posts i’ve written / what consumes me, bud caddell

your new job

09 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • 7 comments

Your new job is to commandeer either one or all of these circles. Your company needs you to.

The world is a game of chess … in that the space of possible decisions and actions is almost endless, beyond your imagination.* Chess, and the market that your company belongs to, are complex adaptive systems. The market itself is a complex adaptive system, your organization is one as well, along with your brain, your ecosystem, and the world – we inhabit ever larger spheres of complexity.

Consistent elements of complex adaptive systems:

a multi-level network of agents constantly acting and interacting, thus a system always in motion
highly dispersed control, behavior is set by cooperation and competition between agents
an ability to restructure and arrange – to adapt as experience is gained or conditions change
an anticipation of the future – a system of agents predicting potential outcomes and planning for those outcomes
many niches, and the act of filling one niche opens up more niches – for cooperation and competition w/in that niche
complex adaptive systems are characterized by perpetual novelty – talking of equilibrium is pointless, equilibrium in a complex adaptive system is essentially a dead system

Just as in chess, there’s no optimal strategy for navigating a market – your best course of action is to make predictions, collect insights, and explore successful strategies outside of your company and bring them in.

Knowing this, it’s shocking just how little of all three activities most organizations engage in and how little credence each is given. Why not a Chief Prediction Officer, a Chief Insight Officer, and a Chief Explorer? And why aren’t there more technological solutions that will capture an organization’s predictions, their outcomes, and rate their effectiveness? Everyone’s job should require them to perform duties inside these three circles; that is, if everyone wants to keep their job.

*Claude Shannon, of Bell Labs, once estimated the total possible number of chess moves to 10^120 – a gigantically unfathomable figure, there hasn’t been that many microseconds since the Big Bang.

the bucket brigade

08 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments

This is how the internet works.

The things you find interesting, useful, beautiful, and amazing are ideated, constructed, and distributed to you via a bucket brigade, of sorts.

Would it be fair to solely credit the last person in the chain for stopping the fire? Of course not.

In any collaborative system, there has to be a mechanism to reward the individual members of the chain. For example, in an economic market, companies pay their suppliers for intermediate goods. These prices are negotiated and the company chooses the most optimal supplier for their final product.

This simple rule is crucial to building a robust community on the web. We should use this concept, based around the profit motive, to encourage and reward activity within a community. It will not only strengthen relationships between agents, but it will also reward varying types of participation inside a community. As agencies build communities for their clients, or crowdsourcing collectives for themselves, it will be important to allow a wide range of participation and reward members for even their smallest contributions.

Some examples of the bucket brigade, and how reward is spread …

Threadless not only distributes profit directly to the designer of each tee, they also reward users, in points that can be exchanged for products, for linking to products (like an affiliate program), and for taking a photo of themselves in the tee (to help legitimize the product page and sell more tees).

Stack Overflow rewards an extremely wide array of behaviors with badges that are tied to the profile of each of its users. In addition, each users collects reputation points based on his/her participation and the community’s score given to that participation.

I use Twitter as an example because of the Retweet Function that was recently adopted by the system after it was a common custom between users. While I think it hasn’t been implemented perfectly, I believe it was necessary to featurize that behavior to strengthen the community and its metrics.

Did I miss your favorite community? Drop me a comment and tell me how they reward their users.

By the way, I stole the term bucket brigade from Professor John Holland, the father of genetic algorithms. In the 1970’s, Prof. Holland was trying to build a self learning system based on how the brain works – specifically, he was looking for a way to mimic how a pathway in the brain will be reinforced and strengthened over time. He realized it could work in the same way that the market does – by the profit motive – and by distributing value along the supply chain of artificial agents (in his case, he was trying to reward specific rules being used by the system). If you’re interested in learning more, I suggest this paper by Holland and colleagues.

Interestingly enough, 4chan actually mimics a good deal of Holland’s original learning system. 4chan is a limited board – it can only hold so much information at one time and when something new is added, something old is destroyed. Therefore, there’s an inherent cost in adding something to the board. And a user wants to optimize the value of whatever they’re posting to earn cred from the community – so the best strategy is to play on what’s been successful in the past. This is how a meme is constructed. A user grabs a popular image from a past thread and improvises on top of it, remixing it, and posting it. Successful remixes will then be grabbed by other members of the community and adapted from there.

Through this process of remixing, a meme is strengthened, just as a pathway in the brain is strengthened through learning.

A single meme has an incredibly long bucket brigade helping it come to life. And while, on 4chan, there’s no system functionality for distributing value to the members of that supply chain, the users facilitate this role all on their own. Check out the video below from Know Your Meme on the meme, Advice Dog. You could also argue that Know Your Meme is helping to spread value between chain members by creating these videos.

You could also argue that users of 4chan were angry at Cartoon Network because they were trying to be the last member of the bucket brigade claiming sole credit for the work itself (by not attributing it to the community).

__________

A quick reminder: if you’re headed to SXSW, come to my panel!

18 use cases for social CRM

08 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments

On Friday, the Altimeter Group released a report on the 18 use cases for social CRM. It’s an extremely broad document that addresses the opportunities for organizations and how to address implementation. Definitely give it a read.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

be here now

05 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • 7 comments

you may have seen this before

Ever since I put together my slideshare on time (above), I’ve been obsessed with how I personally experience time.

An obsessive fascination with the future makes me good at what I do (thinking about the future) while leaving me almost entirely unable to live in the moment.

I rarely take the time to savor what I’m doing. I think I’ve had the opportunity to sip the finest drinks, eat the finest meals, and meet the finest people – but I can’t really remember as I’m typically trapped in my own head working out a problem or making plans for the future. And if recent conversations are indicative of a larger pattern – I think this future thinking lock-in is a growing trend among people like me.

I watch as we all sit in coffee shops, restaurants, and even movies, with our eyes half glued to our mobile phone. Mobiles quickly went from the thing we pick-up to simply look busy to the things that keep us perpetually busy. I spend a good deal of my time pecking away at my Google Reader; repetitively hitting ‘J,’ exchanging action for stimulus, action for stimulus, planning ahead, thinking about what to share, what to push to my blog, and what will allow me a moment of 140-character performance. I plan my route home, my clothes for tomorrow, my haircut for next week, my speech next month, my thoughts for my next meeting, my schedule for the weekend, my next blog post, my current project, my next project, and anything else that comes orbiting my thoughts.

Being more conscious of this, I’m even more convinced that as designers of experiences, we fail to understand people when we build branded experiences. People are rarely ever prepared to be in the moment when they’re online. Moreover, it’s incredibly difficult to get someone to slow down, breathe, and truly experience the world in front of them. Knowing this, we have two choices: 1) build experiences that play into the future-obsessed state that most people occupy, or 2) break real ground in developing experiences that coerce people into a present-conscious state.

If you’re interested in training yourself to be more present, here are 6 steps from Psychology Today:

When you’re trying to do something, pay more attention to the activity, the room, the people, anything other than your own thoughts. Get out of your head and into the moment. Here’s a trick: play one of these things is not like the other with things in the room.
When worried about the future, find things to savor. Much of what we do when we think about the future is collect mental images (often quite negative ones), savoring a momentary pleasure helps you stop catastrophizing future events. As Mark Twain said, “I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
Breathe. Yes, it is that simple. Take a moment to take a few deep breathes.
Find your flow. Give yourself a clear task and focus deeply on your work.
Accept rather than avoid. If you’ve ever tried to not think about something, you know it’s impossible. Accept your thoughts for what they are.
Keep a fresh pair of eyes. Don’t let routine turn your life into a haze – try to notice what’s new around you, all the time.

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