Emotional Spell Check (we are all really dumb)

In the world of office productivity software like the Microsoft Office suite of programs, (Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc.), the 'spell check' feature is so fundamental, so ingrained into our experience of using these tools that we probably can't imagine a word processing or other text-centric application lacking the capability.

At this point could anyone craft a 400 word email or 5 page quarterly report without running spell check at least two or three times?  In fact, spell check is so core to the process of content creation that we take it for granted, and some might contend when the capability is introduced to children in grade school via the use of common office productivity solutions that their ability to actually spell becomes diminished, as they come to rely on the spell check device too heavily.  This likely occurs in adults as well, but we often cleverly convince ourselves we don't really have a spelling problem, we have a typing problem, and that most of the corrections made by spell check are to words we really do know how to spell.

So if we can justify the heavy reliance on spell check as a mere productivity enhancer and not really a crutch, what possibly could we say about the newest 'check' solution launched recently, a product called ToneCheck, which is described as 'the emotional spell check'.  In the words of its creators:

ToneCheck™ is an e-mail plug-in that flags sentences with words or phrases that may convey unintended emotion or tone, then helps you re-write them. Just like Spell Check… but for Tone.

Does your first draft of that email message to your prospect read something like 'Come on already, quit wasting my time and jerking me around. Are you signing the contract or not?

Here is a screen shot of the ToneCheck plug-in activated on a possibly 'emotional' message:

A quick run of the ToneCheck plug-in can flag that passage as 'potentially angry' and suggest that you make some alterations to hit a more 'contented' tone. I suppose you probably knew the 'quit jerking me around' line did have the potential to seem angry.

This functionality has similarities to common features in HR Technology solutions for performance management, namely the 'legal scan' that catches managers from noting things like, 'Sally is really too old to grasp the technical complexity of this project'; and 'managerial helper' kinds of tools that suggest descriptive sentences and paragraphs to accompany objective or competency based ratings.

Having these kinds of helpers and filters and in the case of ToneCheck, a bit of a stop sign put up before you press 'Send' may be beneficial, but I can't help but wonder if these tools are really confirming something many folks often think. That is we really don't know what we are doing, we will quite likely get ourselves and our firms in big trouble if we are not monitored, and at the end of the day we really can't be trusted to spell, keep our emotions in check, and are in fact, really dumb.

Notes:

1.This post is about 500 words, I made 37 spelling mistakes that hopefully were all fixed by spell check.

2. I do not have 'ToneCheck' turned on in the comments, so please feel free to tell me what you really think.

Before you know you want it

As the World Wide Web has developed and evolved the methods and strategies utilized for information discovery have also undergone tremendous growth and evolution.  In the late 1990s portal and categorization technology from Yahoo dominated. If you wanted to find something, chances are a walk down Yahoo's categorization hierarchy was your starting point.

Over time as the web exploded in content and complexity and since human-curated categorization simply could not keep up with the growth, search took over as the primary tool for finding content. This market was led by Yahoo for a time, and eventually came to be dominated by Google.  More recently, social discovery has come to rival search as a primary and important mechanism for surfacing important and meaningful web content.  I know something is important, and quite likely worth my time and attention if a trusted friend or colleague has shared it on Twitter, or recommended it on Facebook.

But despite the obvious improvements in the underlying technology and usability exhibited by the evolution of discovery tools and methods, there still seems an element of inefficiency and imperfection in the strategies and actions that many of us leverage to find interesting information.  Keeping informed of news and developments in our areas of interest, and perhaps most importantly, surfacing content and expertise in adjacent or complimentary spaces, the kinds of resources that are most likely to expose us to new thinking, ideas, and challenge our conception of the status quo, is increasingly seen as an endless, and hopeless struggle.

It is only logical that there is something next, something better and more effective than the combination of search and social curation and discovery that most of us have come to rely upon in an attempt to learn, adapt, and stay informed.  What if the next development is a kind of new technology that not only presents you with a collection of relevant resources and links based on your active preferences and the content shared by your trusted networks, but is intelligent enough to predict what you will be interested in next, and offers information and insights based on a more informed prediction about not just what you may have liked in the past, but what is most relevant to you today, and quite likely tomorrow.

That is the basic premise behind an interesting startup from Finland called Futureful.  Futureful is in the process of developing what they call a 'Predictive Discovery Engine'.  What exactly is 'predictive discovery?' From the Futureful 'about' page:

Futureful’s predictive discovery engine analyzes relevant information flows to open up the potential future around you. We use a combination of personal, social and contextual filters to understand interests, influences and intentions, and provide you with inspiring seeds to play with. Then its up to you to pick and choose, discover and share. 

I have to admit that while a little unsure about the specific ability of Futureful to build and successfully deploy the self-described predictive discovery engine, I do think that in time, and perhaps sooner than later a better, and more precise method and technology for information discovery and presentation will have to emerge.  The current, seemingly unsustainable cycle of adding feeds to Google Reader, adding friends on the various social networks, and the development of new and improved mobile devices that provide constant access to all the noise, with only a passing ability to discover the signal will eventually have to change.

If you are like me, you might feel like you are reading every possible blog, news source, and mass media site you can find.  You may have developed a large, diverse, and valuable set of networks across numerous social platforms.  You are constantly reading, updating, reviewing, and sharing.  But despite all this activity, you never shake the feeling that you are missing something. So you add 'more'. Another feed, another friend, an so on.

Perhaps we don't need more, we need more precise.

Perhaps we need a way to see the future before it arrives.

How about you - what do you do to try and manage the balance between information overload and the sense you are missing something?

Does Technology Change Everything?

Over the weekend I watched the archive of a presentation given by Allen Delattre, Global Market Managing Director for Technology for Executive Search firm Korn/Ferry at last week's GigaOm Net:Work conference in San Francisco.

In the presentation Delattre makes some interesting predictions about the increasing impact of the major technological shifts that enable (or perhaps require) organizations to grow more global, collaborative, and virtual, while acknowledging that 'virtualization' and 'collaborative' have become so overused as terms that they have lost some of their punch. But despite this, the very real effect and impact on new technology from social, to mobile, to collaborative has had on organizations, augmented by the growing influence of the Gen Y and Milennial cohorts, have created such a new environment and set of challenges that the fundamental human resources issues of leadership development, identification of high potentials, and succession management all need to adapt to this new, technology-based reality. 

Delattre sees the ability to understand and successfully implement these new technologies as not only critical to organizational growth and survival, but that the most successful leaders of the future will be the ones that are best able to assess, adapt, synthesize, and implement new technologies to support business strategy and to unleash the best performance from employees.  And since the technology landscape continues to evolve and change so rapidly, Delattre theorizes that traditional organizational succession planning approaches that often emphasize 'coming up through the ranks' and often taking rotational assignments in different parts of the organization will no longer be the best way to find and groom future leaders. His remark that successors for big-time CIO positions used to count on 'surviving that SAP project and bringing in it only at double the original budget' is both sad and amusing.

This is a simple and really direct argument that the technology itself, is a primary driver and leader of the massive changes in organizational structures and that it presents significant impact on the nature of leadership and talent management.  When these kind of 'technology changes everything' speeches come from hot tech companies, or from systems integrators that stand to benefit greatly from the consulting and advisory fees they stand to earn from helping clients navigate the myriad choices on offer, you would be forgiven for taking the remarks with a grain of salt.  But when a Managing Director of a leading executive search firm makes the case that technology leadership is a fundamental and an imperative for tomorrow's leaders, then perhaps a second listen is warranted.

You can take a look at Delattre's presentation at NET:Work below, be warned, the first few minutes are a series of 'Did You Know?' style statistics about globalization, economic, and demographics.  I think by now we all get the idea the world is changing pretty rapidly. Delattre's remarks start at about 4:10. 

What do you think?  Do these new technologies present not just better ways of getting things done but rather a core and enduring change in what tomorrow's leaders must understand and master?

Situational Awareness

Your environment, the activities in which you are engaging, and the people that you are with, impacts and influences your ability and desire to respond to and interact with the constant demands for your time and attention. This is becoming increasingly important as the number and diversity of communication avenues increase,No, not that kind of Situation and how in the smartphone generation, the tendency to be always connected to these tethers has become common and expected.

That was a really long winded way of saying essentially this:

1. There are loads of ways (email, phone, SMS, social networks), in which we interact with our colleagues, friends, and family (and the public)
2. These various mechanisms differ widely in how we respond to them, (an urgent text message from a family member gets an immediate response)
3. Different and sometimes overlapping social circles utilize these mechanisms in varying ways, (work colleagues email us on one account, while almost anyone on Twitter can send an '@' message directed to us)
4. We constantly assess and adjust our ability and preferences for receiving and responding to these messages based on our situation, (we turn off our phones when in a parent-teacher conference, or we may only respond to LinkedIn invites once a week)

Some directives and adjustments are simple -  silencing our phones in a movie theater. While others are more complex and subtle -attending a conference presentation but wanting to remain available for urgent messages from the office or from family members, while ignoring personal email or messaging from various social networks. In all cases, managing the multitude of communication channels and our ability to respond gets more complex all the time.

Recently mobile communications supplier Nokia released a prototype application named 'Situations', designed to help Nokia smartphone users attempt to manage these channels and contexts more effectively, and after some initial configuration, automatically. 'Situations' allows the user the configure various contexts like 'In a meeting', or 'Concert', and set up corresponding phone behaviors like setting the phone to vibrate only, allowing only selected contact group calls to ring through, or auto-responding to text messages with a 'situationally appropriate' response. 

Nokia 'Situations' screen images below:

 

While the current capability of Nokia 'Situations' is basically limited to 'core' phone functions like ringer behavior, text messaging, and basic calendaring, it probably is not too far-fetched to see an application that takes this functionality one better and integrates with personal and corporate email, enterprise and public social networks, and whatever new mechanisms for connection and communication emerge over time. Today, we configure messaging and notification rules for these channels one by one, and no technology I am aware of lets us consolidate these rules and overlay context and situational awareness to refine the rules.

There is much talk about information overload, and while in the aggregate that might be true what seems to be more important to address the overload is the ability to segment, sort, and intelligently respond to the incoming stream of messages based on the situational context of type of message, relationship to the message sender, and augmented by our physical surroundings. 

For smartphones to be truly smart, they should be able to do more than continuously beep, ring, vibrate, and poke us with incoming message after message, they ought to be able (with a little coaching), to do some initial screening for us.

Don Draper has a secretary sitting outside his office doing the screening for him.  The rest of us need some help, and the idea behind the Nokia 'Situations' app I think represents the next evolution in this process.

Inspected by 2

How many times have you put on a new article of clothing and found one of those little 'Inspected by' tags in one of the pockets?

It isn't much, just a little slip of paper that reminds and assures you that someone had a final look-see at your new shirt before it was shipped out of the factory.  Often these tags just have  a number on them to make a kind of vague identification of the actual inspector.  Once in a while you will find one signed with an actual name. Whether you believe that an 'Inspected by Marylou' tag was really placed in your shirt pocket by a real-life Marylou doesn't really matter that much.  It still provides a kind of personal touch to what is, let's face it, a normally impersonal and detached kind of transaction. At least if you shop where I shop.

But for the clothing inspectors themselves, the inclusion of such a tag, especially if it is signed with their real name, provides a signature, a statement of the quality of the product, and a kind of mark or stamp of personal ownership of the overall manufacturing process (or at least their part of the process).

I was thinking about this when I came across an excellent and interesting set of resources called 'Design By Intent' , created by Dan Lockton with David Harrison and Neville Stanton.  The Design with Intent cards present a series of concepts or design philosophies that 'can be used to help inspire brainstorming or idea generation, to explore design methods potentially relevant to a brief, to analyse existing systems, or as a reference.'

One of the cards (thumbnail to the right) mentions the idea of 'Watermarking', or in other words a mechanism for displaying or promoting a system user's ownership of something, be it a product, a service, or even a piece of data.  Watermarking, or tagging with an indicator of creation, or ownership can have powerful effects - increased care and pride of workmanship, better exposure across and beyond the system of an individual user's contribution, and easier discovery of those possessing skill and ability throughout the system.

Built into most enterprise technologies is this concept of 'watermarking', or information ownership if you prefer.  It comes in the form of a database field usually known as 'Created by', and its close cousin, 'Last Updated By'.  These fields are usually attached to every piece of discrete data in the system, an employee record, a purchase order, or a ledger journal entry.  Inspecting these fields can tell a user or an administrator which user performed the actions of record creation and, if applicable, revision.  

But the thing is, in the enterprise system context these fields are not typically visible on the surface or to the casual consumer of the data, may require some super top-secret level security and access to even see, and are most typically only referenced when something goes wrong.  Purchase Order #397 had a bad account code?  Who the heck keyed that in to the system?  Rarely, (pretty much never), are the creators of 'good' data recognized or acknowledged.  I know what you are thinking, people responsible for entering data into enterprise systems are supposed to get it right, we don't need to tag or overtly identify the names (or numbers) of people simply for doing what they are supposed to do.

Well, 'Marylou' is supposed to inspect shirts, we don't need to slip a note in the pocket of each one she quality checks either.  

It's funny, on the social web every tweet, every Facebook 'like', every blog comment is visible, searchable, trackable, but yet so much of the interactions that end users have with typical enterprise systems is effectively, (or at least on the surface) almost anonymous. 

I wonder if that has something to do with how much more enjoyable social technologies are to enterprise ones.

Well there's Farmville too.