The power of archives

Ramesses II died in 1213 BC. Venerated, he lived 90 years, a ripe old age by modern standards. But when you realize that the average Egyptian at the time died by the age of 25, that would be the equivalent of a person today who lived to 400. You can see why he seemed like a deity.

I found this cultural gem in a story about the British Museum's giant statue of King Ramesses II in an archive called A History of the World in 100 Objects, created by the British Museum and the BBC. It's a 100-part podcast series that views the history of the world through the lens of objects from the British Museum.

This kind of archive is not just a collection of items or stories; it is a carefully curated collection with a function, purpose, and vision.

I love archives; they connect with our past and help us understand our present and future. These invaluable resources are often collected and curated by driven individuals to ensure we maintain this connection with the past and its rich source of culture and knowledge. 

Here are some archives I have found and created that have captured my imagination. Please check them out and share any archives you have found with me. I would love to see, hear, and watch them.



History of the World in 100 Objects 

This fantastic collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum tells the story of civilization through objects curated from the British Museum's catalog.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
This one-person odyssey of an archive tells the story of rock and roll through 500 songs, providing a rich cultural history.

The Studs Turkel Archive
A brilliant author in his own right, Studs Turkel had a radio show for 45 years, and the archive of his interviews allows you to listen to fascinating regular people and some of the most influential people in the culture of the twentieth century: the juxtaposition makes this collection unique.

Over the years, in collaboration with various organizations, we at Buscada have created archives covering multiple topics and ideas. These are some of my favorites:

This Triangle Fire Open Archive
Following this significant tragedy for working people over a hundred years ago, the archive collects political, cultural, and personal objects and stories that show how much this event has shaped our modern world.

Working with People
This video archive examines words like collaboration, community, power, and representation and allows individuals to express their diverse perspectives on the meanings of these words. They are creating a space for dialogue and nuance around some of the most critical issues of our time.

Family List
This is our project to curate activities for kids to try, make, and play. It focuses on diverse books, play activities, and cultural ideas to help kids and adults understand the world around them through play.

Investigating design

A software product designer is often given a problem like this:
“People cannot figure out how to share a document using our current software experience.”

It’s natural for that designer to want to talk to end consumers of the software and ask them what the issues are with the software experience. When they do, they often hear responses like, "It’s just not clear," or "I don't even know where the button is,” or "This is not how it works on Microsoft Word." These conversations might offer valuable insight, but they don't really help a designer understand the whole problem; the feedback is about specific parts of the problem but doesn’t form a complete picture of the experience.

But what if this was a mystery?
What if there was a crime, a murder! it happened in the middle of the day, and there were several witnesses, but none of them actually saw the dirty deed.

Interview the witnesses
You would interview the witnesses - just like in our software design problem when the designer talked to the users. But where would you be if you just stopped there without examining the crime scene or forensics?

The crime scene
At the murder scene, we’d investigate the details of the space. Too often, in software, we overlook those spaces where it all happens: the software screens, the buttons, menus, fields, and workflows. There is much to be learned from those old screens, like from a crime scene.

Forensics
Where did people click? Could they understand the labels? Was it clear that this item could be shared? What is all the functionality that's available? In other words, let’s establish the facts so we can see the whole problem.

Put the pieces together...
Once you’ve interviewed the witnesses, investigated the crime scene, and have all the facts in place, you can recreate the sequence of events that led to the crime (the user experience). You can see what is happening and why it's going wrong. You can take all those eyewitness statements (user interviews), put them in context, and make sense of them.

Once you can see what happened in a design, unlike a crime, you can change what will happen. As a designer, you can change the sequence of events and alter the facts to make the outcome something that engages your users and helps them get things done. In other words, you can create a design that is no longer a crime.

Reactive vs Proactive work

A recent official report on Fostering Innovation by the British Psychological Society, having surveyed all the relevant research, concludes that: ‘Individuals are more likely to innovate where they have sufficient autonomy and control over their work to be able to try out new and improved ways of doing things’ and where ‘team members participate in the setting of objectives’.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind - Guy Claxton

Office workers now have more autonomy than ever, and it’s clear that people feel that autonomy is important to them—yet understanding how to use this newfound freedom is often challenging. Autonomy needs a new mindset.

To take advantage of your newfound freedom, you need to consider the balance of reactive versus proactive work that you do.

How do you know if you are doing reactive work?

Are you executing on work set out in the project plan and primarily responding to other people’s requests?

How do you know if you are doing proactive work?

Are you planning how you’ll approach your work?

Here’s an example of choosing one of these two ways to work in response to the same scenario. Your boss briefs you on a new project. You can:

A: Wait for your boss’s project plan and for someone else to schedule a kickoff meeting.

B: Make your own project plan, research the subject matter, and schedule meetings with end users of this project.

While plan B sounds like a lot more work, it has the benefit of being proactive, putting your needs out in the world, and communicating what you want to achieve with the project. Even if you don’t get everything you want, you might get more than you imagine. In addition, you will be much more motivated to do a task you set yourself rather than being told what to do.

Balance is essential. You don’t need to control everything, but you do want control over some aspects of what you do. Doing proactive work can help you achieve this balance.

No matter what your level in your organization is, proactive work can have an impact. If you are an intern, it’s a way to ensure you get a chance to do more exciting work. If you are mid-level in your career, it lets you set the tone for a project, and if you are a leader, it enables you to control your most precious asset, your time.

The best team in the world

It’s 1998. I am 4 years into my career as an interaction designer and find myself working at the BBC on a new service called BBC Interactive. It allows people access to all sorts of information directly from their TV using an interactive interface.

I am working on a project called BBC Wimbledon, which lets people watch multiple live video streams from different courts and stay up to date on news and scores through their TV. The first step of such a service is to build a pilot and show it at the tournament so the public can get a sense of what it would be like. The difficult bit is that very few people had ever made an interactive pilot demo that used outside broadcast video.

So, one morning I get to go to Wimbledon a few months before the tournament and talk to the outside broadcast team with a colleague of mine who is a senior computer engineer at the BBC. The idea is that he will talk to the outside broadcast team and then give me the live video in a format I can use for the prototype I’m designing on a computer hooked up to a TV, simulating the experience of using the service with remote control on your home TV. All sounds great.

We turn up to the outside broadcast area and are shown to a room with the source of the live video: a jumble of wires and cables plugged into a video board that routed the video signal for the live broadcast. At that point, the BBC live broadcast engineer told us that was it. That was the extent of the help he could give us and we should be able to figure it out from there.

My first thought was “Holy s#*t we are F##**Ked”

At that moment I had to rethink what I thought 'hard' meant. The computer engineer with me started to think. He had a Ph.D. in computer science and years of experience. Within 3 days he had written a separate program that would plug into the software I was using so that I could access the live video feeds I needed to make the prototype work.

What did I take away from this experience? That hard is a relative term and that having the right team is far more important than having the perfect process.

Try this the next time you face a hard problem: 
Think of all the people you know who have the expertise or who might know someone with expertise in the problem you are trying to solve. Reach out to some of them via phone or email and ask for their advice. You may be surprised at how open and willing experts are will to share their knowledge.

You make your own best team, and this may or may not be your work team. While this feels odd at first, this is, in fact, the team that will make your career far more successful than anyone team at any one job.

P.S. The prototype worked, and the next year the service was made into a real application that was available for millions of people across the UK.

Grow vs Manage

Grow :  undergo natural development by increasing in size and changing physically; progress to maturity.
vs
Manage:  be in charge of (a company, establishment, or undertaking); administer; run // succeed in surviving or in attaining one's aims, especially against heavy odds; cope.

A patient is diagnosed with with Type 2 diabetes. The patient is scared and worried, unsure of what to do and what their options are. The doctor in this case provides clear medical and self care instructions and schedules a follow up appointment in a month's time.

The patient tries their best to keep up with the tracking and daily medication required, but because of their work schedule and diet they don't follow all of the doctor's instructions properly and start to feel worse. At their next visit the doctor has to "manage" the medical crisis situation, providing additional education and instruction, as well as medical attention.

With the best of intentions on both sides, the situation keeps getting worse, more and more emergency visits are needed, and more "managing" of the situation ensues. In the end, both patient and doctor feel this is not being resolved or getting better.

This story is not hypothetical; it was told to me by a medical professional.

Too often we "manage" by controlling and fixing a crisis that arises, then exhaling and waiting for the next one. This is unsustainable and this management style is a core reason why people leave jobs they would otherwise enjoy.

“People leave managers, not companies.”

“Workers reported that companies generally satisfy their needs for on-the-job development …[such as] significant increases in responsibility. But they’re not getting much in the way of formal development, such as training, mentoring, and coaching—things they also value highly.” - HBR

So what can you do?

“The more that people are rewarded for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.” - Alfie Kohn

The approach I'll describe here isn't hard, but it does require you as a manager to be consistent, focused, and honest with the people you manage.

The first step is to understand where the person you are managing is right now. What is their skill level, how do they approach their work, what makes them happy and sad? This understanding can only begin from careful observation.

Once you understand where they are, you can help them figure out how they want to grow. Your careful observation should have given you some clues but asking directly and exploring future growth paths is necessary to get a full picture. 

Thus far this may sound familiar and straightforward. The next stage in a conventional growth path would be to set goals that need to be achieved to attain new skills. 

This is exactly what should not happen! 

Following the goals path leads to the “crisis management” approach. Once goals are set, the tenor of the conversation becomes about testing: did you achieve the goal, when are you going to achieve it, how long will it take, how well did you achieve your goal? The learning becomes not about new knowledge gained but rather about the ability to pass the test. This approach narrows thinking and makes the whole process of growing your career more stressful and less open. 

The alternative approach is to think about growth as progression.

Let's say a person's goal is to get better at communicating ideas. A traditional goals structure would say: set a goal to give a presentation at a conference of your peers.
 
The growth-based approach would say: spend time each week writing a blog post about the work you have done, make a series of diagrams to show your working process, make a series of short presentations about an idea or activity you really enjoy, make a series of short videos about the current project you're working on.

The growth approach is about exploring a wide range of ways to communicate ideas and to do lots of them in quick bursts so the person starts to build a skill, without worrying about failing, and makes it part of how they work.

The role of the manager changes from someone enforcing and setting the rules to someone checking in on, marking, and supporting progression.

The approach focuses on growing skills rather than on the ability to cram to pass one big test. You shift from the crisis management of “”will this person give a good presentation or not?” (and their coming to you two days before without a real plan) to instead, their practice of a series of activities that allow them to explore and learn from each activity and to build on skills learned and from mistakes made. 

To create innovative products and services, companies need to first invest in building a sustainable creative culture where people feel they are growing, rather than being tested. 

Don’t let things get to a crisis point; decisions made in this mode are almost always worse. Help people grow and you and your company will thrive. 

Work Culture

"Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle." - Bertrand Russell

Everyone is busy! Working constantly -- often much more than their 40 hours a week -- yet, people still do not feel satisfied. The more they work the less satisfied they feel because they are missing out on other parts of their lives. Part of the issue lies in our work culture. Here I'd like to suggest three key ideas I've identified in my reading on this subject; attention to focus, culture, and space can allow for a more sustainable work life, and hence, one's whole life. 

Focus: How do you find the time to do your most important work, or spend the time with the people that matter to you?

Culture: How is our work culture affecting our lives?

Space: How does the environment in which we do our work affect us as people?


Focus 
According to one article from the BBC, “an average working professional experiences 87 interruptions per day” which seems to be an impossibly unsustainable environment in which to work. Cited in that article, professor Dan Gilbert’s study finds that “we spend 46.9% of our time not thinking about what is happening in front of us”. With this little focus, it is not surprising that people put in more and more hours to recover from all the distractions. And - it turns out that even putting in more hours is not the right answer, as the BBC goes on to note that “employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else – often they didn't even work eight-hour day. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break.”

So what can you do if working more is not the answer? These short breaks are a good option, as well as the idea put forth by Thrive Global, a life hacking website, which suggests that you should “build a working system for yourself...[which] makes your goal real...[and] concrete.” One way to do this is to take the 168 approach and look at how you spend your time, track the activities you do for a given week, and categorize those activities into the following groups:

Creative : Activities that make you happier or move you closer to your long term goals. 
Health: Activities that improve your mental and physical well being. 
Tasks : Activities you have to do to maintain your life e.g. washing up, laundry, food shopping. 

Now look at how you have spent your time, and the activities you did. Think about next week and how you want to spend your time and the right balance for you. This is a first step in creating your culture of work, stopping the feeling, and the reality, of being bombarded by trivial activities that stop you from doing what is most important for you to succeed and be happy. 


Culture 
Perhaps one of the clearest and frightening examples of our work culture gone awry is in Japan; the BBC writes that while “the country may have some of the longest working hours it is the least productive of the G7 group of developed economies” and that while workers are “entitled to 20 days leave a year...currently about 35% don't take any of it.” This article highlights how working more hours is not only bad for individual workers but is also bad for companies that use this culture of work and for a country's economy as a whole. Signal vs noise, a blog written by the company basecamp, addresses this issue and sums up much of what is wrong with the current culture of work this way: “Workaholism is a disease. We need treatment and coping advice for those afflicted, not cheerleaders for their misery.” Whatever short term gains companies get from workers doing 80 hour weeks is massively offset when you have burned-out employees and resignations, meaning that companies are losing their most valuable asset, their people. 

Place 
Where we work can have as much effect on our work and happiness as how we work. A 2014 article from the New Yorker shows how the ill-conceived idea of open-plan offices has taken over workplace design “The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve.” The article goes on to explain that compelling evidence in this way:

"In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain. The subjects subsequently attempted to solve fewer puzzles than they had after working in a quiet environment; in other words, they became less motivated and less creative."

Companies gain the short term benefits of being able to cram more people into smaller spaces and to reduce office space cost overheads. Yet, by doing this they lose out in the long term by creating spaces in which it is almost impossible to focus and concentrate, leading to less innovative and lower quality work. 

Another article from Fast Company shows how allowing people control over where they work leads to much better productivity and more innovative outcomes for both the individual employees and the businesses. While they cite that “the most innovative companies have between 25% to 57% of their employees working remotely,” this still does not change the minds of many businesses that continue to look for short term gain and end up providing an overall culture of low innovation and stagnation. 

Focus, Culture, and Space help us think about how to build more sustainable creative workspaces which lead to more innovation, better products, healthier and more profitable businesses, and happier people. 

***
As an additional note to this article, it’s important to say that there is a whole field of study called environmental psychology dedicated to looking at the effect of space on culture and vice versa. Below are a few more articles that might help you understand the profound effect the built environments of our workspaces have on our well being. 
Additional reading :
HBR : Rules for designing an engaging work space
HOK : Workplace Strategies that Enhance Performance, Health and Wellness

Leadership

“My friend Danny recently summarized what he’s learned from years of fatherhood: “Being right isn’t necessarily what matters.” - from Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

I am going to describe a situation, let me know if this sounds familiar.

A person is trying to teach a child the concept of multiplication in mathematics. They tell the child that 5x5 =25, then they ask them to memorize this, and rhetorically ask them if they understood what just happened. Now they ask the child a question, what is 5x6? the child thinks for a while and then says 81? The person who asked the question gets frustrated at the child for not having thought about the answer and not seeing the logical connection between 5x5 and 5x6 which seems obvious to them. The person then tells the child that the answer is 30! and tells them to remember that for next time.

A few days later the person asks the child what is 5x6, the child thinks hard and remembers the answer, 30! Great, says the person, this must be working, now we are getting somewhere. Okay what is 5x7, the child thinks for a while and says 92! confidently. NO!, frustrated again the person tells the child that 5x7 =35, and follows it up with “Remember that for next time!”

A few days later…..

I hope you can see where this is going, and its parallels with the top-down management style widely used across industries and company types. Throughout my career, I have seen this pattern repeated in large and small companies, Fortune 500s, startups, and nonprofits.

Having a single person with all of the context and knowledge does not empower a team to learn and make good decisions. The assumption of management and managers is that they have been clear, but in reality, they often provide very little information and even if they have, no tools to empower their people to solve the problems at hand.

Being a good leader is not just about providing a clear goal, it is also about providing the support and the tools, both tactical and conceptual, to help teams learn for themselves. Only then can you disrupt this broken cycle and create real solutions and sustainable creative environments that people want to be in and learn from.

Competition

“Competition holds us back from doing our best work” 
- Alfie Kohn

How often have you heard that competition in a free market leads to innovation and better ideas and products? Alfie Kohn, a well-respected educator and psychologist, suggests instead that "competition holds us back from doing our best work," making me think more critically about the value placed on competition. 

10 years ago Apple released a new phone and it changed the world of mobile technology, putting a very powerful computer in everyone's pockets. At the time the “competition” were not what you would call the best, they were companies that had competed with each other (Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft…) to make what were fairly mediocre products. They were making products that allowed you to make good phone calls and that’s about it. 

Apple came along and didn't compete with them; they solved a completely different problem. They looked at what people really wanted to do--consume and share media--and then tacked a phone onto it to make something that really is the way you want to communicate. This different approach was not caused by competition but almost the opposite. It was caused by Apple wanting to go their own way, to, as they said, “Think Different”. 

Another clear example of this is Nintendo. For a long time Nintendo had been out-played by Sony, which kept making more and more powerful games consoles. So, instead of competing with Sony, Nintendo decided to play by their own rules and create a low-powered games system that was fun. At the time no one thought this would work, and on paper they were bound to lose, but in fact the opposite happened, the Wii was a massive success.  

A final example from an entirely different field: Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors couldn't compete directly with LeBron James’ speed, size and ability so instead, they invented a completely different strategy of 3-point shooting to win.

In these examples, the “players" didn't compete but instead rethought the problem space and played by their own rules to win. Competition for the most part only leads to incrementalism; for truly breakthrough ideas you have to walk your own path which can be scary, but can have huge advantages. If by following your own path you create an innovation, in the marketplace you will have no competition. No competition allows you time and space to build your advantage. It took the Android ecosystem almost 3 years to catch up to Apple and by that time Apple had established a brand leadership position in the space that meant even though Android far outstripped Apple's sales and numbers the iPhone is still seen as the gold standard. 

To describe a problem is part of the solution. Competition stops you from fully describing the problem because it forces you to play by set rules that narrow your view. I would urge you to examine how some rules can be bent, while others can be broken, to create your own unique ideas.