The Etch A Sketch and Letting Go in Order to Create

Over the weekend I caught the news that the creator of the legendary Etch A Sketch toy, Andre Cassagnes, passed away at the age of 86. The Etch A Sketch, with its iconic plastic red frame, gray slate 'writing' surface, and its dual white rotating draw wheels was an instant it from its debut in 1959.  Over 100 million Etch A Sketches have been sold since, and even in the age of computers, smartphones, tablets, and powerful design applications, the Etch A Sketch still remains popular, with a new batch of 'Sketchies', (I am not sure that is even a term, I might have just made it up), joining the ranks every year.

The singular feature and benefit of the Etch A Sketch is it's impermanence - don't like the way a drawing was turning out, simply stop, shake, and start all over. You'd literally 'wipe the slate clean' and could begin anew. Today that doesn't seem like a big deal, in this modern age of the digital 'undo' and where the marginal cost of saving one more version or taking one more digital image is essentially nothing. Back in the 60s and 70s this was a really big deal - the toy's ability to reset itself and allow the creator to start over without wasting any raw materials was a massive benefit.

But the impermanence of the Etch A Sketch worked the other way as well - if you managed to create something valuable and meaningful with the toy, (admittedly, not that easy to accomplish), you'd be tempted to set the toy down for a while, to show your creation to friends and family, and to make sure NO ONE got too grabby with your creation, lest some inadvertent jostling destroy your art.

Eventually though, you'd be forced to let go in order to continue to play with the Etch A Sketch, for as fantastic the device was, it could only 'hold' one creation at a time. To continue to create, to explore, to perhaps develop something new that could exceed in beauty or cleverness the prior effort, you'd have to bid farewell to the old and set off on creating something new.

It's an interesting dilemma really, one that many of us face today, the desire or tendency to cling too long and too fast to what we've done in the past that can constrain us from looking at today's problems and tomorrow's opportunities with fresh, unclouded eyes.

The Etch A Sketch forced you to let go in order to move forward. That was it's limitation and it's charm.

Have a Great Week!

Off Topic: Infographics of the 1870s

If you are a data/design/visualization mark like I am, then I apologize in advance for the half hour or so you are about to waste on the amazingly cool A Handsome Atlas site.

The clever folks at Handsome Atlas have taken several old government and census documents from the late nineteenth-century, (primarily The Statistical Analysis of the United States, published from about 1870 - 1920), and breathed new life into them, by creating a user-friendly tool for viewing the old works close-up, and in high resolution.New York, 1870

Don't really get why this is cool?

Then spend a few minutes looking at this beautiful chart/infographic titled 'Gainful Occupations and also as Attending School' , a look at employment and education across the states taken from the 1870 census data, (a small snippet of this graphic appears on the right of this post).

The Handsome Atlas site is full of amazingly interesting and detailed data tables, charts, graphics, and visual analyses of demographic, statistical, and economic data that was compiled in the census and published in The Statistical Analysis of the United States. With a big assist to the technology and presentation developed at Handsome Atlas, this data serves to remind us that the current fad and fascination with infographics and data visualization have their roots in the past.

Infographics and other visualizations help us, mostly, to make more sense of the world - breathing life and creating dimension, contrast, comparison, and most importantly, interest in data sets. 

We want to better understand the world around us certainly, and that longing and need for understanding is definitely not only a modern phenomenon.

If you take a few minutes to play around on the Handsome Atlas site, please let me know what you think.

Have a great weekend!

On airplane batteries and single sources of failure

After a massive and highly public launch of the new Boeing commercial jet the 787 Dreamliner, the manufacturer and their customers have been beset with major problems, including a worldwide grounding of all 787s in service, over concerns about possible battery overheating and fire risk.

The trouble with the 787 appears to stem from the planes' lithium-ion batteries that are used on the ground to power and recharge many of the aircraft's electronics.  Concerns about these batteries propensity to overheat and present a fire risk have led to the grounding, but there have been other 787 problems as well - ranging from a cracked cockpit windshield to oil leaks.

Meanwhile as Boeing, their airline carrier customers, and various sub-contractors attempt to understand and resolve these problems with the batteries, a wider conversation about the safety of lithium-ion batteries, and whether or not these kinds of batteries should be allowed to be brought onto airplanes at all was breaking out. For a brief moment, it appeared that at least some major airlines, (British Airways, Cathay Pacific), were considering banning all devices with these batteries, (like your laptop, tablet, and smartphone), from their flights - both in the cargo hold as well as in carry-on bags. Both arilines have since walked back on their initial statements, and for now anyway, laptops and smartphones are still allowed as carry-on items.

The point of all this? 

Well just about everyone that travels for business would not dream of heading out on the road for meetings, customer visits, a trade show or a conference - without their trusty cadre of electronic assistants - almost all of them powered by lithium-ion batteries. If some or even all airlines decided to ban their presence on planes due to safety concerns, this would have a significant and disruptive affect on all business travelers. Heading out of town without a laptop or your iPhone? You would not dream of it, right?  Heck, for many people going 15 minutes without their smartphone turns them kind of nervous and twitchy.

But to me, at least considering the idea that we can easily become over-reliant on a particular technology or tool is worth a re-visit from time to time. It is pretty likely that airlines will not ban personal electronics on their flights anytime soon, (the revenue hit would be enormous), but the possibility that a solution you've come to depend upon might not always be available to you 24/7 is much more realistic.

Maybe you've become over-reliant on LinkedIn, or some other virtual source of information at the expense of building solid real-world networks? What if LinkedIn suddenly doubled or tripled their pro license fees? Or you're asked to recruit into a field where candidates don't even use LinkedIn?

Perhaps you've built a long and successful career riding the back of a big, enterprise technology or architecture stack, and suddenly, and seemingly without warning, that technology is no longer in demand, and with it, your value as an 'expert' dramatically diminished?

Or what if you've built a stable career inside an organization primarily by clinging to the status-quo, protecting the precedence of how work gets done, only to be disrupted by some combination of new technology, new people, or new leadership - most of which don't really care how much you know about what happened in the 90s?

Sure, it is really tough to imagine (and a little unrealistic) heading out on a long business trip without our normal, and usual tools we need to conduct business, and to get things done. It seems really unlikely anyone will be faced with that any time soon. But is far more likely, and even certain, that disruption of your routine - technological, personal, organizational - is coming, and probably going to catch you unprepared.

Here's a good exercise for that spare 10 minutes you have right now, (I know you have some time, you made it all the way to the end of this post) - think about the ONE tool or technology you rely upon the most at work, and then come up with two or three action plans if in the unlikely event that tool or technology were to become unavailable to you.

I think there are at least two major benefits to doing this. One, if indeed you lose access to your favorite tool or tech, you have at least a starting point to go from before deciding your next move. And two, maybe just maybe you'll find a better solution or approach to the one that you swear you can't live without.

'There isn't any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet'

I've been grinding through Nate Silver's book 'The Signal and the Noise' over the last few weeks and while it can, at times, get perhaps a little too deep into some dark statistical alleys, overall it is a fascinating read, and one I definitely recommend if for no other reason than for an excellent chapter on handicapping NBA basketball games.

If there is one major theme or takeaway from the book for me, I think it is best articulated in this quote, about two-thirds of the way through the book, in a chapter about how difficult it can often be in making sense of data, a problem only getting worse as the amount and availability of data continues to explode:

The US Government now publishes data on about 45,000 economic statistics. If you want to test for relationships between all combinations of two pairs of these statistics - is there a causal relationship between the bank prime loan rate and the unemployment rate in Alabama? - that gives you literally one billion hypotheses to test.

But the number of meaningful relationships in the data - those that speak to causality rather than correlation and testify to how the world really works - is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn't any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.

In 2013 I promise that you, as an informed, and opportunistic Talent professional will be hearing, seeing, talking, and thinking about Big Data. Data about job ad posting, data about talent assessment scores, data about compensation and retention, data about engagement, data about performance, and maybe even data about data. 

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, most organizations have plenty of data. More than they know what to do with. And the more they collect, as made really clear in the example above, the chances are high that it won't lead to a faster discovery of the truth - it will just unearth more paths to explore.

Which sometimes, certainly, might be needed, but other times, and maybe most of the time, only results in more ways to get lost.

Don't get caught up chasing data just to have more data. The truth isn't going anywhere, and once you think you have it figured out, and feel that the data you do have supports your beliefs, then you'd probably be better served acting, rather than collecting even more data. 

Have you read The Signal and the Noise yet? Better get on it, just in case it becomes the 2013 version of Moneyball, and you won't want to feel left out!

Modding the Hiring Process

Until my son starting playing Minecraft in earnest, I really had no conception of the concept of the Video Game 'Mod' and how popular and powerful these mods have become in that industry.  For the folks like me that have no clue what I'm talking about, here is a brief explanation from Wikipedia:

Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer games (PC games), especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not stand-alone software and require the user to have the original release in order to run. They can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, textures, levels, story lines, music, and game modes. They also usually take place in unique locations. They can be single-player or multiplayer. Mods that add new content to the underlying game are often called partial conversions, while mods that create an entirely new game are called total conversions and mods that fix bugs only are called unofficial patches.

Essentially, the 'Mod' is the method where fans, players, or third-party development companies add features, capability, depth, and other elements to existing game foundations or platforms. For avid gamers, these mods contribute to a better, more personal experience, and help a game to continue to hold player interest after it has been 'beaten', i.e. all existing levels or missions having been completed.

Last week a piece in Wired featured how one company, an enterprise 'Big Data' startup called WibiData, is using the concept of video game mods in the recruiting process.  Over time, the folks at WibiData realized that many of their staff were avid fans of the game Portal, and that it was likely that one source of future candidates would be from other Portal players.

So in order to connect with, and hopefully learn more about these prospects, WibiData created their own Portal mod, where players get to learn more about WibiData, see renderings of the offices, and are challenged to solve math puzzles to advance in the mod to a WibiData job application. So far, the results have been really impressive. From the Wired piece:

In the week since WibiData published the levels, they’ve been a huge a hit both for getting quality job candidates and getting people to notice the startup. “Compare this to cost of using a recruiter to place a single candidate, this by far the best investment I’ve made in marketing and recruiting,” says (WibiData's) Bisciglia. Thus far there’s been 30,000 visits to WibiData’s jobs page (which introduces the project), 1,000 downloads of the game modification, and 30 job applications.

You can learn more about the WibiData Mod in their preview video embedded here (Email and RSS subscribers please click through)

I liked this story for a couple of reasons - one, certainly as a stand-alone story of how one company came up with a creative and differentiating recruiting strategy to meet their specific talent challenges. And two, for what stories like this suggest might be the future for enterprise software tools more broadly. 

WibiData (and the other folks that design video game Mods), are taking an existing solution that is embraced in their community, adding some specific and important elements and features, (while not breaking the base solution), and unleashing it out into the world for use, comment, and positive results. 

Could this be the way that companies and service providers supply and 'mod' software in the enterprise in the future? One big, established company creates the base or foundation, and the rest of the community creates openly downloadable 'mods' to fit their particular interests and needs of their specific communities? And, most importantly, in a way that does not 'break' the system?

As the generation that expects the ability to easily 'mod' anything gains more influence in the workplace, I expect we'll see more of this kind of thing going forward.

A system, process, technology - whatever the case - if it doesn't work for you, just get, (or create) a mod.