observations -- often phrased in pithy ways -- throughout the book.  In fact, one of the challenges I've faced in trying to post a few notes on his book (and talk) is in selecting just a few of the observations to focus on.  One of the most illuminating observations identifies the importance of feeling important:

Being effective -- changing things, influencing things, making things happen -- is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control. ... Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy. ...  We want -- and we should want -- to control the direction of our boat because some futures are better than others, and even from this distance, we should be able to tell which are which.

I'm reminded of M. Scott Peck's observation that for an infant, it is natural to defecate in one's pants, but that most of us eventually learn unnatural responses to this basic human urge.  I think most of us (myself included) do not progress very far beyond this urge to control, to influence, to matter.  However, as noted above, Dan shows that people are able to adapt to and be happy in the face of a broad range of previously imagined "worse futures", leading me to question how much all this striving for happiness -- or trying to matter -- really matters.  Maybe the key -- or a key -- to happiness is to learn not to focus so much on controlling or influencing outcomes, but to live without attachments.  Don't try to be happy, be happy.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer, in her audiobook Your Heart's Prayer, echoes this sentiment, telling us that to be happy, it doesn't really matter what we do, only how we do it, and that bringing all of who we are to everything we do is the best path to happiness.  She also notes that alleviating the suffering of others figures prominently in the paths to happiness of many people.  This notion of being in service to others does not figure prominently in Dan's analyses, and yet helper's high seems to be highly correlated with happiness in many people.

Perhaps this can be easily accommodated within Dan's proposed solution to happiness by simply expanding on his notion of surrogation, and make it a two-way orientation.  In addition to seeking assistance from others who are already where [we think] we want to be, we can offer assistance to others from where we are now.

I don't know if any of the foregoing will be of any use or assistance to others, but I do know that I feel happy to have finally processed some of the thoughts and feelings that have been floating around my head and heart since I first encountered this book on happiness.

[Update, 2006-06-17: BoingBoing posted a link (via Avi) to an MP3 of Dan Gilbert's talk at SxSW entitled How to do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times.]

[Update, 2006-07-10: Dan Gilbert has a blog!  While reading his book, I sensed that he and I shared a number of things about which we feel happy, e.g., Kauaii sunsets, Talisker scotch, Bordeaux wine, Starbucks coffee, Monty Python, Frank Zappa and Miles Davis.  Now it appears that we also share a keen interest in An Inconvenient Truth -- not that we feel happy about it -- and I highly recommend his blog post on It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine, which includes a copy of his LA Times op-ed article on If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming.]

Everyone's a Customer: The Importance of Empathy, Respect and Helpfulness

I increasingly see how a variety of roles in society might be viewed from a customer service (or customer care) perspective, and how all our interactions can be seen as manifestations of customer relationship management ... and how we all might be better off if more members of society adopted this view, especially those in authority roles, such as doctors, teachers, corporate executives and politicians.

Whenever I start focusing on something new -- buying a car, siring a child, or learning a skill or job -- I become keenly aware of examples all around me: suddenly, I see my make and model of car wherever I turn, the world seems filled with pregnant women, or the new skill or job seems universally applicable or useful.  I suspect this perspective shift is at work in the current context, as I seek to learn everything I can about sales, and so everyone seems like a potential customer ... and, actually, I don't think this is a bad thing.  In yet another series of examples of "When the student is ready, the teacher appears", I've been encountering all kinds of teachers who help me better understand the value of customer orientation.

Yesterday, I was listening to the audiobook version of "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell.  In the first chapter, Gladwell describes research by John Gottman and his colleagues into specific affective factors that are highly correlated with successful and unsuccessful marriages (or, more precisely, marriages that last more than or less than 15 years ... I suppose "success" is a value judgment).  The research revealed that contempt and condescension are highly correlated with divorce.  Contempt and condescension is also predictive of another type of legal action: malpractice suits.  A doctor's relationships with his / her patients is a much more significant factor in predicting whether the doctor will be sued for malpractice than any other factor (even, surprisingly, the number of medical errors the doctor commits).  Doctors who spend more time with patients, who treat them with respect rather than condescension -- and yet make mistakes -- don't tend to get sued.  I'm not sure how much this trend benefits the patients, or society -- and I don't want to delve into the malpractice reform controversy (here) -- but I'd argue that this customer service orientation at least benefits the doctors.

Kathy Sierra consistently models a customer care orientation, both by writing her blog posts with her customers (readers) in mind, and by offering guidelines to help other bloggers to be more customer oriented.  She recently provided a Crash Course in Learning Theory in which she shared some of her insights about this orientation:

One formula (of many) for a successful blog is to create a "learning blog". A blog that shares what you know, to help others. Even--or especially--if that means giving away your "secrets". Teaching people to do what you do is one of the best ways we know to grow an audience--an audience of users you want to help.

Kathy goes on to teach by example, sharing her considerable insights and experiences into teaching: the importance of getting and keeping attention and interest, viewing learning as a process of co-creatiion, and relentlessly focusing on -- and making the benefits clear to -- the customer (er, I mean, student).  The notions of empathy, respect and offering meaningful benefits recur throughout many of her blog posts (e.g., on teaching and advertising), and I expect she would concur that a stronger customer care orientation on the part of teachers would be A Good Thing.

As I mentioned previously, Dan Fine espouses a rather comprehensive view of one's customers, including in that set a broad range of people with whom we regularly interact in a business context: vendors, employees, partners, media, investors or people who purchase your product or service.  The unifying theme is that you need to "sell" a compelling value proposition to all of these stakeholders. I was reflecting on this view during my recent equity negotiations with a potential partner ... and how important it is not only to treat all prospective customers with respect, but also to cultivate a relationship of mutual respect (as would also be the case with doctors and teachers).

Politicians are another group that sometimes appears to lack a customer care orientation.  As with doctors who are sued for malpractice, I wonder whether politicians such as Tom Delay would be in their current legal predicaments if they were more inclined toward empathy, respect and helpfulness.  Perhaps part of the problem is who they view as their customers ... and perhaps I have too narrow a view of who a politician's customers are ... or ought to be.

[Update, 2006-01-24: after further rumination, I'm adding two new paragraphs (directly below) that I don't think warrant a separate post.]

I admit to not being entirely clear about who my customers are.  The proactive display applications developed by Interrelativity are designed to facilitate networking ("interrelating") among people attending an event by showing content from attendees' online profiles on a large computer display when those people are nearby (creating "tickets to talk").  I don't expect that attendees themselves will pay extra -- directly -- for the enhanced networking opportunities, but rather that event hosts and/or sponsors would pay for our services, and I'm exploring other potential groups that might value some exposure on a proactive display.  Thus, there are different value propositions for different stakeholders, each with different costs and benefits, which adds complexity as well as potentially conflicting goals.

Having different groups of stakeholders may also be part of the customer orientation problems in the other examples listed above.  Doctors (in this country) tend to be paid primarily by insurance companies, rather than their patients ... and I don't get the sense that there is a strong tradition of empathy, respect and helpfulness in the relationships between medical professionals and insurance professionals.  Perhaps this lack of full, direct payment interferes with the perception of the patient as a customer on the part of some doctors.  Teachers often do not get paid directly by the customers they have the most interaction with (students), and in the case of K-12 public school teachers, they don't even get paid directly by another group of customers (the students' parents and guardians), and so the intermediating layers may similarly complicate the adoption of a customer care orientation -- by some teachers -- toward their students.  And, while we, the people, typically pay the salaries as well as vote for our elected officials, there is not a direct payment connection between most constituents and politicians.  Politicians have a broad array of people and groups who may offer them financial and other types of compensation -- with varying degrees of directness -- for their attention to specific interests ... and so it's hardly surprising that some politicians may have different ideas about their customer base: who they are really serving (and why).

In general, I think it's difficult to clearly distinguish customers and potential customers from people will never be -- or know -- any customers or potential customers ... which is a powerful motivation to always be a mensch.

iPods, Soma, and Turning On, Tuning In, Dropping Out

Alex Pang has written an insightful and provocative article entitled "From iPod to ourpod: Will it become a more social machine" in the Mercury News, in which he talks about the evolution of personal music technologies (including transistor radios, Sony Walkmans, and portable CD players) that have enabled us to carry our music with us.  Younger people have naturally gravitated toward such devices, as they allow users to escape from being subjected to the musical dictates of their parents (and other authorities). The Applie iPod represents the most advanced instrument for the construction and maintenance of this personal musical space. 

Alex points to a number of interesting social dimensions of widespread iPod use, such as podjacking (momentarily plugging one's earbuds into another's iPod) and the sharing of playlists on a computer network, and references a futuristic scenario sketched out by Clay Shirky involving group playlists dynamically constructed at a bar.  [I recently blogged about a number of other prototypes that illustrate community-oriented possibilities for technology and music.]  However, I do not believe that iPods themselves will lead to stronger community bonds, and, in fact, believe that such personal devices will lead to more technology-enhanced isolation, as iPod users can more effectively ignore the people -- and sounds -- around them while on an "iPod holiday" ... similar to the antisocial effects of WiFi laptop users who can ignore the people in their physical community (even when physically present in "third places" with high levels of community and social interaction) while tunneling out to their virtual communities, many of whom wear earbuds, presumably to reinforce the walls of the virtual tunnel.

Reading the article, I was reminded of Timothy Leary's famous "turn on, tune in, drop out" catch-phrase from the 1960s ... and although I don't want to make too much of an analogy between iPods and psychadelic drugs, I do think that iPod addiction is a potential risk.  I was also, in turn, reminded of the recreational drug soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World:

"Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds."

"I don't understand anything," she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. "Nothing. Least of all," she continued in another tone "why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly."

I agree with Alex' claims that people often have very strong intimate connections to individual pieces of music, and that listening to those pieces of music can evoke powerful emotions.  I also believe that emotionally charged revelations -- including revealing one's most intimate musical experiences -- can foster stronger connections with others (and in fact, I recently experienced this through the emails I received after I wrote about a very strong emotional reaction to CSN's Long Time Gone).  However, I believe that the iPod devices themselves are just another brick in the wall of social isolation.

One World: Disasters and Responses

Listening to, reading and watching news reports of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I'm struck by the refrain of terms that reminds me of human responses to other disasters, natural and man-made.  Injuries, death, destruction, sickness, shortages of electricity, water, food, shelter and medical care, inadequate preparation and/or slow response by the authorities, refugees, refugee camps, despair, desperation, violence, looting, sniper, shoot-to-kill.

The song "One Love, One Heart" by Bob Marley keeps running through my head, as I see the parallels to other examples of human suffering in Asia (following the tsunami), Iraq and countless other places. 

Let's get together to fight this Holy Armageddon (One love)
So when the Man comes there will be no, no doom (One song)
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation

Sayin', "One love, one heart
Let's get together and feel all right."
I'm pleading to mankind (One love)
Oh, Lord (One heart) Whoa.

I'm also reminded of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's ideas about "us and them" in response to the 9/11 attacks in the US, and how it applies more generally to suffering and our responses to it.

I ask, "How can I BE the peace I want to see in the world, today?" Not, how can I CREATE the peace- but how can I BE it- because it becomes clearer and clearer to me that violence and war are not just "out there" but also inside me.

She goes on to suggest that we can either try to identify and empathize with others, or seek to differentiate others from ourselves; essentially choosing to view others as "us" or "them".  She gives examples about substituting "some of us" for "them" or "they" as we think about what others have done (and I would extend this to what others are going through).  In her audiobook "Your Heart's Prayer", she further extends this from "some of us" to "sometimes I".

I believe that most people, placed in similar circumstances, will tend to have similar responses, with respect to their feelings, thoughts, actions and reactions.  I also believe that people can learn new, possibly "unnatural", ways of feeling, thinking and acting (Scott Peck, in "The Road Less Traveled", ponts out that it is natural to defecate in one's pants, but most of us learn new behaviors in this dimension of life).  Oriah Mountain Dreamer, in her poem, "The Invitation", says:

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I can empathize with the suffering and the responses to that suffering in the wake of hurricanes, tsunamis, military invasions and diseases.  I hope that these events will create openings and opportunities for people to rise to meet their challenges in a loving and compassionate way. 

"Let's get together and feel all right".

Reciprocal Self-Disclosure

I spent a delightful hour reading "Hello, My Name is Scott: Wearing Nametags for a Friendlier Society", by Scott Ginsberg, yesterday (while waiting for a McCrea wine tasting to start).  Scott has worn a nametag every day since October 2000 because "it makes people friendlier and more sociable and also helps them remember my name."

I earlier posted a bit about Scott's front porch philosophy; today I want to elaborate on another topic Scott covers: reciprocal self-disclosure.  One of the many interesting recurring reactions Scott has encountered is that people are more likely to verbally introduce themselves to him, presumably because he has already visually introduced himself (via his nametag) to them.

This reciprocal name exchange is an example of self disclosure, which is the act of making yourself manifest.  The reason people are significantly more willing to give me their names as soon as we begin the conversation is because self disclosure is reciprocal respective to the level of intimacy that you have revealed.  In short, when you tell someone something about yourself, e.g., your name, they will be likely to tell you that same thing about themselves.

Googling "reciprocal self dislosure" reveals a number of studies that have explored this topic, including one focusing on Internet surveys and another focused on sexual satisfaction ... and I imagine it's only a matter of time before a study of reciprocal self-disclosure in sexually-oriented Internet sites is conducted.  Scott considers his entire life to be one grand experiment, and while his experiment may not have the scientific rigor of some of these other studies -- although he does report on what might be considered an ablation study wherein he goes without his nametag for a week -- he far exceeds them in longitudinality.

This morning, after reading an article in the May issue of Worthwhile Magazine about "How Full is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life", by Tom Rath and Donald Clifton, I believe another way of thinking about this reciprocity might be "reciprocal bucket-filling" -- nametag-inspired conversations allow the conversants to fill each other's buckets with positive energy.  Towards the end of his book, Scott shares a story about how he was lifted out of a bad mood through a conversation with a stranger that was triggered by Scott's nametag.  I'll wait to elaborate further on this theme until I have a chance to read the bucket book.