February 17, 2006
Lenses that anchor us
Like many other South Africans, I am very passionate about our national flag, and it irritates me when I see it displayed incorrectly ie. the red part should always be on top when flown horizontally.
And using the flagpole as a reference point (anchor?), the red part should be on the right when flown vertically.
Wrong. This misplacement of the flag arose when I noticed the SA Tourism logo and welcome icon a while back, and it bugged me that someone who should know better got the flag placement wrong. I mean, how could they!
So I phoned them, and spoke to a nice guy there called Mabeka, and he assured me that the logo was definitely correct. Hmmm. Let me check my facts again. Visiting the SA Govt info site, the guidelines indeed call for the red to be on the left hand side, when vertical. But that made no sense to me, and wanted to know WHY. I emailed the relevant department, and got this impressively speedy reply:
Dear Simon...The logic is as follows:The Flag is alike a written document. When you read a document you start from top to bottom, from left to right. According to our Flag, Red is at the top and blue at the bottom. So when the flag is displayed vertically, red should be the first one to be reread, hence it is displayed on the left hand side.
I hope this explanation will be satisfactory.
Themba Mabaso
Director: Bureau of Heraldry
Ah! Ok, now it makes sense. But for me, the real lesson was when our thinking is attached to a certain way of making sense of things, we can very easily regard something as incorrect if it doesn't fit the lens we're applying. This isn't news, mental models and frames of reference are continuously being challenged.
The flag issue though was particularly interesting for me in that I literally had a thinking anchor (the flag pole perspective) that precluded me from seeing the placement in any other way ie. through a document lens.
Most of challenge of creative thinking is being aware of the lenses we're applying to a situation, and to introduce different lenses to view a situation. I wrote about this in the context of movie making some time ago here and here.
Posted by sdehaast at 02:24 PM | Comments (1)
July 25, 2005
Ants, BMWs and digital pheromone trails
Reading an article in the latest Intelligence magazine about Germany’s big tech trends, one part stood out for me:
“...In more advanced systems vehicles could use wireless communications to inform each other about oil puddles, traffic jams, or accidents. BMW is working on wireless networks for cars that will automatically set up connections among vehicles in order to exchange critical sensor information; a car that detects a slippery stretch of pavement, for instance, could relay that information to other cars on the same road. The goal is to create networks of inter-communicating cars that could someday form a sort of automotive Internet.”
This reminded me of Steven Johnson's fascinating, but deeply complex, book, Emergence. One of the areas he writes about relates to how harvestor ants search for food by leaving pheromone trails that fade over time. This allows other ants in the area to know that another ant has foraged in that area and there's no point in going there for a while, until at least the trail fades. These so-called semio-chemicals are powerful communication mechanisms within a self-organised network.
This also highlights a very powerful tool for making creative leaps: borrowing concepts and lenses from other worlds. I wonder what insights the world of ants and an entomologist could give the engineers at BMW, or any participant of the road transport eco-system, in leaving digital pheromone trails along highways?
Posted by sdehaast at 11:34 PM | Comments (1)
June 05, 2005
Ladies & gentlemen, start your engines.
Further to my post about biometric visas, I see that Germany is the latest country to start issuing biometric passports:
"The new passport, valid for 10 years, will include an embedded RFID (radio frequency identification chip) that will initially store a digital photo of the passport holder's face. Starting in March 2007, the holder's left and right index fingerprints will also be stored on the chip." pcworld
I keep seeing businesses around that are so not prepared for engaging the future, like the 1 hour photo stores I spoke about earlier. Businesses that are so rooted to the past, that have no idea about the present. Let alone the future.
Do you, dear reader, have any examples?
Posted by sdehaast at 10:43 PM
February 27, 2005
More McLuhancy: 'Ground' penetrating radar & surf-skiing
I relooked at this reply to Renee Hopkins at Ideaflow the other day regarding a presentation on "Why Innovation" and realised it has resonance to the wider world, especially challenging Western-centric wisdom and models around the innovation argument within the developing world.
==="Innovation often comes as such a surprise, it can only be seen looking backwards."Nothing is as zealous as a recent convert, so excuse my relatively recent discovery of McLuhan's work and being my current Maslow 'hammer'. (Actually it's your fault, thanks to your blog where I saw some comments by Mark Federman, which then got me absolutely fascinated :)
As I quote him on a posting on this issue of predicting the future,
"...When faced with a totally new situation we tend to attach ourselves to the objects ... of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future..."
Rear View InnovationHis point: we can best predict the future by probing the present, the essence of his medium is the message quote. But because we're so immersed in it (the 'ground' as he puts it), we don't see it. Only the figure.
The challenge then to the innovator is to develop 'ground penetrating radar'. Hah, just come up with that term now! To see what's going on now and to make sense of its trajectory is to put oneself ahead of the pack. I surf-ski paddle in the ocean, and to catch a swell, I have to be paddling before the swell/wave hits me, otherwise I lose the ride. I think the same goes for a business. If they are waiting for the wave, then paddle, no chance.
==="Why Innovation? … to Do Less and Have more!"
My feeling is that the developing world (of which SA is no exception) runs by a different, agrarian clock, hence the connectedness to seasonal thinking. It also may explain some of the North-South conflicts, however widely or narrowly you define that term ie. hemispheres, inter-country, intra-country (Italy, Germany, Spain).
The 'South' is more connected to the seasonal clock, and have a different worldview to their northern neighbours, who have relied on industrialisation to move on and develop, yet have lost the connection to nature (and a built-in systemic view). I'm still developing this line of thinking, so excuse its paucity of insight.
Anyway, my point: Taking Africa, we have loads of time ie. we have abundant labour resources. So the innovation challenge here is to increase productivity by using simple, appropriate technology (The Appro-Tech "moneymaker" in Kenya is a case in point. A hand powered waterpump that has allowed subsistence farmers to move into a producer category, and is alleged to be contributing to .5% of Kenya's GDP.) EF Schumacher wrote about the concept of appropriate tech. in "Small is Beautiful".
Our innovation goals: reduce poverty, reduce the burden (esp. on rural women), increase growth & development. In short....:"Do more with less."
From a speech I did in 2003 for a Mobile Telecoms conference here in Cape Town:
"In Africa, time is a different concept to in the West. Technologies developed there are geared towards saving time, to do the same thing in shorter, so that more time for leisure is available.One of the amazing things about the Internet is the ability for it to reflect events in realtime.
In an African context, real time access isn’t a priority. Having access to content that is a day to a week old is infinitely more valuable to someone than not having it at all.
Thus the paradigm of needing to be “online” to the Internet for it to be relevant is challenged.
“Take-away” Internet can be a powerful tool in education, providing healthcare, collecting data.
Wizzy Digital Courier, one of the Cape IT Initiative’s Bandwidth Barn successes, delivers Internet content on a USB Flash disk via a courier system to schools, as well as downloading requested websites after hours when call rates are very low.
Combining existing distribution systems with web content demonstrates how powerful a perspective shift can be.
Another difference from the West: Here, we have loads of ‘time’; labour is abundant.
What we need are technologies that produce more with the same human effort. "
Posted by sdehaast at 10:19 PM | Comments (1)
February 24, 2005
Air Taxis and Convergence
Ester Dyson's latest seminar is called Flight School:
"Our goal is to get the pioneers in space and aviation together to trade ideas and opportunities as you build and transform your market. "
One thing that caught my eye in the promo email was about air taxis.
"...The second transformation is the on-demand air taxi business – a marker so new it doesn’t have a simple name yet. Air taxis carrying just one to five people can operate competitively and profitably – or so their proponents claim. They will require an interacting combination of cheaper, more reliable aircraft and business models based on real time schedule, price and customer-preference optimization. All three of these developments are coinciding, and should result in a new market that changes not just aviation but on-the-ground business and living patterns."
Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, talks about the confluence of component technologies that eventually allowed the DC-3 Dakota to take off, from both a technology/aerodymics perspective and from a business model perspective. It's going to interesting to see the evolution of an air taxi business go through the motions.
Senge makes the point that when engineers come up with a new idea that works in the laboratory they call it an invention.
But what the engineer seeks to create is an innovation. An idea that works in the laboratory does not become an innovation until it can be replicated reliably on a meaningful scale at practical costs.
In engineering when an idea progresses from an invention to an innovation, it requires that diverse, “component technologies” come together.
Senge uses the development of the DC-3 to illustrate this.
He notes that the thirty years between the Wright Brothers' first powered flight and the development of commercial air travel were marked by a myriad of failed experiments.
"The early planes were not reliable and cost effective on an appropriate scale... The DC-3, for the first time, brought together five critical component technologies that formed a successful ensemble.They were: the variable-pitch propeller, retractable landing gear, a type of light-weight molded body construction called 'monocoque,' radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps.
To succeed, the DC-3 needed all five; four were not enough."
Additionally, he notes that it also took the development of radar, airports and commercial airtravel business models to launch the air travel industry (and it related eco-systems).
Some food for thought about what technologies lying around the lab now can blindside you later?
Posted by sdehaast at 10:22 AM
January 26, 2005
Bits vs Atoms 2.0: Cassius, ePassports, and 1hr photo shop
My beautiful, adorable and incredibly intelligent boxer-x-rottweiler, Cassius, filled my life with such joy while he was around (he took on a micro-bus in 2001 and lost). He was also one of the first RFID-chipped animals I knew of, having a tiny ID chip injected into his shoulder years ago. This was to help identify him in case he went missing/got dog-knapped and lost his collar.
Being an early-adopter canine, Cassius highlighted for me early on the potential with RFID (radio-frequency identity) chips and smart-cards.
Recently I got thinking about this area again and what it could mean for business as usual.
The USA is offering incentives to frequent travellers to that country to move to a biometric-based visa system. In time, most countries will require visitors to have biometric id's.
Biometric smart-cards work is this way:
-A template is created of your biometric data, whether it be your face, retina or hand/fingerprint.
-This data is then stored on the chip on the card in a highly encrypted format.
-The card is also encoded with certain rights/permissions, as in access to a building, or country, in the case of a visa.
-The card-holder's identity is confirmed by a biometric reader, which then compares the (live) data to the chip template.
-If the two match, and the access rights are ok, then all is well.
Ok, now getting the template created in the first place needs to be made as easy for consumers as possible, in the case of travellers. I foresee a situation where certain biometric template providers will be licensed to supply this service, according to various standards.
Today, when we need visa or passports photos for travel purposes, one generally goes to the local 1hr photo shop. Smile, snap, snip, and there's your photo. EXTENDING this to the biometric-based future, it makes for these same photo-agencies to invest in this capacity or knowledge area and tap into existing consumer behaviour.
What do photos and biometric templates have to do with each other?
Nothing at the moment, but history is replete with examples of industries that anticipated potential futures and aligned accordingly, as well as wrecks on progress' highway of businesses that didn't sense the future. Those in the atom business (photo labs) need to understand the implications and extensions of a bit-based world.
Posted by sdehaast at 03:53 PM
January 17, 2005
Superglue and poltergeists
Personal observations are great in providing insights into the art of creative thinking, and I love to use these stories to impart these insights, like this earlier one.
7am Friday morning. Went to bed late thanks to my really bad habit of watching TV. My housemate calls me from downstairs, saying that the bathroom door is locked, and no-one's inside. Freaky. Those poltergeists again.
So I stumble downstairs and investigate. Sure enough, the door is closed, turning the doorknob yields a locked door. But how?? The wind slammed the door shut during the night, that's for sure. So I surmise that during the slam, the tumbler in the lock must have flipped over causing it to lock, somehow. And the key is on the inside, and the windows have really effective burglar-bars installed, like any self-respecting house in SA should.
Out come screwdrivers, long-nose pliars and later, satay sticks and superglue. Yes, satay sticks. The latter 'tools' were for me to try retrieve the key through the keyhole so that I could grip it with the pliars, turn it to unlock. Royally screwed that one up when I knocked the key out accidently. And no, there's no gap under the door to slide the key under.
Now I've always conditioned myself that there is ALWAYS a solution to some problem, it just requires that one be asking the right questions.
I then get another key to see if it by some fluke it works.
Key almost fits..but it also indicates to me that the door isn't locked!! Huh?
Now it dawns on me. The shaft inside the doorknob must've been forced back post-slam. So the doorknob is turning on itself, but not being attached to anything, it has no effect.
Solution is now easy - take off doorknob, insert another object wide enough to turn door latch, and bingo.
I thought about this afterwards as to how valuable this experience was for me in creative thinking. The major assumption that I was working on was that the door was locked because the doorknob had no effect. This caused my solution hunting be driven by the wrong questions: how to unlock the door. It should have been, how do I open the door: check all facts about impediments to that task.
Posted by sdehaast at 02:20 PM
December 05, 2004
Innovation at the edge
Telcos are hamstrung by the embedded worldview they have because they started off being a mobile TELEPHONE network.
With the transition from mobile voice to mobile data, new thinking is needed to truly ride this wave.
My article on McLuhans rear-view way of going forward is relevant here:
"gee, now that we've got much fatter pipes, we can run a video feed while we talk to someone."
Bollocks. A video feed of their chin maybe. Watch for the rise in cosmetic surgery bookings.
Broadband (and narrowband) wireless is much more than getting stuff to a handset. A handset/voice centric view will make an operator money (as has done in obscene amounts over the last decade) but do nothing to expand the pie of fresh new product ideas.
Those in play at the various operators need to think beyond the current device paradigm, and think in terms of the possibilities that this creates.
Think music subscription service - take iPod + iTunes Music Store + 3G connectivity. And a healthy dose of outward looking music industry execs. You now have an opportunity to offer consumers as much music as they can listen to for a limited period based on their monthly subscription. And since they're more likely to listen to more stuff, the chances are that they'll buy/keep at least some percent of that. The concept of The Long Tail plays out.
And I'm not talking about a wireless streaming audio service. No, this way you get to keep the music. Music of the Month club kind of stuff. Netflix for phones.
Extend this to audio books. A truly innovative product offering could be that Exclusive Books/Wordsworth, MTN/Vodacom/CellC and
A hybrid DAB digital radio / UMTS service can provide exceptional programming and content choice in your car radio. Think iTrip + cellphone.
This reminds me of the Negroponte switch, except that the switching is between different radio/wireless technologies. (Include as well RFID and Bluetooth networks).
(My fascination with audio rather than video is because you can still do other stuff while listening.)
Back to the realities here at home.
UMTS-enabled medical teams can much more easily perform tele-medicine services. Regarding my comments about narrow-band wireless, smart sensors can monitor water levels in flood- or disease-prone (eg. cholera) areas and rely infomation in a timeous fashion. Read more about SmartDust here.
The big challenge in eradicating poverty with limited resources in the near future is putting the people and resources where they will be most effective. Wireless networks just make it easier to gather that information.
This is possible because of a BIG FAT WIRELESS PIPE.
The point is, be wary of being too definitive about what services you (as an operator) think the public wants. Rather provide the basic services and create a platform for the public to innovate and develop novelties. Boro Douthwaite and Eric von Hipple have some excellent thoughts about this.
By innovation platform I mean allow people who want to tinker have access to the resources. Create a tinker-licence for those early-adopters. See my article [.doc] on user-led innovation for more on this and novelty generation.
So Russell Beattie is 100% correct in saying that Yahoo Mobile should give their staff unlimited access to mobile internet. What an incredible innovation pool. The structures just need to be in place so that the ideas can float freely and cross-pollonate and build on each other.
TiVo has an amazing platform that allows for the tinkering and developing new services by end-users, thanks to it being Linux-based (see here for example. Except from what I've seen, their management has cocked those opportunities up royally.
Essentially what's happening out there is open source innovation, and the more you open up your products to tinkering (with obvious warranty-based and safety provisos), the more interesting stuff you'll get.
Innovation happens at the edge of markets, not in the mainstream.
UPDATE: I'm always amazed by synchonicity. I found these insightful articles after I posted this.
"...If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I’m spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you’re going to make a billion dollars off it."
UPDATE 2: check this entry out on all-you-can-eat subscriptions and other emerging models in the music industry space.
Posted by sdehaast at 04:08 PM
November 26, 2004
Man Traps
Further to may last entry on the boxes that we create for ourselves through our assumptions, is this quote. It needs to read a couple of times to resonate.
”A trap is a trap only for creatures which cannot solve the problem it sets. Mantraps are dangerous only in relation to the limitations on what men can see and value and do. The nature of the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped. To describe either is to imply the other.”
– Sir Geoffrey Vickers, Freedom in a Rocking Boat.
Heavy bru.
I used the following in a pitch to flesh out the above quote:
· To make sense of the complex world around us, we employ thinking models and scripts to help us cope. These mental models are developed over time through our experiences and environment.
· The models we use to make sense of the world create these boxes, or ‘mantraps’.
· Unfortunately the moment one tries to simplify complexity, detail is lost, and to fill the gaps we use assumptions, stuff that has worked for us in the past in seemingly similar situations.
· In the corporate space, truisms of the past inhibit creativity and growth for the future. My role is to help you surface these assumptions and challenge them.
Posted by sdehaast at 05:02 PM
Bits vs Atoms 1.0: Thinking with new boxes
I avoid using cliches like "think out the box" for a number of reasons, but invariably in describing what I do I end up having to use that term. Same goes for "best practice".
A box, whether it be a mental construct, industry position, or world view based on mental models and assumptions gets to be a pretty safe place. In fact most of the 'boxes' we find ourselves in are of our own making.
I prefer to use the term new box thinking because I try to provide teams with a sense of security from which they can base their new thinking habits from. Being outside of a box is daunting, and most people feel intellectually naked.
In June I got to attend the Smart Card Society conference (thanks Obie) and one of the speakers was from the Reserve Bank. The essence of their talk was the fact that allowing Smart Cards to act as wallets for more than one service (eg. parking meters) was illegal in terms of the Banks Act, as the only people allowed to be third party payment providers were the banks and the Postbank. So they came to tell us that they're busy reviewing the framework to allow for SmartCard wallets to take off.
So that got me thinking...always a dangerous thing :)
And this is part of a bigger area of research that I'm doing around the battle between bits and atoms.
I live in Cape Town and we have parking meters that operate on ADO smartcards. But as I mentioned about you can only load cash to buy parking. What will be interesting to see is the evolution of this model. ADO/City of Cape Town have infrastructure on the ground - terminals in selected stores, parking bay units, parking marshalls on the ground.
Once the SARB's framework is in place, this will mean that ADO cards will be allowed buy other stuff eg. vending machine merchandise, bus/train tickets, hey whatever. If I need to top-up my card I can either go into a store and do it over the counter, or, and here's the interesting point, I can ask the parking marshall to do it via one of the parking terminals.
These terminals become de facto ATMs. I'm not saying that the volumes will be huge (yet), but it is in making connections like this that new opportunities emerge. And I'm not talking less about ADO coming up with the innovations, but rather the parking marshalls who will invariably come up with interesting business/service opportunities.
It is at the user interface that new ideas or gaps emerge. I wonder if the banks are developing new boxes to think from?
Posted by sdehaast at 04:20 PM