Practice Creativity

Watch the practice creativity video
I know many people who read this newsletter are engaged in work that involves being creative. It is an integral part of my work and life--coming up with new ideas and ways of solving all sorts of problems and creating new opportunities.

Think about your life and education. Were you ever taught how to be creative? Did you attend a workshop, take a course, formally learn how to practice this skill? Or did you just pick it up yourself?

For something so important to many, this central skill is often left to each of us to figure out how to develop on our own.

Making things has been central to my practice of creativity-- sketching out a new idea in a notebook, making a schedule for a new project, taking a picture while out on a family walk, each of these creative activities helps provide continuous inertia to stay in a creative mindset. I realized early on that even if my job title was "designer", which you would assume was an inherently creative job, the everyday practice of creativity was often missing in the process of making new products inside the structure of an organization.

Writing, drawing, filming, photography. It does not matter what it is, the simple act of making something helps fuel my creativity. Every time I make something, it feels like I am filling up my creativity tank, practicing the skill of thinking independently from the world and imagining something new.

Recently, I took this practice and turned it into a project over a month. Every day I took 5 seconds of video of something that struck me as unique on that day. At the end of the month, I edited all the clips together and added a soundtrack (supplied by my budding 8-year-old guitar player Luca).

The simple act of making each day was a reminder that creativity is a practice and a focus on moving your awareness to a different place for a period of time, a place you want to be.

Check out the video and think about your own creative practice. What projects can you do each day to help you find your voice and shift your focus on the things that matter most to you?

Sustainable creativity

Sustainable creativity is a workshop I have given several times over the last three months to a wide range of groups and organizations. The idea is to show people a system to generate ideas and in doing so allow them to sustain their creativity for the rest of their lives. Well, that’s part of the workshop. The other part happens after I stop talking, when the participants use the space that has been created to share the inventive ways they sustain their creativity. People have shared everything from setting up a standing monthly meeting with a group of like-minded people to writing jokes for a stand-up comedy class. The workshop enables people to get into the right mindset to talk about their ideas. 

It sounds simple—talking about ideas—but let me illustrate the issue with a metaphor. 

Let’s say that instead of talking about ideas, you like playing tennis. 

You ask your neighbor who also likes playing tennis to a game. You both like the idea of a game but realize you don’t live near a tennis court, so you both decide to just start playing tennis in the street, with all the cars and pedestrians and with no court makings.How do you think that game is going to turn out? 

Distracted, chaotic, not fun at all. 

This is frequently what it’s like when you try to talk about ideas with someone without making space for it. You can have the conversation, but too often everyday life gets in the way. And, with no guidelines and constraints (like a tennis court) to guide the conversation, you get distracted, neither of you is clear on where the conversation is going, and no one knows when it might end. 

With this workshop I am making a space for ideas, a metaphorical tennis court to be used to discuss ideas and creativity onto which I can invite people to play. 

I made this video version of a portion of this workshop to share one part of the tennis court. Perhaps if you watch it with a friend or colleague it can give you a productive space to play, think, and talk about the ideas which you find fascinating. Without ideas it is hard to change culture and if culture does not change we only repeat our mistakes. Please take a moment to watch the video and step onto the court of ideas. 

If your organization—or one you know of—could use some help creating a new space for talking about ideas, let me know, and we’ll find a time to book a workshop and set up the court.  

Progress not perfection

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” ― Chuck Close

I look at the huge pile of washing up in the sink. In my head I’m thinking, this would take forever to do and it wouldn't be more fun to watch that new Netflix series right now? But instead of giving up on the washing up, I make a bargain with myself. I’ll devote the next ten minutes to this task and get as much done as I can and then go back to the things I really want to do. So I do. I focus and spend the next 10 minutes doing the pile of washing in front of me. Surprisingly, I get it all done.

Anxiety about doing something is often caused by our need to complete something. If instead you focus on the process and try not for completion but for progress, you gain control over the situation. Instead of perfect completion, you are making progress.

For example, if every day you did the washing up in the sink and got 90% of it done, in 10 mins a day you would have clean cups and dishes and a mostly empty sink. Or, you can avoid it completely because you’re daunted by completing the task, resulting in a larger pile of dirty dishes and not having anything to eat on.

“You may say, “I must do something this afternoon,” but actually there is no “this afternoon.” We do things one after the other. That is all.”
- Shunryū Suzuki

Dirty dishes are one thing, but most things in life are never 100% complete. There is always more to do and letting go of the anxiety of completion and embracing the idea of progress will open the door to completing more of the projects you care about but feel are too large to take on. Using what I call a design mindset can help.

My way to solve my washing up predicament shows two key attributes of a design mindset.

First, there’s iteration:
Focus on the process. Each iteration of the design/activity gets you closer. Everything is a work in progress.

Next, there are constraints:
Constraints allow you to impose some order on an activity. In creating limitations, you help creativity get started in ways that productively solve the problem of the constraint. And, as we all know getting started is often the hardest part of completing anything. Time can be a constraint, as can limiting the number of tools you use to make a project or the number of words you can use to describe your project’s value. Each constraint creates a natural challenge—don't go overboard and set too many constraints, but one or two can boost your creativity.

The next time you have to complete a task instead of worrying about how long it will take, turn the question around: I am going to give this task the next 10, 20, 30 mins of my life, and let see how much I can get done. Using this method gives you control of the time and the task. Instead of setting goals for yourself, set yourself challenges, and surprise yourself with how much progress you can make in just 10 minutes. Repeat this every day and you will be amazed at how much progress you can make.

The numbers trap

More and more data and metrics play a significant role in my life as a designer of digital products. You can measure everything about an end-user; how often do they visit your product? What do they look at for and for how long? What do they buy…? The numbers are endless, and yet in my experience they tell only half the story.

A while ago I was working on a project that made this clear. When I met with the metrics team they would confidently tell me that there were four types of users who exhibited different behaviors when they visited our website service. For example, one kind of user would linger on the site, while another kind of person would immediately find the content they needed and make a purchase. To me, this seemed odd—who were these four different kinds of people?

But the metrics told us that there were four types of users and we should customize the experience of our service around these four user types, because the customer is always right, right?

One day a colleague who was curious about this data visited a call center to hear what people did when they called in to buy products instead of buying them directly from the website. While listening to the calls something interesting happened; a person would call in to buy something and just before they were about to buy they would hesitate and rethink their purchase. The call center operator told my colleague to just wait, the customer who had hesitated would call back in a little while.

Sure enough, the customer called back. They had resolved to buy the product but had a few more questions. Once again they got to the point of purchase and then found a reason not to go through with it. Again, the call center operator said the customer would call back. And they did—two more times. On the final call they made their purchase almost immediately, having gotten all the facts and justified to themselves that they really needed the product through the earlier calls.

What was interesting was that this behavior matched the online data, which had been interpreted as identifying four different types of customers. What the data had not told us was that this wasn’t four different types of people, but was in fact one person exhibiting four different types of behavior over time as they made their mind up to make a purchase.

Connecting this qualitative data to the quantitative data revealed a much richer picture of what was going on and how people were making decisions. This changed our outlook on what we were making, and how we should design the product to accommodate these different behaviors and needs.

Too often one-dimensional mass data is used to make decisions. Even worse than our misinterpreted data, many types of data are deeply flawed, don’t measure what they purport to, or are biased, like IQ tests. And many crucial things have no reliable measurement, like how much pain a person is in.

Data and its analysis rules much of our lives, from taxes to healthcare, and yet much of what is important cannot be measured directly and often has no measurement at all. In the upcoming couple of posts, I will explore some of these examples which cover money, the brain, and the body, and show how often what we think are facts are in reality just half the story.

Designing Culture

The first Seven Up documentary was made by Michael Apted in 1964. The British documentary's premise was to follow the development of 14 children from different socioeconomic classes from the age of 7 onward. They would interview the kids every 7 years for the next 55 years. The idea was to see if the kids’ personalities and opportunities at age 7 might indicate how they would evolve into adults. The ninth film in the series, 63 Up, came out in 2019.
 
The arc of the documentaries shows people growing up and changing as the complex individuals they are, while also showing how the impacts of social class remain strong throughout their lives. It turns out that the design of the environment around them determines a lot of this future behavior and possibility; the people they interact with, the signals supplied by culture, and their class all affect each person in the series deeply. 
 
Culture is designed, like our cars or our buildings. But unlike objects, the decisions that shape dominant culture are reproduced over time and the only way to change the culture is to redesign it completely, not just to change the outcomes but to change the mechanics of how it works. 
 
I recently watched a clip from Bill Moyers’ documentary featured in the New York Times article “A Racist Attack on Children Was Taped in 1975. We Found Them.” It shows how a group of young Black children ran into a white supremacist rally right in the middle of Queens, New York in the ’70s. They did not expect it, but there it was. It is heartbreaking to see and hear the stories of these children who were attacked by this rally, and how that event still affects the adults they are now. 

Yet, what also keeps nagging at me is that not a single person in the crowd of anti-Black protestors could be traced. Culture is formed by what you see and who you talk to, and when you are young that is powerful. There were many white children and teens participating in that white supremacist rally and all of them are now adults with kids of their own. Raised in, and having perpetuated, a culture of racism, have they redesigned a new culture for themselves, their kids, and most importantly their wider community, or is it the same design pattern repeating itself today? 

As we think about how to redesign culture together, creating new spaces for conversation seems more important than ever, let me leave you with this thought and method for doing that from the excellent book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg: 

“When … someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good!”

Omelet Design

The intention-based design approach

Making an omelet could be easier. There are thousands of online videos and cookbooks to help you with a task like this, yet people still find it difficult to start or to know exactly what to do.
 
While it sounds like a simple task, the tools and information you are given are often inexact or don’t fit your situation. You’re missing the right ingredients, you don’t have the right type of equipment, or you don’t understand the technique to make something.
 
Taking what I call an intention-based design approach to this problem will shed light on both the structure of the problem and the solution.
 
Intention-based design at its best breaks down a problem into stages. It looks at the issues you face, the needs that you have, and the type of tools or technology required to help you solve your problem or complete your task. 
 
Let's break it down like this. 

 
1. Before you start cooking, do you have the right equipment to cook the omelet?
+ If the answer is no then a good solution should provide you with a list of places in your neighborhood that can sell you the right pieces of equipment. 
 
2. Do you have the right ingredients to cook the omelet?
+ First, you need a list of ingredients (most cookbooks provide this)
+ Then, if you don’t have them, you need a list of places in your neighborhood where you can buy the right ingredients. 
 
3. Do you know the right technique to cook the omelet?
+ If the answer is no to this question then you should have a simple video that shows you the right technique for combining the ingredients and cooking the omelet. 

Now that we’ve broken down the structure of the problem, we have to look at what currently exists to solve the three parts of the problem outlined above. 
 
The primary cookery education tools--cookbooks and online videos--solve only the third part of the problem (technique). They do not really touch on the first two parts of the problem, and if they do they do not provide you with a solution of where to get these items. 
 
By contrast, a cookery solution designed through an intention-based design approach would provide answers to all parts of the problem and would sequence the answers so that you have all the things you need to make a delicious omelet and avoid the frustration of having the wrong equipment, the wrong ingredients, or a lack of understanding of the technique.
 
By missing important parts of a problem, solutions can often make simple things much harder. As designers, it’s important to articulate all aspects of the problem, as well as our users’ intent, before coming up with a solution. The intention-based design approach I use breaks down the problem and connects the parts of a user’s journey to create a cohesive whole experience that provides the right information, tools, and advice just when a person needs them most. 

Being decent

Since the May 25th murder of George Floyd, and the weeks-long protests that it (and so much other violence) has sparked, there has been an awakening in American culture to the long history of injustice that African Americans have endured. And this has led people to ask a series of questions. Why is there so much racism? How did it start? Am I a racist?
 
While these are indeed important questions, their answers can sometimes address only the symptoms rather than the causes of the problem. 
 
Asking whether you are a racist seems a very low bar for our culture--yet, though of course we have yet to meet this basic requirement. The even bigger question is, are you a decent human being?
 
If, when you look at a situation that involves injustice, you answer “no” to the question of “would I like that to happen to me?”, then speaking up and standing for what is right is the decent thing to do. We cannot all be perfect, but we can all be decent, we can all treat others in the way we would like to be treated. 
 
The books below are for readers who want to be even more than not-racist, who want to be genuinely decent human beings, something a culture can be built on. 


Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?” 
 
“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied” 
 
“Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.” 



1491 by Charles C. Mann

 “When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on the earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile as China or India.”
 
“After Cortes, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620-25, it was 750,000, “approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed. “ Cook and Borah calculate that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960’s”



Contested City by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

“...these definitions [of community, collaboration, and public] are mutable, unfixed, and that making your own definitions clear and being clear about those of your collaborators, while seeing and making visible who has the power to set them, are at the center of this kind of work. It takes a specific kind of thinking and strength of will to question ideas that people think are simple or agreed upon. It takes a similar kind of thinking and strength to query or reject the premises, rules, and baselines of planning processes that city governments present to communities and neighborhoods as defining the realm of the possible. Without this kind of thinking and strength, our work isn’t worth doing.”



American Dreamer by John C. Culver

“Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity”
 
“More than four thousand committees had been set up to administer the farm programs at the local level, making it the most decentralized and democratically participatory federal program in the nation’s history”
 


The mismeasurement of man by Stephen Jay Gould
 
“But science’s potential as an instrument for identifying the cultural constraints upon it cannot be fully realized until scientists give up the twin myths of objectivity and inexorable march toward truth.”
 
“Yet, beyond this obvious desire to remove the superficial effects of clearly acquired knowledge, Binet declined to define and speculate upon the meaning of the score he assigned to each child. Intelligence, Binet proclaimed, is too complex to capture with a single number. This number, later called IQ, is only a rough, empirical guide constructed for a limited, practical purpose:”
 
“Not only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; he also refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limited purpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a practical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indicated a need for special education—those who we would today call learning disabled or mildly retarded.”



Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman
 
“The most common cause of infant mortality in the United States is parental beating.”
 
“As McLuhan has said, there is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
 
“as the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.”
 
“Future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.”
 
“Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”


Bind us Apart by Nicholas Guyatt
 
“Racial separation had become the most popular means of imagining a world after slavery... And Abraham Lincoln, in the first years of his presidency, did more to secure government support for black emigration than any politician since James Monroe.”
 
“In 1824, President James Monroe told Congress that Indian nations should move west of the Mississippi, where the federal government might more easily manage their journey toward “civilization.”
 
“Slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.”
 
“From the seventeenth century, runaway slaves took refuge in Indian country, often becoming full members of Indian communities. This infuriated southern slaveholders and became the cause of considerable tension on the borders of white settlement. But as southern Indians adopted rudiments of the “civilizing” program around the turn of the nineteenth century, they borrowed one marker of respectability from the white planters rushing toward their lands: Native Americans began to practice forms of captivity that increasingly resembled the chattel slavery of the southern United States.”



The March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman

“The belief that the government knows best was voiced at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on the resumption of the bombing ” we ought all to support the president. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against”. This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a Stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. “foreign policy decisions,” concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study “are in general much more influenced by irrational motives” than are domestic ones.”
 
” no one is so sure of his premise as the man who knows too little”


Letter from a Birmingham jail cell by Martin Luther King Jr.
 
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” 
 
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” 
 
“Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.” 

Forgotten by design

Let's imagine a situation where we take 50% of the earth's population and ignore their financial, health, work, and safety needs, and this ignorance is not accidental but is instead systemic. Now imagine that this is so deep-rooted that when a global research study speaks with members of this 50% disenfranchised group they themselves distrust the ability of the humans in this group to perform tasks as capably as the other 50% of humans. 
 
The following collection of articles shows how deeply-rooted cultural and systemic bias against women can run. The articles show just how broad this bias goes and how deeply it hurts our culture to keep these biased systems and practices in place. 
 
Looking at my own field of design, I find it deeply disturbing how thoroughly we have decided to ignore half the population in so many of the design and policy decisions we make. These pieces collected here show that in 2020 this bias is as strong as ever.


Culture 
Study finds 90% of people are biased against women
“The number of female heads of government is lower today than five years ago with only 10 women in such positions in 193 countries, down from 15 in 2014.”


Sports
No more ‘pink it and shrink it’ as women get boots made for women’s feet at last
“Adidas introduced its first women's soccer shoe in 1995. Superstar Mia Hamm played an integral role in designing Nike's answer to this shoe.”


Safety
Invisible Women
“Car crash test dummies are also generally male, based on an average man, which of course means they feature different sizes and proportions than a typical female. The tacit assumption is that the 50th-percentile cis male is the average person, skipping over around half of the population entirely. This approach ignores anatomical differences, plus specific individual circumstances like a person being pregnant. These tests impact design and are part of the reason women are far more likely to be injured or die in a car crash. Even in places where “female” dummies are brought in to test cars, these figures are often just scaled-down male dummies with the same basic shape.”


Finance
Women in financial services are tackling an underserved market: themselves
“A top management consulting firm has called women its “single largest underserved group of customers”. According to a recent report financial services firms - this in banking, insurance, and wealth/asset management are leaving $700 billion in revenue on the table by using assumptions that are built around men’s careers and not offering solutions that address the realities of women’s lives.”


Art 
Baltimore Museum of Art will only acquire works from women next year: ‘You have to do something radical
“We’re attempting to correct our own canon,” Bedford said. “We recognize the blind spots we have had in the past, and we are taking the initiative to do something about them."


Health 
The healthcare system thinks helping women is bad for business
“Women are receiving lower-quality care and ultimately paying more for care than men, with worse outcomes. This is true of all women, but women who are poor and women of color have notably worse experiences with the healthcare system, including higher death rates.”

Conference rooms change culture

Maybe you’ve had that moment when you walk into an office and are looking for a conference room, and the room you’re looking for is named something generic like “Manhattan”, even though you are in Los Angeles. Now we also have virtual spaces, zoom rooms, Facebook groups, email lists, and slack channels and we name all of them too. Those names of our highly-used spaces become part of our culture. We refer to them and connect with them daily. 
 
Right now is a time of massive upheaval and uncertainty, but also of change. We have the opportunity to improve and make the world better in large and small ways. 
 
One thing I have learned over many years of designing products and services is that changing people's behavior is not only an intellectual and educational exercise but also a practical one. Change must be fused into people's daily lives and become a new type of habit which is not only embraced by an individual but by the rest of the culture around them. 
 
What if we begin to create new habits in our most common spaces, the spaces of work? What if all companies and groups across the globe changed the names of their conference rooms and virtual meeting rooms to honor significant people in their field, discipline, or industry from underrepresented groups?
 
What if a design studio in New York honored Sylvia Harris, who in her role as creative director for the US Census Bureau’s Census 2000, helped to encourage previously under-represented citizens to participate? Or, Jack Whitten who is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. He also lived for many years in Soho around the corner from many design studios. What if your global consultancy considered honoring Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel prize for economics for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons? 
 
Just as we must say, and never forget, the names of Black people murdered by police, we also need to say the names of the Black people, people of color, and women whose work makes America. When people say these names every day and make them part of their lives, they may become curious as to who these people were and what they contributed to our culture, helping to change the perception of who makes culture and society. Real diversity cannot be attained by a single action, it is a practice which if not encouraged on a daily basis falls to the wayside, making each of our worlds more grey.
 
"In learning about difference, we become less afraid and therefore more courageous. In learning about commonalities, we become more hopeful."
- Neil Postman

Be kind

“There are three ways to ultimate success:
The first way is to be kind.
The second way is to be kind.
The third way is to be kind.”

― Fred Rogers

Kindness is hard to define, you know it when you see it and feel it. A couple of stories from my own life illustrate the power of the practice of kindness, and how it can have a profound effect on both the giver and the receiver. 
 
Copenhagen
On a family vacation to Copenhagen last year we found ourselves walking past the national football stadium.  We had planned to take this route as our son Luca loves football and because it was on the way to a park we wanted to visit. As we walked past the tall steel walls and gates of the stadium we heard a voice from a little ways behind us say “Nice shirt!”  We all turned around to see who had paid my son the compliment. Luca was wearing a Liverpool FC soccer shirt with the name of Mohammed Salah emblazoned across the back of it, (Mo Salah is one of Liverpool's top strikers and also quite an amazing human being: find out more) Luca smiled at the man and what happened next took us all by surprise. The man then asked in a simple and matter of fact way, “do you want to come in and see the stadium?” 
 
This was all Luca wanted to do.  He looked up at my wife and me to see if we would say yes, and of course, we did. 
 
The man, whose name was Martin, was one of the grounds staff and he took his keys out of his pocket and opened one of the large steel doors which led into the stadium. 
 
I have been a soccer fan my whole life and getting to see a national stadium pre-season was just amazing. 
 
But then something more amazing happened, Martin told Luca he could walk on a corner of the newly-laid pitch and for the next twenty minutes, he engaged just with Luca in a conversation about Danish football and the history of the stadium. He did not have to do any of this, he just thought it would be a kind thing to do for a kid who obviously loved football. 
 
I don’t think any of us will ever forget that day: for the amazing opportunity of getting to see something so amazing first hand, but mostly for the kindness of our guide Martin.

 
Happy Memories 
My father had died two weeks before. I had flown back to England just before he died and had stayed to be with family and to make funeral arrangements. Luca and my wife arrived to take part in the Hindu funeral ceremony that would happen the next day. 
 
It was a long day of prayers and ritual and at the end of it, my family came back to our home exhausted and lost in thought about what had happened. 
 
As we all sat in the living room lost in our own thoughts, Luca, who was about 5 at the time, stood up and asked a simple question, “Can you all tell me your happy thoughts about Grandpa?” He had not known his grandfather well, we had visited the UK a few times from New York and he had been very small so he had fuzzy memories of his grandfather. 
 
This one question gave everyone a moment to think about a time and place which made them happy, a happy memory, and for the next hour, Luca got to hear all sorts of happy stories about his grandfather. 
 
This simple act of kindness by Luca helped people talk in a time when talking was the last thing anyone wanted to do but was also the most important thing to do.
 
Being kind is a practice, not a gift, and in times like this, it is important to practice that skill to help yourself and your families through this most unique and difficult of times.

Worker Cogs

I began writing this article before the Covid-19 pandemic. It has long been clear that the constant attack on working people is not sustainable and that these are the very same people who have vital jobs that are keeping our society going, and for which they should receive adequate healthcare and compensation. The current crisis has laid bare just how bad these employer practices are, how much we depend on the people who do the jobs most often treated as cogs in the machine, and how badly our cultural and work systems are designed.

The commodification of workers has been happening for a long while, but the articles collected here show just how much working people today are seen as interchangeable cogs in a corporate machine. Treating people this way leads to worse results, terrible morale, human tragedy, and high turnover rates.

AI and robots are often touted as the next step to making work better and faster, possibly with many fewer humans involved. AI and machines are often good at simple tasks, yet the services and products people want involve complex platforms and sequencing of services far beyond the capacity of any AI.

This Harvard Business Review article Artificial Intelligence for the Real World shows that while many “moonshot” projects have been launched, AI has singularly failed at achieving lofty goals, though it has proven to be useful in more down to earth projects. 

“In 2013, the MD Anderson Cancer Center launched a “moon shot” project: diagnose and recommend treatment plans for certain forms of cancer using IBM’s Watson cognitive system. But in 2017, the project was put on hold after costs topped $62 million—and the system had yet to be used on patients.”

At the same time, too often the simple tasks that AI is used for are inhumane, and damaging to both workers and society, as this article on Amazon's time-off rules makes clear. 

Amazon Workers in Sacramento are Protesting the Company's Strict Time-Off Rules

“They just have a computer program that automatically fires people, no human oversight over what the conditions or concerns might have been.”

In conjunction, we also have the old practices of union-busting reinterpreted for this era, as Elon Musk takes to Twitter to threaten workers trying to unionize

Elon Musk broke US labor laws on Twitter

“These are known as unfair labor practices. And what is the financial penalty for this? There isn’t one.”

Instead, investing in your people seems to be the obvious alternative and yet as noted in the “The future of work will still need humans”, the majority of employers are not taking the time to make assessments of their workers’ current skills or taking the next step of investing in their people.

“The report reveals, however, that there is a distinct lack of understanding among employers today about the skills they have within their workforce. Just 48% of employees said that they had undergone any kind of skills assessment, which makes it difficult to accurately plan to fill whatever gaps might exist.”
From: The future of work will still need humans

Yet it is possible to implement new kinds of work practices that leverage the capacity of technology, keeping the needs of people central. This approach can also contribute to the crucial need to support workers’ growth, and re-skilling, to accommodate what will now be very long careers as birth rates decline across the globe.

For example, BMW began using technology that reduced physical stress for older workers whose decades of work experience made them invaluable to keep on the job. This approach also had an impact on younger workers; the very same machines that help the older workers pick up heavy objects also help younger workers by reducing stress on their bodies and therefore extending and improving their work lives.

Car Factories Turn Robots And Humans Into Co-Workers

Game Changing

Prologue
A quick note, I wrote this post over the 2019 Christmas holiday, and rereading it in our current world makes me even more convinced of how important the control of networks will be going forward. With COVID-19 forcing people to stay home, the network has become the vital channel through which all communications and, to some degree, life flows. So now, more than ever, the idea of who owns these networks and how they are used is crucial to understand and to critique.

In the next few years, video games will see massive changes. These changes will impact the games themselves, as well as determining who will hold financial power in the industry (no longer just the game publishers and platform owners). These shifts will also portend changes far beyond the gaming world; they could shift the way you think about computers and technology. Up until now, computers have been like toasters; the device itself determines what you can make with it. But what happens when you no longer need to own an expensive and limited piece of hardware? What happens when the device could cost $25 dollars but give you access to a supercomputer in the cloud? What could you do with that access, and what are the unintended consequences for you as an individual, for the companies that own this technology, and for culture at large? 
 
For years games were delivered on optical discs or via download; now Google, Microsoft, and Sony have game-streaming subscription services that allow consumers to access anything they want for a monthly fee. In addition, Apple and Google are launching mobile gaming download subscription services which provide another all-you-can-eat option. 
 
Nintendo is moving in a different direction: planning to charge a subscription for just one game—Mario Kart—on mobile. While they’re proposing this new model they also have massive triple-A games like Overwatch coming to their Switch platform. In the end, this may lead to Nintendo becoming the company with the best hardware for the game-streaming world, a cheap portable device that can stream internet content.
 
Yet, other factors are important here. While the advent of 5G makes streaming viable, it also has the potential to create a two-tier market of people with access to bandwidth and people without that access, now that net neutrality is a thing of the past thanks to the current FCC. 
 
This is a new turn of events. For a long time carriers have been the people who provided so-so customer service and phone hardware; they will now suddenly be the people who control the apps on your phone. In the near future, those same carriers (Verizon and AT&T) will also control the TV and advertising networks. This will be the first time companies control the network, content, advertising and (in some cases) the hardware and software. No more downloading, everything is streamed to every device, you no longer own anything but subscribe to both the software and hardware. This sounds like a technology-first, people-second future. 
 
There is an alternative future that could see opportunities for people and companies to connect in new ways. For example, imagine that you run a weekend music festival. Right now no one will download your festival app because it's too hard to find, it's another app on their phone, making a good app is expensive, and what do you do with it once the weekend is over? In a streaming world, the app could be integrated into an advert for the festival; instead of downloading an app, the content is streamed to your phone with an option to buy tickets to the festival. Press the button and your tickets are purchased. No app download, no logging in, no credit card entry. As a festival organizer, you would only pay to have a service app for the week leading up to the event; the app would do just what was needed, and once the event was past it would no longer clutter the App Store. 
 
In choosing what our future looks like with streaming services, technology can shape us or we can shape it.

Design is murder

Inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Jules Maigret, I’ve come to see that design and detective work (the fictional and possibly even the non-fictional kind) share some illuminating common elements: piecing together clues from many small pieces of information; putting these pieces back together in different configurations, and finally finding the solution that fits - either by solving the mystery or creating a design that works. 

Fictional, and even real, detection uses a particularly powerful conceptual framework:

Means, Motive, and Opportunity. 

Restated as a series of questions, this framework can be applied with remarkable effectiveness to design problems: 
 

Means: How can a person gain access to, and understand how to use, your product and service? 

Motive: Why would a person use your product or service?

Opportunity: When can a person use your product or service? How does it fit into their lives?


Of course, there are two big differences. First, a mystery usually has only one right answer—a single killer or bank robber—yet design can offer many great (or terrible) solutions to the same problem. A second difference is that in detection each time the problem is similar (e.g. who committed the crime). Yet, in the design process, the designer has to define both the problem and the solution. Without the former, the latter makes no sense. 

Like the detective, the designer has tactics they can use to define and solve the problem. As I’ve written before ("The “problem first” design process"), the process for defining a problem is very similar to designing a solution; once the problem has been clarified you can then move into design solution mode. 

Following the detective’s framework, you can use a number of tactical design tools to solve a design mystery.

Means: How can a person gain access and understand how to use, your product and service? 

In Form, Function, and Feel, I look at how prototyping allows you to examine the different ways in which end users will perceive and use your product or service. 

“It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise, your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.” - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Motive: Why would a person use your product or service?

In Design First, I articulate a different approach to research which uses design tools to uncover the key questions that need to be answered to make a successful product or service. 

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear." - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Opportunity: When can a person use your product or service? How does it fit into their lives? 

In Intent driven design I propose an approach to predicting your users' intent and actions which allows you to anticipate and delight users with intuitive designs based on their needs. 

“See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.”  - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Detection and design share many similarities. When you begin, there are many questions and many assumptions are made. Yet, only by testing out your ideas can you hope to find a solution. In both cases, understanding human nature plays a vital role in coming to a solution; can you understand what motivates someone to commit a crime, or to use a service?

If the “means/motive/opportunity” framework is crucial in fictional (and even real) detection, in design it can crack the case of both defining the problem and developing solutions. 

Grey Space

The last in my series of book pairings is Computer Power and Human Reason and Maigret’s Memoirs. Two very different books, they are linked in that they each look at how human life can be over-simplified in their representation and what happens when some of the most important aspects of that life suddenly go missing.

In Computer Power and Human Reason, author Joseph Weizenbaum writes about the founding of artificial intelligence and how his computer program LISA allowed people to form the most unlikely and intimate relationships with a machine. People thought this machine was understanding their complexity as people but was, in fact, nothing more than a system which had incorporated their own words into a feedback loop. Reflecting on the danger of this deception, Weizenbaum wrote:

“What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

While Weizenbaum explains how over-simplification resulted in a false intimacy engendered by a computer program, Maigret’s Memoirs is an entirely different kind of fiction (within a fiction) that makes clear the dangers of another kind of over-simplification. Maigret’s Memoirs is a brilliantly meta-story in which Georges Simenon (the author of the Maigret series of mysteries) turns himself into a character in his own novel, and shifts his character, Detective Chief Inspector Jules Maigret of the Paris Surete, into the position of the writer and narrator.  The book purports to “set the record straight,” as Maigret recounts how he watched Simenon turning himself (Maigret) and his own behavior into a character. A key part of the fictional Maigret’s critique of the real Simenon (which is, of course, written by Simenon) is that authors oversimplify the messiness of real life. The “real Maigret” is irritated and wants to let the reader know how Simenon shortens time and leaves out all the boring aspects of police work to keep the reader engaged in, rather than repulsed by, the complex and deadly world of crime.

Both books address the dangers of over-simplification. In the first case, by accident or misunderstanding, something which is actually very simple (the LISA computer program) appears, wrongly, to be very complex and very human. In the case of Maigret’s Memoirs Simenon shows how the telling of stories often leaves out the day-to-day, step-by-step (sometimes boring) processes which are, in fact, crucial to getting to the heart of the matter, even when that matter is solving a fictional crime.

Too often, people look for black and white answers to complex problems. This can lead to oversimplified solutions: walk 10,000 steps a day to be healthy, work 10,000 hours to master any skill, etc. Yet, the reality is always more complex and nuanced and requires us to engage more deeply with problems and people, to develop our own best solutions and tools, to be patient and live in the grey space.

Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum
Maigret’s Memoirs by Georges Simenon

Express your needs

For the last few years, I have been fascinated by the idea of personal culture: how people spend their time, how they create their ideas and content, and how they represent themselves to the wider world.
 
My fascination centers on the idea that understanding yourself better help ground yourself; by understanding your own needs you become more empathetic toward those of others. By doing this, you become less afraid, more courageous and hopeful.
 
Representing yourself to the world is a tricky business, you have to show your past, present, and future, and much of it centers on how you express what you need. Not what you think or what you want, but what you need as a person to grow and better understand yourself.
 
This has led me on a path of researching how people can express what they need. Two books I have found stand out as examples of this idea: Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg and Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn. While on the surface these books seem to deal with very different subject matters, at their cores they each help people express what they need and create a vocabulary that is rarely taught. 
 
What follows are a series of quotes from each of these books, which I’ve grouped around the ideas of empathy, thinking for yourself, listening, and stating your needs. I hope you find them as enlightening and as empowering as I did. 


Empathy 
“Former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold once said, ‘The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is happening outside.’” – Marshall Rosenberg
 
“To focus on children’s needs, and to work with them to make sure their needs are met, constitutes a commitment to taking children seriously. It means treating them as people whose feelings and desires and questions matter.”- Alfie Kohn
 
“I’ve become convinced that praise is less a function of what kids need to hear than of what we need to say.”- Alfie Kohn
 
“When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings.”- Marshall Rosenberg



Thinking for yourself
“In our culture’s workplaces, classrooms, and families, there are two basic strategies by which people with more power try to get people with less power to obey. One way is to punish noncompliance. The other is to reward compliance.”- Marshall Rosenberg
 
“Depression is the reward we get for being ‘good’.”- Marshall Rosenberg
 
“The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things ‘because we’re supposed to’.”- Marshall Rosenberg



Listening
“My friend Danny recently summarized what he’s learned from years of fatherhood: “Being right isn’t necessarily what matters.” – Alfie Kohn
 
“Studies in labor-management negotiations demonstrate that the time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees, before responding, to accurately repeat what the previous speaker had said.”- Marshall Rosenberg
 
“Listen to what people are needing rather what they are thinking.”- Marshall Rosenberg
 
“When we listen for feelings and needs, we no longer see people as monsters.”- Marshall Rosenberg
 

Stating your needs
“Expressing our vulnerability can help resolve conflicts”- Marshall Rosenberg
 
“If we express our needs, we have a better chance of getting them met.”- Marshall Rosenberg

One Way Traffic

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman and The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton look at how design and technology change both individual lives and the cultures of entire nations. 
 
It can happen that, as Neil Postman writes, “a new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.” Yet simultaneously, Technopoly provides a crucial warning about our obsession with the new: “We had learned how to invent things and the question of why we invent things receded in importance.”
 
For its part, The Shock of the Old provides us with two fascinating and terrifying examples of this receding “why.” 
 
“In October 1942 the V-2 was successfully tested. Two years later, the first V-2 was fired in anger, and around twenty were being built a day. The V-2 `was a unique weapon, says its historian, Michael Neufeld, in that more people died producing it than died from being hit by it: at least 10,000 slave laborers perished in the course of production and around 5,000 from it. Nearly 6,000 V-2s were made so that, very crudely, it took two human lives to make a V-2 and each killed one person. It is estimated that instead of V-2s Germany could have built 24,000 fighter aircraft.”
 
“In the world as a whole, the motor vehicle is just behind malaria in the list of killers, a sobering measure of the significance of a technology. Three times as many people (nearly 200,000 out of a world total of around 1 million a year) die in Africa from car accidents as in the whole of Europe. In Africa, the death rate per car on the road is up to forty times greater than in rich countries.”
 
These are examples from the mechanical age, but we are now in a new era where change is caused by devices but also by data, the new oil. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. And people with data are obsessed with getting more of it and applying it to everything. Postman explains how in this context too the “why” is getting lost:
 
“Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before. To the question 'What problem does the information solve?' the answer is usually 'How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.'"
 
Just because we can, we will. But what is an alternative? Postman suggests that alternatives already exist in our societal structures: “Courts of law, the school, and the family are only three of several control institutions that serve as part of a culture’s information immune system.”
 
Oftentimes technology is painted as progress and but it can simply mean the generation of more objects or data in the world. And most worryingly, all three of Postman’s institutions for immunity are under severe attack right now.
 
Once ideas are out in the world it is very hard to put them back in the box but, if we work to strengthen our institutions, we can use them to shape these newly minted ideas toward Gandhi’s formulation: not for “mass production, but for production by the masses.” 
 

The power to question

We are taught the landmarks of human history--their importance is reinforced again and again throughout our lives. The wheel, the axe, trains, printing press, steam power, electricity, the internet, and space rockets!
 
These are what have shaped our culture. 
 
But what if you question that narrative?
 
To paraphrase Neil Postman, education is part content, part method. For most people, content is what is focused on in their education: when did we land on the moon, how many miles wide is America, what is the capital of New Zealand? 
 
But what if we stressed the method: the skills to question, observe, and listen? How would we view the history of our world and what has shaped it?
 
With this post, I’m starting a series to explore books I’ve recently read that probe and push to find new narratives for our culture, narratives that can only be found through an education system that believes we should not tell people what to think, but rather we should teach people how to think. 
 
In this first in the series, I want to introduce you to two books, Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt. These two books break apart the received information people often have in their heads about how education works, or about American mythology, using the questions at their core to unlock a new way of looking at the world. 
 
Teaching As a Subversive Activity
This is an unusual book for Neil Postman because alongside criticism of media and culture he offers an alternative to our current educational system. It’s an appeal to make learning not about finding a job, but rather about making a life. And it suggests that this starts by the learned habit of asking questions. Postman writes, “Asking questions is behavior. If you don’t do it, you don’t learn it. It really is as simple as that.”

Education fosters cultures that treat people with humanity and care. Our current situation of antagonism makes clear what happens when education is systematically underfunded and the most widely-promoted education methods are those that do not meet contemporary cultural needs. 

“Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”
 
“First, good learners have confidence in their ability to learn. This does not mean that they are not sometimes frustrated and discouraged. They are, even as are poor learners. But they have a profound faith that they are capable of solving problems, and if they fail at one problem, they are not incapacitated in confronting another.”

 
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
This book questions some of the most deeply held myths of American and western culture. It examines the icons and the motives of the people who “founded” this country, and the means by which this country grew. In one calculating example, Guyatt writes, “Jefferson told Harrison to ‘push our trading houses’ onto the Indians, encourage them to run up accounts, and then, ‘when the debts get beyond what the individuals can pay,’ encourage them to ‘lop them off by a cession of land.’”
 
The book also makes clear how people can be so easily persuaded to take to heart something entirely fictional and destructive, in particular the insidious construction of race as a means of wielding power. In one example of this Guyatt writes, 
“From the 17th century, runaway slaves took refuge in Indian country, often becoming full members of Indian communities. This infuriated southern slaveholders and became the cause of considerable tension on the borders of white settlement. But as southern Indians adopted rudiments of the “civilizing” program around the turn of the nineteenth century, they borrowed one marker of respectability from the white planters rushing toward their lands: Native Americans began to practice forms of captivity that increasingly resembled the chattel slavery of the southern United States.”
 
These quotes, and the book overall, underscore how easily people stop thinking and feeling empathy for others when a prevailing, and powerful, culture tells them that however inhuman their actions may be, an entirely fictional construct of race and racial difference can make those actions seem acceptable, or even appropriate. 

Social media, the new smoking

I remember smoking bans coming into effect in pubs and restaurants in my native London and in New York, and at the time it was a contested issue. People felt strongly that you would lose the character of a place if you could not smoke there with your friends. 
 
Now it seems like a no brainer. I don’t smoke and yet a decade ago I never thought about the effects secondhand smoke was having on me. But, I could see what smoking did for my friends and colleagues. It broke down to something like this:

1. It made them feel cool, connecting them to a silver screen mythology. 

2. It created a social bubble of like-minded smokers, and even after smoking bans in restaurants, pubs, and workplaces, it allowed them to connect to people. 

3. That social bubble was also time-consuming--meaning they had to take time out to both buy and smoke those cigarettes. (5 mins a cigarette x 20 a day =1hr 40 mins a day) 

4. It was expensive (even more so now)--but felt necessary.

5. It was addictive.

6. Finally, it had a serious impact on long term health. Even if you gave up, years in the future you were more likely to develop all sorts of life-threatening illnesses. 
 
What has this got to do with the title of this article? If you remove the word ‘smoking’ and replace it with ‘social media’ you have an almost exact match. Let’s try it. Social media: 

1. Makes you feel cool and connected to what’s happening with friends and celebrities 

2. It creates a social bubble of like-minded people who agree with your worldview. 

3. It is time-consuming, even more so than smoking. In 2016 people spent on average 50 mins/day on Facebook alone. When you add in a few other social networks, that is a large chunk of your day. (New York Times: Facebook Has 50 Minutes of Your Time Each Day. It Wants More)

4. It is expensive but feels necessary. We spend large amounts of money on devices, phone plans, and WiFi to access social media 24/7. 

5. Is addictive. 

6. It can have serious long term impacts on your life and career. Things you said in your teens and twenties are there forever and can come back to haunt you in the future. 
 
The analogy goes one step further, both cigarette manufacturers and social media companies like Facebook and google know full well the ill effects of their products and do little about it. In the smoking case, they used to plead ignorance of the science. In social media’s case, they plead that they are just networks, not media companies. How could they possibly do anything about a foreign power affecting the results of an election in another country, for example? Social media companies know the powerfully addictive effects of their products and yet stick to their vision of “connecting everyone in the world.” 
 
So why doesn’t everyone quit social media? We are in the middle of it; it’s like asking people in the 1950s to quit smoking (when 45% of Americans smoked). They would have thought that you were quite mad. Smoking was at the center of culture, it connected people and formed a commonality, not unlike social media today. When I ask people to quit they often think I’m crazy--to them it’s the most normal thing in the world, why would they want to stop?
 
The documentary maker Errol Morris once said that “History is like the weather, there are patterns that repeat but it is never quite the same.” While social media is not smoking, its patterns seem to have many of the same effects on our culture. 
 
Social media, like smoking, is about a system of control. The smoking industry wanted to normalize smoking so the profits would keep rolling in; social media companies want you to keep clicking. However crazy an article might be, the system absorbs it and normalizes it, giving everything the same importance and credibility. In the end, all you do is read a series of manipulative headlines, and decide when to click ‘like.’ Consider the dangers too, when the two come together--as the Juul, which is spearheading an increase in underage smoking, is promoted to young people almost exclusively through social media--a perfect storm of the confluence of the two lists above. (New York Times: Did Juul Lure Teenagers and Get 'Customers for Life'?)
 
The filmmaker Adam Curtis has a similar idea about how social media works, he notes that social media algorithms are always looking for patterns of information which they turn into feeds of news they think you will like, a steady drip of the same kind of news to create stability and uniformity. 
 
 “What results is a system that cocoons us and makes us feel safe. And that means we have become terrified of all change. But that fear of change is in the interest of a system that wants to hold everything stable. And stops us from ever challenging it.” - Adam Curtis ("Hypernormalization" movie)

The only constant is change. In the same way that in 2018 it seems to most of us like a bad idea to take up smoking, I hope that social media will also seem like a similarly poor choice in the next few years.

Way Finder

Everyone needs a plan. A plan is like a map, but with important differences. It is not something that is static; it changes with time. Unlike maps of the physical world that, barring major upheaval, change only slightly over time, your plan for your life, your company, your community has to adapt to constant change. 

There are two really important parts of a plan: where you start and where you end. Knowing where you will end is hard so the best you can do is create a hypothesis of where you want to go and then aim in that direction. 

Having said that, it is impossible to create your hypothesis unless you know where you are right now. What's your situation? Where are you on the map? No point setting out to climb Mount Everest if you don't know which country you are in right now. 

So how do you find out what your situation is? At this point, I could give you some quick tactics. But the real answer is for you to figure out your own tools for understanding your situation. Imagine if you are visiting a city you do not know. I could give you a map, but if you don’t know how to read it then it’s of limited use. I could give you a tour guide, but after your visit, none of the places or how you got to them would stick in your mind for next time. What can you do?

Explore; small sections to start, make your own map, with your landmarks and places that you know. Build out further and further. This takes time! Which is free by the way, it just means you have to decide to use it to build your knowledge. 

Now, there are some shortcuts. You could ask other people for help in your network. Initially, this feels like asking for advice, but over time as your own map grows you will be able to start giving advice and then it is more of a collaboration. You can also share your map with others so they can benefit from your experience. This might lead to you exploring and extending your map. 

At this point you might ask, but what about the goal?! What about the endpoint you were talking about at the start of this piece?

I would answer by saying that the goal is always undefined and that by creating your own map, you have achieved your goal. Not only have you done that but if you have shared this knowledge with your network you have brought tremendous value to many more people. 

This excerpt from the poem “Ithaka” by C.P. Cavafy gets to the heart of this post’s ideas. The journey is to be enjoyed but before you can take it, you need to find out where you are right now, which is a journey in itself. 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

- C.P. Cavafy

(for the full poem: Ithaka)

Read, Curate, Write

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot"
- Stephen King

Every day you are flooded with information, articles, books, social media, blog posts, lots and lots of information. It can be overwhelming because none of it speaks to your voice inside; it is just a lot of noise. You might have favorite authors and retreat to them when faced with all this noise but how do you find your voice? How do you get your ideas out into the world? It can seem impossible. 

Writing is hard, and writing in your own voice is even harder. It makes you vulnerable, it makes you look inside and talk about what you really feel and believe. Most of all, it puts new ideas and visions out into a world that might not be ready to receive them. 

Stephen King is right, reading lots and writing lots is the key to unlocking your own voice and ideas, but writing can be especially hard as an immediate next step after you read. One step toward a solution can be found in a curatorial approach.

Reading Stephen King's quote made me think about the process of writing and how reliant it is on both reading and curating your thoughts while reading. This may seem like merely collecting or organizing but it can be an important step between thinking about an idea and actually writing something of value for yourself. Curation bridges the gap between reading and writing and creates a path toward a writing habit. 

Try it: Collect 5 articles on an idea you find interesting. Now find another 10 articles. Next, select from these 15 articles the 5 most important ones that start to form a narrative arc for the story you want to tell. Each of the five articles will help tell a different part of the story. Begin with the article that gives the best overview of the current situation of the subject you are interested in. Then find the articles that best outline the problem or opportunity with the subject. Finally, pick the articles you feel talk about a solution to the problem you posed. Through this process, the act of curation tells a story and makes an argument. 

The next step might be to write a sentence or paragraph about the collection of articles, providing some context for your selections and order. Finally, write more specifically about the ideas in the articles. Through this process, you start to find your own voice. 

Reading, curating, and eventually writing. Over time the reading and curating will not be what you publish. Rather, you'll publish your writing on the ideas this process has sparked within you. 

The art of this literary curation, of gathering your reading into one place, is a starting point to help you find your own voice as a writer. In a sea of information and opinion, it will help you find yourself every day.