Mary Panttaja

I spent part of the day yesterday at the CMP and O’Reilly sponsored Web. 2.0 Expo in California. It brought together people and companies who are working at the edge of the internet computing platform. Of course, it was for industry folks and their customers: technology providers, the engineers who build things, and customers who buy things. (When you follow this industry in the blogosphere, sometimes you get to feeling that it’s just a few folks talking to each other; but seeing the attendance you did get the sense that there are real “working” folks and companies actually figuring out how and whether to use these new tools.) There were a mix of development platforms (Coghead, BungeeLabs, Etolos, Adobe Apollo were the most visible); site enhancement tools (Snap [Do you like the SnapShot features?]); some social networking platforms (Yoono,) wikis (Socialtext, Mindtouch) and other writing tools (Buzzword).

Here is the most interesting product I saw; one of the winning Ignite presentors:

Wireless Power from Potenco presented by Colin Bulthaup of Squid Labs: A hand-held electric generator about the size of a large yo-yo: pull the string constantly for one minute and get about 45 minutes of talk time—that seems tremendously efficient. The product is targeted for the world that has yet to be wired and is so valuable nowadays because many of the community-enhancing electronic tools (like the cell phone) are so relatively cheap to power. The company is partnering with the $100 laptop project. (If you don’t know about this project—you should look it up.) The pair will transform many communities in less developed areas (wireless, as it were). I would propose a interesting funding maneuver: sell them to folks like us as at substantial markup to fund sending many more overseas. Having spent part of the weekend rebuilding the harnesses for the solar panels that help power our little camper, I am reminded of how possible its to actually live on much less power than we generally use.

Okay. Tomorrow I’ll talk about software in the rest of the report. And about the dearth of solutions for my writing and publishing challenges. (I was surprised.)

My most recent post just arrived in my email. (I subscribe to make sure things are going out—not to boost my subscription count.) But I’m still here in the Starbucks, writing. So I guess I know that I am at least talking to myself in a very weird sort of way.

I sitting in in a Starbucks in downtown Seattle trying to get some work done this morning. I spoke with a man in line about how disorienting it was to find yourself in a familiar place when in the back of your mind you know you flew last night. Of all the Starbucks I’ve been in, this is one. (Hong Kong, London, Colfax, SF, Healdsburg, on and on—-I’m sure you’ve hit more.) He suggested that it was much like MacDonalds world-wide—-MacDs for grownups.

I’m trying to find a pace and pattern (maybe it’s really tactics and practices) that enable me to keep working (writing and researching) while I’m traveling. Since that’s what I’d love to be doing I’d better figure it out—how to work through a modicum of distraction. The last month, with illness, remodeling, and family events (all good; except the illness) I really couldn’t find my way. But if I can get the tactics down, I know I can do better.

A couple of my tricks:

• Write anywhere you are comfortable, but write. I used to find myself with a bit of writer’s block (not usual for me, as normally there is always something I can blah, blah on about). I discovered, to my embarassment, that it was not a block to the writing, it was a block to sitting at my desk. Sometimes I just want to be horizontal. And I can write in that position as it turns out. So I just take the computer with me wherever I have the urge to be (and in whatever position). I write on the sofa sitting up straight; I write on the sofa lounged out flat; I write in bed; I write outside in one of my REI lounge chairs; I ocassionally write in front of the tv—but would usually rather be writing than watching. I would write in the bathtub (the subject of the remodel), but my Mac is not really prepared for the possibilities inherent in that location, so I am reduced to reading.
• Keep writing topics queued up all the time—one will always meet your needs when you come to write. If you can, keep a number of threads open. For me they seem disparate some days—but most of them come back around to weaving into the general thread of the the work.
• Move items to the top of the queue as the last thing you do before going to bed. I always try to have a draft of the next blog on my desktop. Work does happen overnight, and a fresh morning and a primed pump makes getting the material out really efficient.
• Stay open to moving ideas—thoughts percolating. Grab them and put them down—this post is just something I was experiencing—and much of everything I experience comes back to be useful—a writer’s work is handy like that—life IS the topc. My character George likes to write in a coffee shop.

More later—there will be many distractions in Seattle this week: friends, biking, kayaking, music. We’ll see what I manage to get done.

The Clean Garage

It is key to realize that we are not trying to create a single moment in time when our goals are reality, only to have those goals dissolve into dust. We want to create lives/products/businesses where our goals are continually realized and continually getting better. (They have to evolve as our dreams and goals continue to evolve.) It will never be enough to use a short-term technique (hire 10 people) to get the garage clean—unless they stay around, of course—for the patterns of life and action that got the garage in disarray are still there.

On the other side of the coin, if you figured out the behaviors and mechanisms that would keep a garage clean (just imagine it), then you wouldn’t actually have to clean the garage. You would just have to start living those mechanisms and the evolution of the clean garage would come into being. Get that—-you wouldn’t have to clean the garage, it would become clean as a matter of course.

What we really want is a life style or set of mechanisms (actions and use patterns) that evolve a clean garage. The clean garage is the state that we want to create—and we need to create a preponderance of potential that the clean garage will always (or mostly) exist in our future.

Silly way to think about it? Maybe. But if you substitute your future career, your growing business, the ability to continually evolve your product line, it starts to become a richer idea. The truth is that what you are trying to create is a particular state of the world in the future—and that means we need to build the potential of that now, in the present. And not for it to happen just once—one moment. We want it to exist with us until we dream of something better.

So what could a set of mechanisms look like for the garage? Let’s play with some ideas, some tactics and practices.

1. I will never set anything down in the garage except in the place where it belongs.
2. As I use each thing in the garage, I will make sure it has a place to live.
3. For each project that involves items in the garage (tools, toys, storage) I will allocate a little extra time in my project to organize those items.
4. Once a month I will sweep through the garage and look for 3 things that I can get rid of.
5. At the end of each season, I will put unneeded items away properly.

Maybe not a complete list; I’m sure you can do better. You never stop and clean the garage, but your actions will slowly evolve a more and more organized work space.

And darn, suddenly we realize that we have to rewrite all the rules as “we will”, and get everyone to agree. Mechanisms for group goals are more challenging—mechanisms for individual goals in which others can mess with you can be really tough (you want the garage clean but brother Sam doesn’t really care). But that is where leadership always lives—on the outside edge of what is easy to motivate in others where you need to develop the ability to empower and inspire others to participate.

And, of course, this is a relatively easy goal to visualize. Most of our personal goals are not so direct. But what we see is that we want to be continually building the potential of our goal state, so that the likelihood is that our goal will be realized. That’s what we mean by the preponderance of potential (the potential for our goal is greater in amount or value than that which is against our goal.) If we want to create anything, that is our job.

And a kicker is to notice that whatever is today is the the state that has had the most potential created; whether you like it or not. Our world is precisely as it is because this is what we have created together. Want something else? Then your job is to change the potential of the future to be different. And no one else can play your part in that evolution.

Note: Another time we’ll discuss control and lack of control—once we realize that we’re not in control the way we thought we should be, we sometimes just give up. We have to learn that there is a kind of control we do have (it’s just more subtle) and that giving up is not really an option.

Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire” beautifully lays out how species can evolve patterns and mechanisms to help each other through the process of living together in a common enviroment : bees and flowers, sharks and cleaner fish, humans and fruit. The mechanisms get more complex. Fruits meet a need (or desire according to Pollan) of humans and humans provide a service to the fruit. The evolutionary participants uncovered another active member of its neighborhood and found a way to build a relationship that helps the gene pool to survive.

The apple is one of his interesting examples. It has an relatively unusual survival tactic in that its primary form of reproduction produces an excess of variety—its mechanism focuses on the “new ways to get along”-part of the simple evolutionary pattern. So it creates an incredible array of new options. It can always evolve rapidly to meet changes in its environment, which gives it stability in maintaining and spreading its genes as a species. But any given form of the apple is doomed, as cross-polinated seeds do not breed true to the parents. But this pattern of mechanistic evolution is great for another species who comes into contact with the apple: humans. There are lots of kinds of apples with a great many different qualities. And we found many that met some of our needs and desires: sweet, dependable food sources. And, importantly, we discovered that we could control the reproduction of those features we like through cloning and grafting genetic material.

So the apple-human mechanism is based on the apple producing a lot of variety genetically, and the human controlling the apples genetic variation (when it wants) with its awareness and intelligence. The apple’s genes are spread over the planet and people have a manageable food source. The overall mechanism is built out of the skills and needs of independent species. The mechanisms together build a preponderance of potential that the future will continue to meet their needs and desires.

Successful models of business, and many of the “new” business models arising in Web 2.0 style, are evolutionary mechanisms for their markets. That is, they embody mechanistic behaviors or actions that reinforce their desired state of change—growth of their audience or customer base. The early versions of these were called “viral” after one the most successful evolvers we know.

These viral mechanisms—patterns of action and use—reinforce the spread of the virus, which means the adoption of the product. The product’s growth in the marketplace is entrained by the mechanisms. You can watch the mechanism work to change and evolve the state of the market as the potential for the goal to be continually realized is increased by the mechanism.

To cause a change in the state of an organization, whether it be market growth, product development, or improved ROI, you must not just “fix” a problem, but ingrain process mechanisms that reinforce the desired path. We must create dynamic evolutionary mechanisms that default to taking us where we want to go.

One of my favorite examples is an everyday problem: for many people the garage is always a total disaster and they really want to have a clean garage. (It could be anything that is consistently arriving in our present moment which we see as a “problem”—we don’t like it, but we always have it: missing deadlines,  uphappy customers,  processes that don’t meet current needs.)

We think that what we want is just a clean garage. We think that if we had enough time and help we could just get it clean. But this is a wrong-headed idea. We don’t really want just a clean garage—that would just be a moment in time (a brief moment) when we like the state of the garage. What we really want and need is a lifestyle, or a set of mechanisms, that result in a clean garage—automatically.

What does that mean? More tomorrow.

Back to the subject of creating organizations….

I have been reading two different books that are basically about evolution: “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, and “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan. One traces the power of evolutionary forces from biology through the evolution of cultures. The other illuminates the power of co-evolution, species evolving in concert for the benefit of both. Another new focus of evolutionary thought these days is the evolution of individual and group consciousness, growth in our capacity for awareness and action.

Evolution is a great model for managing our relationship to the things we are trying to create as well. Our effort to create things (lives, families, corporations, products) is just a slightly more conscious movement of that creative impulse that has evolved everything we experience.

How does the evolutionary model help us think about the choices we make?

The process of evolution itself is a creative mechanism, that is, it is a pattern of discovering success and failure through a natural mechanism of creativity. The universe has created/discovered/evolved (??) a process that results in ever more of what it is trying to create (which seems to be more diversity, awareness, complexity, and creativity.)

Once you find a functioning mechanism that through its regular actions succeeds in continuing to create what you want, or moves in the direction of what you want, you only have to allow the mechanism to keep functioning. Of course, if you are creating something new then the mechanism must allow for movement towards something you don’t want, and adjust for that. Path correction must be part of the mechanism.

So what do these mechanisms look like?

(In the case of evolution, I will, of course, be oversimplifying.)

A plant evolves by doing its thing the best way it knows how and living to create offspring that mostly know what it knows. In addition, it blends what it knows with a sexual partner in a slightly random sort of way that mixes it up—creates some new and different ways of getting by. Some of those succeed in the environment and some fail—some don’t live to create offspring, or create fewer successful offspring. So the mechanism is something like this: make more of what works and keep throwing new ideas into the mix. The “new ideas” are really important because the enviroment is not a single stable thing, but is itself changing making survival more or less likely. Biological evolution doesn’t have to know what its going for in terms of form or function—the mechanism results in life continuing to find a way in a changing world. (Of course, sometimes the mechanism comes up against an environmental change it can’t cope with—it takes times to find new ways of getting by. A meteorite was more than the dinosaurs could work their way out of.)

More about co-evolving next time.

I just spent two days with a 5 year old. She will be six next week. We took her to the snow which she had never experienced. We put her on skis—which, of course, she had not seen. We took her onto the icy corduroyed surface of the track and coached her along.

She then skied 1.5 kilometers out the track, up and down a practice hill, and back without a hesitation or doubt, with joy and interest the whole way. She would charge up a hill with a robust determination and confidence that took your breath away.

By noon she was so enamored of gliding downhill that she was totally undaunted by the requirement to walk up it, every time. Over and over she did it. Further up, further down. Further up, further down. She never complained or ask to stop. Eventually she let us down gently by telling us that she did not need our help any longer, that she could go up and down alone. Only when she could not slide down the hill without falling three times did she accept our suggestion that maybe she might want to stop and rest a while.

On the drive home she sang to us in a beautiful, young lilting voice. In English and in Spanish. And then she determinedly began to count. For miles through the countryside she counted. Stopping to figure every once and while, stopping briefly to consider. 200. 400. We arrived at home where we decided she would pause—eight hundred and sixty.

Where does such grace in being alive come from?

Illumine is a coming-of-age story set in northern California and Nepal.

It concerns George, his sister Sarah, and her husband John and explores their experience of a catastrophic illness that catapults them into a spiritual journey that carries them around the world to the mountains and cities of Nepal.

The novel is currently in its third major draft and is in the hand of a select group of readers. It will be going through at least one more draft before the process of finding an agent begins. In addition I will be exploring solutions for publishing it digitally using the potential of dynamic delivery to explore the material in new and dynamic ways.

(This could lead into a further digression about a evolving model of creating “stories” that use some dynamic technology to build fictional contexts—-but not today.)

There is more to the Illumine story. That is, there is another novel that is slowly taking shape that continues the stories of George and Sarah and the people in their lives.

The inclusion of Nepal in the story has both inspiration and practicalities in its source. I have friends from Nepal which has opened up travel there for me as well as the opportunity to stay with Nepalese families. But additionally, since I was young and first read a book on Marco Polo and then Maurice Herzog’s “Annapurna”, I have had a strong affinity for the rugged trails through the mountains of Asia. So it was natural for me to set my novel there for many reasons.

As I prepared for my first trip to Nepal, I was surprised to realize how much of my reading over my life has concerned itself with the region. I still own a small green hardback book that was my childhood exploration into the travels of Marco Polo. I know that I read Herzog’s book on his expedition to climb a 8 thousand meter peak when I was fairly young, perhaps twelve. And, of course, in my late twenties “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthiesen became my constant companion. (And now, I am amazed to say, I have actually looked from a distance into the land of Dolpo.) And the reading list continues. I hadn’t realized how much I had invested in reading about a land so far away—that I had not yet been compelled to visit. It was my first foray in traveling into a very foreign culture on my own—I guess that is significant.

I will be going back, hopefully this year, to extend my research for both the current and the following novel. And maybe the travel writing from my Asia travels will start to arise on one of my blogs.