Social Glass

(cross-posted from the active.com Product Development blog)

I spent some time in Mexico last weekend visiting my brother and his family.  His wife’s from Venezuela, he’s from Colorado, any they have a daughter who was born in Mexico.  They speak to her in Spanish and English at home, but mostly she speaks Spanish (I’m always fascinated by little kids who speak a foreign language, or who speak English with a non-North American accent).  Years of studying Spanish in university paid off, and I found I was able to speak with my niece and the odd taxi driver with only minor difficulties.

While in this environment I was reminded of the usefulness of the word ustedes in Spanish.  We don’t have this word in contemporary English, but loosly translated it means all of you, as in como están ustedes (how are you guys in English). But after having become used to ustedes while speaking Spanish, I find it awkward having to say you guys or you (hoping the inferred plurality is picked up by the recipients).  It just seems inefficient.

So I did some research and found that indeed in old-English a literal translation for ustedes did exist.  Ye was used to refer to all of you (plural), while you meant, well, you, in the singular sense.  Why would we remove ye, a compact, easy to pronounce word from modern English?  How much easier would it be to say how are ye instead of how are you guys?  Ye does sound very Shakespearean, but then again Australians still say fortnight instead of “two weeks”, and that to me sounds Shakespearean too.

It seems interesting that a language construct would devolve becoming less efficient, not more.  Maybe I’ll just stick to Spanish so I can use ustedes.

1994: WebCrawler and Lycos became the first widely adopted search engines.  They flattened the Internet giving all resources an equal chance of being discovered.  Before search engines, people were meant to find content by going to “what’s new” web pages where they’d find hyperlinks to web pages that had been recently added.  From those pages they’d find links to other pages and so on.  The Internet, at least at its conception, was meant to be surfed from site to site, not flattened.  But search engines proved there was a much more efficient, comprehensive way to find information.

And I continue, bewildered, that companies follow the pre-Lycos model when constructing their intranets.  For some reason they always try to consolidate information into knowledge management “silos” like Documentum.  They set policies that change the homepage of their worker’s browsers to be the landing page for the new intranet portal which has “everything an employee will ever need to know” buried deep within.  And then they wonder why nobody uses these new solutions.

It’s because they can’t find anything.

Data will always be federated, scattered across many information systems, just as it is on the Internet.  Instead of investing in building a one size fits all intranet, invest in procuring and deploying an enterprise search engine.  Let it crawl the file share.  Let it crawl Lotus Notes.  Let it crawl the shiny new Documentum application.  Then set policies changing the worker’s homepage to the new enterprise search application if you must.  And make that search page simple.  Nobody understands taxonomies nor will they spend the time to.  Forget faceting.  Follow Google’s example making search dead simple. See what happens then.  A search for “jury duty” might actually produce a result that tells the worker how much compensation he’s entitled to if summoned.

And I’ll bet your workers will be much less pissed off that you changed their browser’s default homepage.

Barry Schwartz, an economist who studies how human psychology is linked to economics and author of The Paradox of Choice, recently spoke at Ted about how process has replaced wisdom.  His thesis is (and I’m paraphrasing), that process exists because policy makers don’t trust “doers” to make the right decisions.  Process curbs risk and act as an insurance policy.  The result is less catastrophe and more predictability.  But process also assures mediocrity.  It denies the people who execute processes the freewill to improvise based on immediate circumstances.
Barry tells the story of a father who takes his son to a baseball game.  During the game the son says that he’s thirsty.  So the father goes to a drink stand and buys two cans of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, unaware that this drink has alcoholic content.  He returns to his son and the two start drinking the “lemonade” together.  A concerned fan notices and calls security.  Security calls the ambulance who rushes the boy to the hospital to remove the alcohol from his system (it turns out the boy had only very minor traces).  The police meet the father at the hospital and arrest him.  Social workers place the kid with foster parents for a few days.

The father then has a hearing before a judge.  He asks that his son be allowed to return home.  The judge agrees, but only if the father moves out of his home and is accompanied by social workers on scheduled visits.

And along the whole journey the security guards, parametics, police, social workers and judge each apologized to the father for doing what they had to do.  But they had to follow procedure.

Wisdom, commonsense, would have ended this madness at the baseball game.

Now, I’m not saying we should do away with structure that promises some sense of predictability and repeatability.  But I like the word “framework” instead of process.  To me, frameworks provide basic direction to a group, but allows said group the freedom to make micro decisions.  It’s like saying “go northwest and you’ll get there”, instead of giving turn by turn directions.

I struggle, in my work life, with finding a balance between providing enough structure that the team arrives at desired destination while fomenting the talents of each team member in order to get there in the most efficient manner (and just where is “there”?).  But I’ll favor the wisdom of my team over regimented process any day.