archive.Joe Lamantia.com

The other day, over a hot corned beef sandwich from the 2nd Avenue Deli, someone asked what I’m reading now. As usual, I ended up mumbling a few half complete book titles (not sure why, but I always have difficulty remembering on the spot – probably because I’ve got four or five things going at once…).

To help fill out the list, and because I’m still doing most of my writing via other outlets, here’s a snapshot of the books scattered around my house. It’s divided into helpful categories, including ‘Books I’d Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn’t, Because I’m Still Reading Other Stuff’, and ‘Books I’ve Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won’t Won’t Get To In The Near Future.’

Books I’m Reading Now

• This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Daniel Levitin
• Critical Mass: How One Things Leads To Another. Philip Ball
• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam Greenfield
• Pulse. The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things. Robert Fresnay
• The River Cottage Meat Book. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
• In Praise Of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire. Mike Davis

Books I’d Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn’t, Because I’m Still Reading Other Stuff

• Maximum City. Suketu Mehta
• Atlas of Novel Tectonics. Reiser + Umemoto
• Failure: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. Various
• Istanbul: Memories of A City. Orhan Pamuk
• Uncany Networks. Geert Lovink
• The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein

Books Recently Finished

• Sailing to Byzantium. Robert Silverberg
• A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine. Anthony Bourdain
• The Laws of Simplicity. John Maeda
• Buda’s Wagon. Mike Davis
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Michael Pollan
• The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Sasha Issenberg
• The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Mark Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer

Books I’ve Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won’t Get To In The Near Future

• A Thousand Plateaus. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
• Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham
• Leonardo’s Laptop. Ben Schneiderman
• Emergence. Stephen Johnson
• In The Bubble. John Thackarra
• The Direction of Cities. John Guinther
• Home: A Short History of an Idea. Witold Rybczynsk

Bonus: Things I’m probably Never Going to Start / Finish Reading

• Women Fire and Dangerous Things. George Lakoff
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The culture, structure, and workings of an organization often pose greater challenges for User Experience practitioners than any technical or design questions at hand. If you’d like to know more about the factors behind these situations, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure, by Peter Jones, just published by Boxes and Arrows.

Peter is an independent consultant with deep expertise in research, product design, and strategy. His talk for the panel on failure at the 2007 IA Summit was insightful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very useful material on the roots and warning signs of organizational failure (by comparison, consider the very brief post I put up on the same subject a few years ago.)

Peter’s is the second written feature to come out of the failure panel (my missive on the parallels between entrepreneurial and societal failure was the first). I’m looking forward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as additional features from the remaining two panelists, Christian Crumlish and Lorelei Brown!

Here’s a snippet, to whet your appetite:

How do we even know when an organization fails? What are the differences between a major product failure (involving function or adoption) and a business failure that threatens the organization? An organizational-level failure is a recognizable event, one which typically follows a series of antecedent events or decisions that led to the large-scale breakdown. My working definition: When significant initiatives critical to business strategy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals.”

For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I’ve been working on for a while in the background, titled, “It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind”. This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

I’ve written about organizations and failure – Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations – in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.

In The Fishbowl

Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.

One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.

Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.

Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:

• Leaders and planners dedicated to focusing on the future
• Large amounts of accumulated knowledge and experience
• Sophisticated structures for decision making and control
• Mechanisms for maintaining order during crises
• Collective resilience from surviving previous challenges
• Substantial stores of resources such as food and materials, money, land
• Tools, methods, and organizations providing economies of scale, such as banking and commerce networks
• Systems for mobilizing labor for special purposes
• Connections to other societies that could provide assistance (or potential rescue)

Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.

I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that’s easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn’t allow discussion of their failed society in the article.

Read the article to see what happens to all three!

Semi Random Assortment of Quotations

In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known – and mostly successful! – people.

“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – CHARLES DARWIN

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – EPICTETUS

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – THOMAS EDISON

“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.” – HAVELOCK ELLIS

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” – ANAIS NIN

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” – RABINDRANATH TAGORE

“Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other.” – SHANTIDEVA

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” – JOHN DEWEY

I’m trying something new for the 2007 IA summit – a panel! I am one of four presenters for a panel titled Lessons from Failure: or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs. We have a promising set of speakers: Christian Crumlish, Peter Jones, Lorelei Brown and myself.

My portion of the panel will focus on how states of mind, cultural outlooks, and unspoken assumptions about problems and their proper resolution shape responses to failure – on both small and large scales. Our goal is maximum audience participation and minimum talkingheaditis, so please don’t be shy about sharing examples and joining the discussion.

Of course, we’re one among many reasons to attend. Quite a few things look especially interesting on this year’s schedule, including several of the pre-conference sessions that touch on rapidly evolving areas of practice such as designing for social architectures and enterprise efforts.

Hope to see you in Vegas!

A few months ago I came across a presentation titled Organizations in Crisis and Decline, by Randall Dunham. After giving examples of organizations in crisis and decline that include Kmart, General Motors, United Airlines, and Michael Jackson. (interesting example of an enterprise…), Dunham goes on to summarize typical symptoms of crisis, the strategic consequences of decline, and 10 behaviors of unhealthy organizations.

I came across this while doing some research on how the structures and cultures of organizations influence modes of thinking, resilience, and decision making, so this is related to some of my postings on enterprise software. It might be a while before I have the chance to write up all the ideas, so I’ll share Dunham’s material now.

Why is this of note to IAs? Quite a few Information architects (practitioners, not just those with the title…) are actively looking for effective tools and modes of understanding to help frame and manage enterprise problems.

Understanding the signs of decline and crisis in organizations can help information architects and other change agents understand the environmental context of a situation in the critical early stages of setting expectations and roles, and before it’s “too late”, when everyone at the management table has strong opinions they must defend. In other words, before making a leap is into an active project, a planning and budgeting cycle, a strategic vision session, etc.

I see (at least) two very important aspects of a situation that Dunham’s warning signs could help identify; how healthy an organization is, and what latitude for activity and change is available. Building on this, these criteria can help identify situations to avoid or be wary of. Of course, organizations in crisis and decline can present opportunities as well as risks, but sometimes the ship is going down no matter how much you try to patch the holes…

For those without powerpoint, I’m going to present some of the material here as text, with acknowledgment that I’m borrowing directly from Dunham, who himself credits this source: Mische, M.A. (2001). Ten warning signs of strategic Decline. In Strategic Renewal: Becoming a High-Performance Organization (pp. 25-30). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Typical Symptoms of Crisis/Decline

• Lower earnings & revenues
• Increased employee turnover
• Reduced market presence
• Decrease in customer satisfaction & interest
• Increasing costs & high structural costs

Strategic Consequences of Crisis/Decline

• Lower market value
• Inconsistent strategies
• Misalignment of internal strategies & external goals
• Diminished capacity to attract top talent
• Increased vulnerability

10 Behaviors that Signal Decline

• The organization exhibits a lack of understanding the environmental and economic realities confronting it, or is in denial
• The management of the organization is arrogant with regard to its view of the world & assessment of its internal competencies. Ex: Icarus Paradox
• The organization has lost perspective with respect to customers, products, suppliers, and competitors
• Management and employees have an insular focus or preoccupation with internal processes, internal measurements, and politics
• The organization has lost its sense of urgency and lacks an attitude of self-determination
• The organization is relying on historical and poorly conceptualized or inappropriate business strategies and traditional management methods to address new & different challenges
• The organization has the propensity to repeat mistakes and fails to learn from past experiences
• The organization has low or slow innovation practices and is late to market with new products/services
• The organization has a tendency to recycle marginally performing managers
• The organization relies exclusively on internal talent as a source of leadership

Key Factors that Contribute to Decline

• Age of the organization: Older, more established firms may rely on legacy practices
• Size of the organization: Large firms with many vertical levels can have trouble adapting
• Financial success and past performance: Past success can lead to desire to follow same path in hopes of future success
• Ownership and equity structure: Is there accountability at all times to outside agents?
• Environmental influences: External shocks
• Ability to learn and discern patterns: Lack of learning organization culture
• Certainty/uncertainty: Effectiveness of change management
• Leadership: Young & inexperienced without desire to learn

Success Can Drive Crisis

• The same processes that lead to success in an organization can also lead to failure
• This is because success promotes rigidity, resistance to change, and habitual response
• Biggest problem – people learn the ‘right’ way to solve a problem and do that over and over again, even if that way will no longer solve the problem

It’s true these are quite general. Naturally, the art is in knowing how to apply them as criteria, or interperet what you found. As a quick test of accuracy, I’ve used the behaviors and warning signs to retrospectively review several of the organizations I’ve seen from the inside. When those organizations showed several of the behaviors and warning signs at an aggregate level (not necessarily my group, but the whole enterprise) then the strategic consequence dunham mentioned were visible at the same time.

From a practical perspective, a rating scale or some indicators of relative degree would be very useful. In order to gauge whether to stay or go, you need to understand the intensity of the decline or crisis and what action you can take: for example, do you have time to go back to the cabin to save your handwritten screenplay before the ship sinks?