Culture and identify in the new future of work

Preparing for the new context of the Future of Work goes beyond the challenge of managing our connections and enabling old processes.

In previous discussions I have identified the limitations of Covid19 innovation to date in this space: A backlog clearing exercise in which the old 'important but not urgent' list suddenly became tagged 'urgent' too: A huge outpouring of effort to build what our experience of old contexts had suggested we need.

The context changed with Covid19 - making distributed working THE way of working among those ordinarily housed in offices. The 'go' button was hit - and hit hard - on tools to deliver productivity in quite traditional processes.

Now the context has changed again. Now it's not a matter of making the best, to patch up a response to muddle us through until we could go back to normal. Now there is the realisation that this new context is here to stay.

Sustained, distributed working comes with a new set of challenges to overcome.

One is cultural.

Where does culture reside when the office is shut? If I think of this from a network perspective, culture is an emergent property of the interactions within the network. The interaction, rather than the position of the nodes (and certainly not the physical position of the nodes) is the primary driver. 

How we enable those interactions has the biggest impact on culture not where we choose to work. With distributed working culture risks being diluted across space and time - and potentially by disconnected leadership.

If an interaction is planned, formal, one-way, hierarchical etc, the culture will reflect all of these.

If the interaction is adhoc, informal, two-way, flattened etc, a different culture is likely to emerge.

The current tools at our disposal tend to the former (I'm very open to hearing alternative views on this) and given the urgenct need to enable somewhat more open, flat, innovative ways of working to handle extremes of ambiguity, it is time to get out of 'backlog' mode and design towards the needs of this new context.

Another relates to our identity

What of the nodes - the people - you and I?

The way in which we, very social, naturally co-operative humans, handle our new distributed - increasingly isolated - paradigm is critical.

How can our digital tools and processes map to key human needs essential to our identities - such as:

1. Our sense of autonomy. When lockdown very clearly constrains our freedom, our sense of control over our own lives and our ability to choose, our technologies - and how we design our use of them, must seek to restore these elements. The paralysing communication defect of slide presentations devoid of anything more than a voice over - and little sense of audience feedback - is one example where design is yet to catch up with the needs of the new context. We need our audience to respond to us, we need to see their smiles and nods. And if the bandwidth can't cope, we have to virtualise a proxy.

2. Our sense of relatedness. Social distancing is breaking down how much we feel others may care about us. This is an area in which distributed and diluted leadership is having a negative impact. And it's a two-way street. Can we become comfortable signalling our need for a little TLC via digital means? Face to face an empathetic leader creates some of their greatest impact by recognising this and responding to what they recognise. Tools that alert and inform, perhaps even via automated emotion tracking in facial and written comms, could help. But be warned - appointing a minister of fun or similar happiness monitor is unlikely to get the result you seek. Happiness is most often an emergent quality of a well-performing team. Delivering more effective tools to collaborate will drive greater team cohesion (and therefore more sense of care about each other) than any amount of time-boxed merry making.

3. Our sense of competence. In times of huge ambiguity, acknowledging and rewarding all learning experiences can help us feel this sense of achievement. Tools reflecting the small, achievable goals in agile, desops and devops should be considered for broader use across rapid, iterative, MVP-disciplined ways of working. Master what is in front of you. Learn what needs to be learned to solve this task.

Tools and processes reflecting these three areas (psychologist call it the ARC of happiness) can help secure a positive sense of identity at a time when our identity is under significant threat from the ending of the work/home divide. 

In order to sustain creativity, the level of cultural connect that makes a collection of people more than the sum of its parts, our design of the Future of Work must be informed by a reality which now looks set to be with us for years rather than months.

Photo by Carson Arias on Unsplash

Putting Context Collapse into Context...

If you watched this from Michael Wesch, you might be interested in the further explanation of the Context Collapse he describes.
The context here is the moment the vlogger faces the webcam to record something (for youtube for example) and realises that they are about to share with whoever may ever discover it on the web, for all time.

Daunting.

Some pause for thought to try to let that sink in...
Most just crash on without thought for the ever-more or the endless variety of audience for their piece-to-camera.

Rather helpfully the prof has penned this.
Here's an illuminating excerpt:

"Context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself."

The same weight of history applies to our blog posts (even these words as I write them...), your comments, forums, the pictures you share on flickr, the relationships you share on social networks...

As I asked Mike in the comments on his post: "Assume you make the distinction for video (as compared to our words and pictures in blogs, forums and social networks) because of the lack of ‘face-work’* in those contexts?

Mike Wesch: "*Face-work is a complex collaborative dance in which all participants and their every word, wink, gesture, posture, stance, glance, and grunt take part. In short, how we present ourselves (and by extension, who we “are”) depends a great deal on context; where we are, who we are with, and what we are doing, among many other factors.

I guess the weight of history rests upon the very words I type now. But the process of writing has been one we are used to performing without direct and real-time feedback.

Out of interest, I wonder if Mike has done a comparison with how people reacted to home video when it first emerged (ie video that was never likely to be shared with history?)

Do you remember the first time someone shoved a video camera in your face? Could you guess who you were presenting yourself for?

The webcam, I think Mike is saying, puts us in a place where we can no longer make that guess.

A MESSAGE TO THE FUTURE

POST SCRIPT: This inspired me to record a message to the future on qik. If you have one, post it where-ever you like (youtube, seesmic, qik, whatever) and, please, post a link to it in the comments on this blog?
I'll add it to our list.

• David Cushman's Message to the Future
• Mark Earls Message to the Future.

Alan Moore's message to the future:


Rebecca Caroe's message to the future:

Unfinished symphonies

I met with a group of media and journalism students at Birmingham City University last week. It's something I'd like to repeat. I was interested in how they look at the career ahead of them (entrepreneurial or corporate and or how they could be mixed) and in the approach of people who are genuinely digital natives when it comes to building web services which serve the community first.

But my greatest learning came when we discussed working practices.
I've often heard research quoted about how digital natives, those who have grown up with multi-channel experiences all around them, are able to 'cope' with several different streams of information all at once.
For example, in the UK, the place you are most likely to find mobile television consumed is in the home, often in front of another TV, while the user is also browsing a magazine, listening to music and indulging in an IM chat with friends on their laptop.
The argument goes that this ability to multi-task in this respect is hard-wired in to us as we grow up and can't be changed later no matter how we juggle.

But what I found in conversation with these students is that they ALL (including switched-on course organiser Paul Bradshaw) find it necessary to tune out when they want to really focus on completing a task.

For example, when writing a dissertation (against a deadline) they all agreed that they have to turn off email, IM, TV, radio, music... everything.

Which is nice, because I find that's true of me too. And I'm 42. Perhaps it is universally true?
For example, recently I had to complete a presentation from scratch to finished powerpoint in two hours. I shut down email and twhirl (my twitter client of preference), detached myself from google reader etc etc.
And I got the job finished.

And that's the revelation for me.
When we need to complete, to finish, to put a full stop on, we need to focus... to get the job done.

And we all understand this. We all see the value in ending the process, in getting a final result. I guess we like to complete.

But that's not the way the networked world works. And it's not the best fit with the networked world. It therefore is not the best way to release value in the network.

The networked world is about collaboration, sharing, being connected, evolving an idea not hunting it down, putting a bullet through its head, stuffing and mounting it.

Perhaps this is why I can have other channels open while I write this blog post. A blog post is never finished. If other ideas feed into it, even while it is being written, they are welcome and add value. A blog post is less mine than it is ours. Your comments, interpretations, links to and from, create what it really IS on the network. I just provide a stub. It is always unfinished. It is always evolving.

In the networked world this is true of everything. It's why clever businesses regard themselves and their products as 'always in beta'. Being 'finished' suggests it is the best it can possibly ever be. That no one else can improve on it. It's a kind of thinking built on the centre-out, broadcast/mass industrial hegemony.

Blogs and wikis allow documents to always be in beta. Open source allows software to always be in beta.
Keeping our channels open mean our ideas can always be in beta.

Kind of fits the human condition - and particularly our identity - we're all in beta too.

That doesn't mean you never act, you just act knowing you do so on the latest best guess and not that it may change later but that it WILL change later.

It also raises questions for how we reward. Instead of rewarding greedy introspection, how can we better reward and encourage thinking outloud? In companies and in our educational establishments?

We've placed a great deal of store on 'ownership' when it comes to taking responsibility within organisations. How far has that infected how ideas and often projects are treated?

Here be seamonsters: Tonight I'm going to party like its 1303

I don't watch much television. But last night something did catch my eye. BBC4 broadcast a programme titled Inside The Medieval Mind.
It had real resonance for me. The good professor Robert Bartlett, of St Andrew's University, described how medieval man understood the world - as a place of mystery and enchantment.

"The world was a book written by God. But as the Middle Ages drew to a close, it became a place to be mastered, even exploited."

That sounds familiar. The beginning of the Renaissance (let's call it 1304) began the period of disenchantment with the world - as we learned more about it we found there weren't sea monsters, or people with faces in their chests, or with a dog's head. We demystified the world and we did it through travel, exploration and the exchange of information.

We did this in the physical world. So it took 15 centuries for Greek philosophy to reach and impact on the West.

With the emergence of the network in the digital world it feels to me like the end of another era of mystification. I suspect its impact will take rather less than 15 centuries.

I wonder if it is ourselves who will be 'disenchanted' (ie we will demystify our 'selves') this time around?

We want our data back (part 752...)

The riot of noise is being turned up to 11. In December last year I predicted that by this time this year we'd be seeing a clamour of people wanting their data back. Today ask.com offers a search tool which allows you to delete your data from their server. AskEraser puts the user back in control. Google keeps your data for up to 18 months.
There is a swing away from data ownership, data farming. It's about data mining now - data is all mine, not yours! See Ankur Shah's thoughts' about using data only when interacting with the owner of that data (ie the individual concerned) reported here.

See you at Digital Identity

I'm back in London tomorrow, this time to speak at the eighth annual Digital Identity Forum at the Clink.
It starts tomorrow and also runs on November 21 - though I can't stay for day two, unfortunately.
It's an interesting time to be considering digital identity - with the growing buzz around the social graph.
I'm going to be speaking on 'Reed's Law and the Demand Curve'. For those who can't be there, much of what I'll discuss is covered in the white paper you'll find here.
For those who can, please come and say hello.

I want my identity back! Tough times ahead for data collectors

The slow-burn begins http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6339813.stm.
At the end of last year I predicted (among other things) that digital consumers would start demanding their identities back. I was inspired in this thinking by Peter Miles writing on the Oxford Forum. Here's the original post on it: http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2006/12/privacy-and-permissions-customer-wants.html

The news that Microsoft is throwing its support behind the Open ID scheme is a very significant moment. It means there will be a very simple way for users to own their ID data and to control how much or how little they wish to share with you. And that data remains held by them - not you.

From the BBC report: "The Open ID scheme uses web addresses that people already own to help authenticate their identity...
"Microsoft has got involved to supply a technology it is developing called InfoCards to add more flexibility to the scheme.
"The InfoCard program gives users a way to identify themselves with varying degrees of detail depending on who is asking for information about them. Each InfoCard acts like a virtual index card that can store different sorts of ID information for different purposes.

I'll make some assumptions here. When a user can store their own identity and share only those elements they prefer - aren't they going to demand that this data is only available when they want it to be available to you, too? ie while they are logged in on your website - and removed the moment they leave.

The drive will be for them to demand you do not store those details in any form. New Data Protection Act anyone?

This all has huge impact for those who make their money from personal data - and should sound an alarm for those building business models around the ownership of personal data.

There is a ray of sunshine. People like how useful cookies are to them. Unless the Open ID system can resolve a way of taking your history for each site with you back to your own stored ID location, it might not quite spell the end of data acquisition.

But I suspect a solution to that will come. The real answer is not to rely on owning a relationship (by virtue of keeping someone else's data under lock and key) but in sharing an ongoing and persistent relationship - by continuing to deliver what that user finds valuable to their life and by encouraging a regular and enduring two-way flow of communication.

Digital media predictions for 2007

This will be my last day in the office before the New Year. I will attempt to resist updating this blog until then (about as likely as resisting the temptation of more Christmas chocs, to be honest...). However, I thought it would be a good time to make some predictions about 2007 - all of which you are very welcome to contend, add to or dismiss via the comments below.

So, I say, 2007 will be the year in which:

1) Access to the internet via mobile will surpass 40% of all internet use (globally).
2) A UK national newspaper will close its print operation. And a series of one-time print only magazine brands will become digital only (pick a number between 25 and 100).
3) Broadcast TV on your mobile will become commonplace. Sky will offer it as a bolt-on upgrade to your home services.
4) Microsoft/Google/Yahoo (one or all) will launch a mobile phone.
5) All mobile operators in the UK will follow 3 and offer fixed price mobile internet access.
6) A mobile operator will seek the edge by launching a fixed price for all services (ie £40 a month for all-you-can-eat internet, voice, text, mms...TV(?)
7) More than 10% of internet users will blog.
8) A citizen-journalism TV channel made up entirely of video shot on and uploaded from mobile phones will launch.
9) TV on demand will revolutionise how you consume TV and send advertisers into a blind panic.
10) A slow-burn campaign for users to claim back their digital identities will turn to a riot of noise by the end of the year...

Privacy and Permissions: The customer wants his data back

Whenever you're involved in any kind of digital project clever marketeers will fight tooth and nail to make sure they get data-mining elements included.
They talk about 'owning data', by which we mean owning customers' personal details. The more we know about them, the more money we can make from them. Perfect knowledge... and all that.
But we shouldn't assume this is a digital default. Some time, very soon, we're likely to see a consumer revolt. And with the power vested in the blogosphere, the social consumer will get what they want - their identity back.

Individuals will own their data and offer us permissions to access it from time to time. It will be theirs to share, not ours to own.

What this means for brands is that we will have to work harder than ever at our engagement - we will have to make ourselves more trustworthy, more relevant and more worthwhile to get any kind of permissions. And we'll have to do it consistently, persistently, every day.

Peter Miles, discussing the issue on the Oxford Forum (see link below, left under resources, says:)

"For a whole host of reasons I think this current arrangement is illogical. I think the logical arrangement is much simpler and will be based on the fact that I do own (and retain) all rights to my personal data / profile but essentially I am prepared to 'share' aspects of this with selected companies based on a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties.

"My logical situation would be something like:

"All data / profile on 'me' is stored in a secure place under my direct and sole control.

"I allow different levels of access to this data information to different companies / institutions based on the nature of the relationship. So I might allow my chosen Bank certain access and say my sports social networking site a different level of access.

"None of my data is actually transferred to these sites thay are simply allowed to access through to my secure place.

"If at some point I decide to 'deny' them that access then they cannot therefore keep any data of mine as a sort of legacy trace.

"One beneficial side effect of this might be that I will no longer need to remember 50 different user names and passwords as I - or is that 'me' - become the centre of my own universe.

I do think that at some point there is going to be a legal challenge to the current situation and that will spark a very interesting debate."