Innovation Science

More Ive

A colleague of mine, Sridhar Kalluri, informed me of this post on Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of Design responsible for the iPod, iMac, all things “i” who I’ve posted about before. It’s a preprint of an article from the soon-to-be-published Ten4 magazine’s issue on British creativity.

Ive provides some insight into design that isn’t common knowledge to people unfamiliar with modern design processes. The article begins with Ive explaining that design is about problem solving:

The design we practice isn’t about self expression. I don’t want to see a designer wagging his tail in my face. I want to see a problem solved, and in a way that acknowledges its context.

When talking about how his design team addressed a specific difficulty with a stand for the latest iMac:

We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was.

This interview from the Design Museum is also interesting, Ive identifies technology convergence when asked to name catalysts for today’s design development:

New products that replace multiple products with substantial histories is obviously exciting for us.

The Bleak Future of Communication

In Bill Gates description of his work process, he said something that I found disturbing: 

At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).

The future of office communication, if what Gates says is any indication, is its sparsest form: e-mail. I’ve posted about this before, but I’ve got a few more things to add on this topic.

A while ago, I sat beside an interesting person who conducts leadership seminars for the FAA. Among the many insightful thoughts on leadership that he offered, he said that “Communication is 70% body language and facial expression, 20% voice tone, and 10% what is actually being said.” The numbers may be off, but the concept is sound—the actual written transcript of a face-to-face conversation fails to convey a significant amount of what was communicated. Try reading Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and see how little the words represent what is actually being communicated.

People convey a significant amount of information in their facial reactions and body language without realizing it. I’m not just talking about the “Oh no she di’int” kind of looks that display obvious reactions or emotions, I’m also referring to the cues that are given during conversation that help the listener interpret what the speaker is saying. People can change the meaning of their words with intonation, a smile, a shrug of the shoulders, a furrowed brow. Actors know this from improvisational exercises where they have to create a completely understandable scene with nonsense sounds or create completely different stories using the same dialogue.

Kathy Sierra posted a great commentary on how humans have evolved into sophisticated pattern recognizers to pick up on the subtlest of visual cues from other members of their species. I won’t repeat what she says, its worth reading her post in full. I will add that there has been significant research on our ability to detect intent from seemingly imperceptible facial cues by former UCSF Psychology professor Paul Ekman—you may have read a great profile of him by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker a while ago.

I’m sure that a group within Microsoft is hard at work creating a system that incorporates avatars within e-mails or instant messaging systems—serving up customer service Second Life-style—under the assumption that this will restore that need for visual contact while communicating. It won’t.

E-mail is a necessity in business and life, but it is no replacement for face-to-face communication. Previously I discussed miscommunication that can occur by eliminating the additional information from tone and visual cues, resulting in misunderstandings that would never have occurred had either videoconferencing or even a phone been used. There is something more than this lost, however, by relying excessively on e-mail for communication.

What is additionally lost is the back and forth that occurs in conversations, the refinement of what is said, the interplay of minds that can cause the conversation to go into a rewarding and unexpected tangent. Everyone should be able to think of times when a discussion that you expected to be short and on a single topic turned into a rich conversation of new ideas, perhaps producing long-lasting effects or resulting in the development of new initiatives. All of this is lost in e-mail, where there is no interplay. Think of a time when you had a great discussion with a friend over a beer or two, perhaps sitting on their porch at night, with the conversation ranging across all the important issues to you in the world. Now imagine yourself with a beer, sitting in front of a PC monitor, sending e-mails back and forth to that same friend. The ideas just ground to a halt, and not because you are no longer under the stars for inspiration.

One hundred years ago when letters were a much more common form of communication than today, I’m sure that no one suggested that letter writing should replace real conversation if the latter were possible, business or otherwise. Letter writing allowed thoughtful and careful commentary. Face-to-face discussion allowed exploration into unplanned and sometimes exhilarating thoughts, allowed one to realize that the other is misunderstanding and to add clarity to one’s point, allowed the listener to interject and ask questions where they need additional information. Just because e-mail makes delivery of written communication instantaneous doesn’t eliminate these differences.

This week is TV-Turnoff Week. Perhaps we could use an E-mail Elimination Week.

The Bill Gates Way

Bill Gates’ description of his work process in Fortune Magazine has caused some interest in the blogosphere.

Besides the fact that his description is somewhat of an infomercial for Microsoft applications, three items caught my attention. One was the way in which he recruits innovative ideas from within his company: 

Right now, I'm getting ready for Think Week. In May, I'll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. I've been doing this for over 12 years. It used to be an all-paper process in which I was the only one doing the reading and commenting. Today the whole process is digital and open to the entire company.

I'm now far more efficient in picking the right papers to read, and I can add electronic comments that everyone sees in real time.

I’m curious what has made Gates better at deciding which ideas to give his time to—is it a better process, better tools, or is his he better at scanning topics? I’m also curious to know more about Think Week. For a company its size and with a strong focus on new business and technology research, I guess that far more than 100 papers would be submitted if the submission process were open to everyone. There must be a weeding process in there somewhere, and I’d like to know what it is for my own enlightenment.

A second item that I noticed was Gates saying that he gets about 100 e-mails a day, and he says the reason that the number is this low is because his Outlook filter only lets through e-mails from Microsoft employees and people in his address book. Six years ago I used to get over 100 e-mails a day at a company that only had $200 million in revenue, so again I’m guessing that there’s more filtering going on than Gates suggests.

I’ll leave the third item that caught my attention to a separate post since I think it deserves its own space.

I’ll finish by saying that I’m a little disappointed that Gates didn’t use the opportunity to advance Microsoft’s use of blogs for internal communication. As far as I understand, Microsoft uses blogs extensively within their company while only a very small number of other companies use internal blogging as a form of communication. Rod Boothby has been provided compelling reasons for their adaption and it would have been nice to see the concept get some high-level validation.