TED Talks is producing some brilliant presentations!

This talk given by author Steven Pinker focuses on ideas from his latest publication, The Stuff of Thought.

I came across the video below while looking for other articles supporting the necessity of plain language when writing content for web services and improving communication between IT and Business departments.

As Mr. Pinker notes in his presentation,

“…language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature so much as a window onto human nature.”

Mr. Pinker goes on to describe how language is “infinite” in its’ form, shape, and construct which is why it is such a complex process. Yet we aren’t conscience of how and what we are saying forms the basis for others’ to clearly understand the purpose of our message.

If over 90% of effective communication between others is based on body language; let alone the numerous complexities that are folded into the mix when you take into account culture, dialect, and the environment, is it any wonder why we get frustrated when trying to convey new ideas to others?

Email, for example, has become the primary method of communicating with friends, family, and colleagues. A medium that does little to provide clarity to the message delivered; hence why I feel the ideas talked about in this video are so important today.

In an exclusive preview of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. By analyzing common sentences and words, he shows us how, in what we say and how we say it, we’re communicating much more than we realize.

I was waiting on a colleague the other day; and while waiting I came across this article in Scientific American Mind magazine that I wanted to share. It focuses on a new approach to leadership that pulls us out of the Industrial Revolution and into the Information Age.

In the past, telling people what to do and how to do their jobs was a necessity. Then again, there was a huge knowledge gap between the leader and the worker. Today that gap is virtually non-existent. Yet there are still many organizations functioning in this “top-down” / micro-management style.

The aforementioned article discusses how a new view on leadership is starting to take shape:

In this alternative view, effective leaders must work to understand the values and opinions of their followers—rather than assuming absolute authority—to enable a productive dialog with followers about what the group embodies and stands for and thus how it should act. By leadership, we mean the ability to shape what followers actually want to do, not the act of enforcing compliance using rewards and punishments.

In all my years leading others, I’ve never seen the “I have an important title and thou shalt listen to me” approach ever succeed.

Strike that. I have seen it be incredibly successful in the following ways:

Increasing Anxiety

Creating silos between people, departments, and data

Breading a corporate culture of mistrust

Destroying any creative process

Killing communication amongst team members

It’s troubling to me that a bottom-up leadership style would be something new to leaders today; especially in an era where community and mass collaboration are creating capacities never seen in our time.

My father taught me well in this domain. He was the Director of Engineering for DuPont Canada when he retired. Prior to this he was the site manager of the largest plant in Canada for several years.

The one lesson, amongst many, that he taught me is that everyone wants to feel like what they are doing is of value; and that they are valued in the process.

Given that good leadership depends on constituent cooperation and support, this new psychology of leadership negates the notion that leadership is exclusively a top-down process. In fact, it suggests that to gain credibility among followers, leaders must try to position themselves among the group rather than above it.

And who says soft skills aren’t as important as technical ones? In my mind, soft skills aren’t “soft”. They are, in fact, the hardest skills of all.

This “new view” on leadership suggests that if you are overseeing a group of people and you don’t have the ability to listen more than you speak or direct, you will not be successful in such a role.

I couldn’t agree more!

So how do you know if you are a micro-manager? In a related Blog post, this diagram was passed on to me from a friend and colleague. It provides an explanation for why the “old school” leadership style is backwards by today’s standards.

The most important function for a manager is X = -Y, where X is employee brain use and Y is degree of management.

If you are unsure if your style is that of top-down or “micro-manager”, ask yourself these questions:

1) Do you pride yourself on being “on top of” the projects or your direct reports? Do you have a solid grasp of the details of every project?

2) Do you believe that you could perform most of the tasks of your direct reports, and potentially do a better job?

3) Do you pride yourself on frequent communication with your employees? Does that communication include asking them for detailed status reports and updates?

3) Do you believe that being a manager means that you have more knowledge and skills than your employees, and thus are better equipped to make decisions?

4) Do you believe that you care about things (quality, deadlines, etc.) more than your employees?

Answering even a weak “yes” to any one of these might mean you either are–or are in danger of becoming–a micromanager. And once you go down that road, it’s tough to return.

Teams are brilliant examples of community. Start listening to your community as a leader; you’ll be blown away by the results!

Seth Earley, Principal of Earley & Associates was recently interviewed about his acquisition of Wordmap for the purposes of creating taxonomies and making information easy to find.

So why write about this? Companies buy other companies every day.

I think it’s a brilliant purchase for the services Earley & Associates offer – a tool that makes content management and the creation of taxonomies that match the mental model of their end users – it’s a smart match.

What continues to amaze me about organizations who go to purchase these tools is the lack of understanding about the purpose of the tool, including:

What problem(s) will it resolve?

How will it assist in improving operational efficiencies?

Have you identified end users of the system being purchased and interviewed them about using the tool?

Will this piece of technology make information, not random data, easy to find?

Do you have information to populate such a tool in advance of purchasing the system?

In many cases, from my experience, these questions and data aren’t answered/acquired in advance. The result? The promised ROI is almost never realized. More money is in fact spent because of this lack of purpose.

That said I believe that Seth has the right approach when it comes to the acquisition of Wordmap,

Earley & Associates will still focus on solving customer problems and not just selling them a tool, according to Earley. “If the tool is appropriate, then there is a terrific syntergy,” he says. “But no tool is appropriate for every circumstance, so we intend to remain a consulting firm and bring in Wordmap as appropriate.”

If your only tool is a hammer – every problem looks like a nail. You wouldn’t dig the foundation of a house with the claw of a hammer; it’s the wrong tool for the job. So why use any technology that doesn’t help people resolve problems with information management?

I am a member of the Taxonomy Community of Practice, which Seth and his colleague Stephanie Lemieux helped forge, along with other global communities of practice.

I would encourage others in the fields of I.A., User Experience, or Knowledge Management to join this group and share your ideas in making everything easier to find.

Editor of KM World Magazine, Huh McKellar wrote an interesting article in the April edition of the magazine, Making a case for context.

Hugh confesses his initial reaction to social media six or so years ago, was that these things were for teens with too much time on their hands.

…the most important issue facing the enterprise was preserving the “knowledge” of older employees- the baby boomers – as they start leaving the work force…Social networking was nice, but more appropriate for the younger, consumer-focused demographic.

This acknowledgment of the differences in generations is an issue I’ve spoken too in many of my blog entries to date. This is a challenge in all organizations. The business value that senior leaders bring to the table is incalculable. Yet too few businesses are taking the time to capture this wisdom before they leave for the sandy beaches of “retirement island”.

Ovum refers to Generation Y’s as the “iGeneration.” According to Mary Turner at Ovum,

…this group’s [iGeneration] expectations in the workplace have been forged from their experiences outside it. Younger workers require a high level of search, e-discovery, content managment, and personalization.

This represents a real paradigm shift in the way in which organizations have to start thinking about the management of staff, security restrictions to content, and the like.

If you still aren’t convinced there needs to be a dramatic shift in the way business and government does business, perhaps these statistics will help convince you:

In 2006, 161 exabytes of data—that’s 161,000,000,000 gigabytes—were generated, IDC reports. In four years, that figure will leap to 988 exabytes. Just imagine the implications of managing, in every sense of the word, all that “stuff,” all that content. Sure, a percentage of that data will have no real value to anyone. But without context none of it will. And the iGeneration, or whatever you want to dub it, is primed to bring value and context to enterprise content in new ways. This reformed skeptic is eager to watch it unfold.

Still think Findability and subsequently creating a positive User Experience aren’t critical when looking to innovate, project plan, and keep your customers happy?

This article from KM World Magzine discusses the advancement from Web 2.0 to Collaboration 3.0.

In particular how Boeing created their new 787 Dreamliner aircraft in a way that would confound many organizations today – collaborating with other companies in the creation of an improved airliner:

Seventy percent of the aircraft is not just being manufactured but was designed concurrently by partners located in 11 countries, and then assembled virtually in a computer model maintained by Boeing.

Boeing’s approach is a model for other businesses in the global community. By sharing ideas and collaborating with other subject matter experts, the end product is substantially ahead of its’ time; and was even delivered well ahead of industry standards.

Normally the creation of such an airliner takes about six years from ideas to full production. The 787 was created in just four and a half years time. A full year and a half ahead of schedule!

In an increasingly global economy, the type of cross-organizational collaboration embodied by Boeing will become more common—but at the risk of creating yet another buzzword, they will only be successful when managers understand that Collaboration 3.0 processes and tools need to be part of the equation.

And while this may intimidate some senior business leaders, as it is a paradigm shift in the way business has operated for decades, I believe we will hear more success stories like Boeing in the months and years to come.

I think the tag line for Adam Curry’s Podcast sums up the reason why organizations in every sector should start working towards collaboration as their means of innovation and business success:

There are no secrets – only information you don’t yet have.

I was talking with Rebecca Hope from the New Zealand based company, Tecadsnz, last night. The focus of our discussion was around their Motive8 Infographics tool that allows clients to disseminate large volumes of data through graphic design.

The Motive8 Infographics process is a brilliant one, to say the least. In an age of overwhelming data and not knowing what or how to make choices, the ability to clarify process for individuals and teams has never been more important.

After this discussion I went searching for similar examples. This video from Johnathan Harris demonstrates three applications including: “I feel fine”; “Yahoo! Time Capsule”; and “Universe”; which paint the picture of human emotions through the billions of words generated by everyone, everywhere online.

At the start of this video, Jonathan tells his audience that he considers himself a storyteller. The story he’s telling is not his own, but that of the collective emotional consciousness of the entire planet.

In a world of computers and disconnecting from other people, it’s refreshing to see a use of technology that re-connects us with ourselves; or at the very least helps us reconnect with the rest of the world on a more “human” level.

Truly amazing!

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes and thoughts snapped up in 2006. And he premieres “Universe,” which presents current events as constellations of words — a tag cloud of our collective consciousness.

Chris Baum, Editor in Chief of Boxes and Arrows, talks about Information Architecture (IA) with Jeremiah Owyang.

Chris talks about “what is IA”, as well as the differences between “Big IA” and “Little IA” and how the Information Architect adds value to the overall User Experience.

I had the pleasure of doing a Podcast with Chris and Jeff Lash on their two part article on Boxes and Arrows, Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management.

As the Podcast Editor for Boxes and Arrows, I’ll be lining up future shows with authors in the coming weeks.

If there are specific publications you’d be interested in learning more about, drop me a note.

I’ll prioritize future shows for the B&A Podcast according to the greatest interest of the community.

Liz Danzico is editor of Boxes and Arrows and is on the Advisory board for the Information Architecture Institute. She had the opportunity to present at An Event Apart conference in Chicago, on the seven lies of IA.

I like this article because it challenges commonly held beliefs about the role of the Information Architect and the “stead fast” rules about the art and science of labeling and structuring content.

The seven lies about IA, according to Liz, are as follows:

1. Navigation must be consistent.
2. There is a magic number (plus or minus two).
3. Users must get to all parts of the site all of the time.
4. Users must know where they are at all times.
5. The user experience must be seamless.
6. Shorter is better.
7. Information architects must do information architecture.

The biggest lie that I agree with, (I don’t think I’ve ever made such a statement – but in this context it makes sense) is, “Information architects must do information architecture.”

Individuals bring tremendous value to organizations not only because of their niche expertise in one area, but also from their multitude of experiences in other disciplines, and even past careers.

For myself, working in the field of Cognitive Psychology for years prior to entering the discipline of IA has been a huge help in past and current projects. Knowing how people process information and subsequently behave is at the core of Cognitive Psychology.

When I tell others about this transition the typical response is:

“Wow! That’s a leap going from working in the field of Cognitive Psychology to IA”.

My response is always the same:

“Not really. I understand how people think and subsequently behave. I just take those experiences and transfer them to the creation of findable and useful solutions for clients.”

The Information Age has reinforced the truism, “Content is King!”. Every industry has several teams publishing content to multiple web services. It is critical that everyone practice effective IA, to ensure people can find everything they need, whenever they need it.

The idea that IA’s must do IA is not only a lie, but such a perspective will prevent Information Architects from an incredible opportunity to both learn from, and teach other professions, about different theories and solutions to problems.

A huge thank you to Liz for having the courage to present these ideas at the conference in Chicago and for sharing with the global community.

I look forward to further discussions around these ideas with other professionals both within and outside the discipline of Information Architecture.

One further thought…

I hope that such events in the future will be recorded as a Podcast. I think an audio reocrding of Liz’s talk in conjunction with these ideas would provide greater context to the information provided.

To see an example of what I mean, check out the Podcast I did last year with Ottawa’s Human Factors Group, CapCHI. Here you’ll see three of the four Podcasts have the PowerPoint along with a discussion with the presenter, prior to the talk.