Killer statistic:
Every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. – Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google.
Question is, of course, what are we going to do with all this information?
This was easier than I thought. I’ll flesh this out (and change my mind) over the coming months, but here’s the current list.
1. Mass intimacy
2. Augmented reality
3. Cloud services
4. Baking
5. Moral philosophy
6. Cuddly robots
7. Photovoltaics
8. Gameification
9. Ethically inclined fish
10. Near field communication
Note: This list is in no way ranked and, as always, does not represent the most important trends, merely new things that I find interesting or old things that are gaining momentum.
I’ve started to think about trends for the next 12-18 months and it’s come out as quite a depressing little list. Here they are. I will endeavour to put together something less pessimistic over the next few weeks.
1. Turbulence
2. Uncertainty
3. Fragility
4. Contagion
5. Risk aversion
6. Displacement activity
7. Intrinsic value
8. Security
9. Rage
10. Fear
Coming soon…an optimists guide to 2012
Sign in a cafe in St John Street, London, yesterday:
“Italian slow food, fast.”
Go figure.
This is interesting. Why would Google pay somewhere between $100 million and $200 million for Zagat, the restaurant guide? Why didn’t they just crowd source their own reviews or aggregate other peoples’ content rather than buying a company that still puts ink onto bits of dead trees?
OK, Zagat have an OK website and an iPhone app and that will mesh nicely with Google maps, but, again, why not use user generated and user filtered content? Why buy it?
I think it’s due to two things, one obvious and one perhaps less so.
The obvious thing is the growth in local search and information. This fits.
Most of Zagats reviews are written by locals and Google needs to create original content too.
The less obvious thing is, perhaps, that Google wants to be known for the quality of it’s information and millions of potential people with too much online time on their hands is no match for a few hundred passionate people and a handful of editors that actually know what they are talking about.
Agree?
Disagree?
Here’s the text of my recent talk at TEDx in Lodz (with one tiny addition I thought of on the plane home).
—
I’ve been thinking. About thinking.
Specifically, how do everyday environments change how we think?
Some time ago a British company gave its senior managers a sign to hang on their office doors. The signs read:
“Do not disturb, I’m thinking.” Interesting the company didn’t think that junior managers should think, but that’s another story.
I think this situation would be almost impossible today. Firstly, we have become obsessed with open plan offices, so individual offices, along with doors, are mostly gone. Secondly, the supermarket chain now operates a clean desk policy. This means that anything left on a desk after 6.00pm is thrown in the bin. The idea here, presumably, is that a messy desk is the sign of a messy mind. But I am reminded of what Einstein said about this:
“If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what then is an empty desk?”
Anyway, mess can be productive. Leon Heppel was a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health. Mr Heppel’s desk was fantastically messy. So messy in fact that he had the habit of every so often putting a sheet of brown paper over the mess in order to create a second layer of mess. Multi-story mess. Fantastic.
But here’s the good bit. One day Mr Heppel was flipping through some papers on the lower and upper levels of this desk and stumbled upon two letters from two totally unconnected researchers. He suddenly spotted a connection and put one in touch with the other. This connection subsequently led to a Nobel Prize. Had the letters been in a conventional filing system chances are the connection would not have materialised.
The third reason such a sign such would be ridiculous today is that it’s almost impossible not to be disturbed. Most people no longer have secretaries, so calls come straight through unannounced. We have mobile phones. And email, twitter, facebook and a cacophony of other mobile devices that do not respect either time or place.
Does this matter? I think it does. Putting aside the issue of how such interruptions impact human relationships, there’s the concern that they are destroying serious thinking, especially the kind of deep thinking that companies claim is so important nowadays. This is the kind of focussed, deliberate, calm, reflective thinking that’s associated with ‘out of the box’ creative thinking.
A couple of years ago I contacted almost a thousand people of all ages and walks of life and asked them a very simple question:
“Where and when do you do your best thinking?”
Only one person said in the office and they didn’t mean it – they said very early in the morning when there was nobody else around. In other words, when the building wasn’t really functioning as an office at all.
The top 10 responses were:
1. When I’m alone
2. Last thing at night/in bed
3. In the shower
4. First thing in the morning
5. In the car/driving
6. Reading a book/newspaper/magazine
7. In the bath
8. Outside
9. Anywhere
10. Jogging/running
Let me read out a few individual responses:
“Loading the dishwasher, scrubbing the floors, scouring the pans; the polishing, the cleaning.”
“ Over the decades, I think that my best thinking has occurred when I am visiting a foreign country, have my obligations out of the way, and am sitting in a pleasant spot – in a café, near a lake – with a piece of paper in front of me.”
“I do my best thinking in bed – sometimes even when asleep. I wake up having solved a problem.”
“Usually when I am not working, and most often when I am travelling!”
“I sit down (usually at home, in my study, in my grandmothers Welsh oak chair),
with a sharp pencil and a blank notebook and start to draw out the idea, almost graphically.”
“37,000 feet and half way into a gin and tonic”
“In a hot bath”
“I do my best thinking ‘if’ I go to church – away from things and where I am forced to stop working and usually drift off and stop listening.”
“I do my best thinking on a morning run – the crisper the air, the better…I like big sky, open fields and lots of fresh air.”
“I do my best thinking in bed – my dreams are often very close to real life, so sometimes I wake having solved a problem,”
“Not sitting in front of a screen – I tend to find that ideas come to me when I’m sitting on the ferry, in the shower, walking between meetings, listening to the radio…I think it’s something to do with having mild diversions between you and the problem.”
Do these responses have anything in common? I’d say yes. A significant proportion of the activities cited involve a relative degree of solitude and silence.
In an age of multi-tasking, crowd-sourcing and 24/7 media, doing nothing, or what sometimes appears to be nothing, seems to be vastly underrated too.
The way our minds work is that they need time to switch off, rest and relax. We need to go to bed, take a nap or do something that takes our mind off things.
This can mean going for a very long walk, visiting a bookshop for no particular reason, looking out of a window or doing something very mundane or repetitive
– ideally something physical – that uses a different part of the brain. All of these activities allow our minds to drift and dream.
Travel can be useful too, as is any new experience, because new inputs create new outputs. The key, in my view, is volume and diversity are key here.
In my experience, long-haul flights are especially productive, especially if there’s a window to look out of. I think this is because I’m suspended between places.
I have no responsibilities and therefore I have permission to relax. Mind you, I flew with Ryanair yesterday and I can definitely say it didn’t work with them.
Scale seems to be important too. You sometimes need to feel physically small to have a big idea – so being very high up often helps. This might explain why mountains and especially space travel can change our thinking so profoundly. Seeing a distant horizon also appears to project our thinking forward.
I think artists instinctively understand this, which is why basements with strip lighting are possibly not the most productive of spaces if you are contemplating a masterpiece.
And let’s not forget about churches. I mentioned churches to a teacher a while ago saying that I thought they could change how people think. He said no. I was wrong.
They change how people feel and this, in turn, changes how people think. I think that’s an interesting thought.
Personally, with churches, I think it’s something to do with a combination of high ceilings, relative silence and history, although some people might say God is in the details too.
A really good library is another thinking space that’s interesting.
Public libraries are having a hard time at the moment, partly because governments are trying to save money, but also because they are seen as being increasingly irrelevant. After all, who needs a physical library in the age of Google and eBooks? Not anyone between the ages of five and sixty-five it seems.
But this rather misses the point in my view. Physical books are important, but that’s not why good libraries should be preserved. Libraries are important, not because of what they contain, but because of what they don’t.
In a world that’s becoming faster and noisier, libraries are valuable because they are one of the very few spaces we have left where silence is still golden. In short, they are one of the few places where you can literally hear yourself think.
But most libraries don’t seem to get this.
They are trying to modernise themselves. To bring themselves up to date with our new culture of instant digital gratification and universal connection.
But I think this is a big mistake.
In my view, libraries should stop trying to compete with Starbucks. If you allow the use of mobile phones, noisy laptops and coffee machines in libraries what you will end up with is not a library. It’s a Starbucks. They should be doing the very opposite.
So here’s my idea. We need to preserve silent spaces.
For example, we should make a lot of noise about the fact that mobile phones – both our own and those belonging to others – can be disruptive and use should be restrained or restricted in some places.
Similarly, quiet coaches on trains or airplanes should be just that. Parents will unruly children should perhaps be given instant fines.
And perhaps in restaurants dinners should pay extra if they want to talk to someone other than the person – or persons – they are eating with.
But perhaps that’s too easy.
I was watching a documentary about Leonard Cohen a while ago. Bono, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen and The Edge from U2 were asked about Cohen’s music. Bono made a great comment that Leonard’s success stemmed partly from the fact that he was patient. If he couldn’t find what he was looked for he just waited.
I think that’s an interesting insight, but another comment caught really my attention.
One member of U2 commented that if you study the early stages of Christianity it was the widely accepted thought that if you wanted to hear God’s voice you had to go somewhere really quiet. Quite a logical thought if you think about it.
I’m not especially religious, but I think this thought can take us somewhere useful.
How about creating a law that insists that everyone takes a week off every ten years to think. That retreats are set up on top of mountains where all forms of communication – both digital and physical – are banned and where conversation is strictly regulated.
This might not change the world, but it might change a few peoples’ perspectives.
6 million workers in the UK do not take lunch breaks according to a study by BUPA, a health insurance company. 34% say this is because of pressure from managers, while 50% say it’s due to excessive workloads.
48% also say that without lunch their productivity drops around 3.00 pm, which leads to 40-minutes lost work worth around £50 million per day in lost productivity.
So time to roll this essay out once again…
Lunch. Let’s do lunch. Let’s skip lunch. Lunch is for wimps. It is fourteen years since Gordon Gekko made that last infamous announcement and yet ‘lunch’ is still a dirty word.
We need to eat; but we seem also to need to justify the time spent doing it. Sometimes we sit alone at our computer while we wolf a sandwich (extra points if purchased from an entrepreneur with a basket actually in the office). Sometimes we snatch a bite while we rush round doing the domestic errands that will allow us to stay later that night. Sometimes we miss lunch altogether: we jog to burn up calories (the absolute opposite); or we go to the gym to work out (work up?) aggression before plunging back into the dog eat dog marketplace. Anything, anything but simply having lunch and enjoying it.
Why? When, indeed, eating in the middle of the day is a natural and healthy moment to do so – sustaining energy, allowing digestion and feeding conversation.
It is an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, broadly speaking. Further south, societies have a stronger tradition of eating, and then resting, in the middle of the day. The day starts earlier, is broken by some hours in the afternoon, and then goes on later into the evening. The anthropological explanation of this is climatic: it is the heat which dictates, not the digestion. Except that, now that Anglo-Saxon capitalism is dominant, in city after European city the habit is beginning to die, as desks must be staffed until Tokyo has gone to bed and New York has woken up. Global capitalism has overridden variations in the global climate.
This new capitalism is lean, mean and very hungry. Back in the bad old days, when socialist sensitivities were keen, business lunches possibly earned a bad name. Fat cat capitalists sat late into the afternoon over brandy and cigars, while their workers toiled in satanic mills, only emerging late in the afternoon with pale, hungry faces and emaciated limbs.
But now bosses are thinner than shop-floor workers – they can afford more expensive gyms – and brandy and cigars. Business entertaining goes on, but water is the order of the ambitious lunchtime drinker, and the lunch – notoriously never free – must be justified by a concrete deal, a bottom line, a result.
Meals are significant social moments in all cultures. Meals have always attracted rituals and meanings. They used to be far more simply and recognisably significant in our own culture. The directors would have lunch in their own dining room, and would invite others to join them. Banks, shops and offices would close for lunch. Lunch was important. And it was important throughout the week. Sunday lunch involved all the family sitting down. Christmas dinner still does. In America there is Thanksgiving. In church there is the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion, The Lord’s Supper … meals are where we find much that is significant about how we live, what is changing, what is enduring.
Lunch is an interface. Lunch is where work meets people (where colleagues became friends before the days of motivational workshops and team bonding courses). Lunch is where people talk and people think. It is where the new economy meets a very ancient set of rituals and customs. How we approach lunch says a lot about our attitude to work, and work’s attitude towards us.
Lunch has been on a long downhill trek – from luncheon to something, which we snatch, shamefaced, alone. So what have we gained by downgrading lunch? What have we lost?
“I’m going for lunch.” Yes, but are you going for lunch to eat; or are you going to do the things that you do instead of lunching? In one sense the latter could be said to be fraudulent because this hiatus in the working day is there in order that the natural human need to eat should be met. But on the other hand we don’t want to eat. So we have turned lunch into something else, something broader – time out during the working day. And so employers negotiate about how long ‘lunch’ – and other breaks – should be.
Is the time taken at the employee’s expense, or the employer’s? If it is just used by the employee at will, then cannot employers reasonably argue that it should not count towards the working day? If it is used to eat, because an eight- or ten-hour stretch without food involves significant loss of efficiency towards the end, then cannot an employee regard that as benefiting the organisation? Lunch, in those circumstances, becomes a necessary concomitant of employing people at all – and the employer’s business.
This is lunch as a battleground. It suggests a workplace that is a battlefield. Investment banks are the new sweatshops, as much as the new call centres – only with bigger bonuses. So that’s all right then? In a free market and a free society people are able to choose what they do with the time when they could be eating. That canteen, lunch-break culture was so paternalistic, so patronising. Yet now market pressures seem to work only one way. They have eaten up lunch for the keen employee. Modern business culture has become as food-friendly as a plague of locusts.
Historically, many communities dedicated to a common end have distrusted meals. Under the Rule of St Benedict monks eat in silence, listening to readings from improving texts. (When do the readers eat? But then, when do waiters have lunch?)
The trouble is, eating is so charged. Rows over the family table. Class war fought with serried ranks of cutlery and fish servers. Meals are the traditional moment to betray your enemy under the guise of friendship: the invitation to break bread speaks of peace, but treachery often strikes. Dante puts traitors to their guests into the very lowest Hell.
It is a busy place.
And yet, we should nevertheless try to reclaim lunch for the new economy. Because, what is wrong with eating? Can’t we simply enjoy that necessary break in the working day, make a virtue out of the necessity, feed ourselves, replenish ourselves, come back to give it back to our work? A solitary sandwich maybe efficient but is it effective?
Everyone should think about lunch more. Employers should value employees as people who need to eat. Employees should value employers as people for whose sake – among others – they eat. And maybe the ritual meal, the nourishing meal, the creative meal, food not as a weakness but as collaboration, can come back into business. So, re-build the subsidised canteen, bring back the dinner ladies!
Perhaps, even, we could invite Dionysos back to the lunch table, to oil our ideas, give us a little courage to make that intuitive leap, speak up to the boss, help us to dare outline that off-the-wall idea. Of course, it would be dangerous, but it’s food for thought.
Love this…
“In Tunisia, protesters escalated calls for the restoration of the country’s suspended constitution. Meanwhile, Egyptians rose in revolt as strikes across the country brought daily life to a half. In Libya, provincial leaders worked feverishly to strengthen their newly independent republic. It was 1919.”
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011.
So what are you waiting for. Read it now.
On a different topic, it was nice to read about the power of bare feet in the papers at the weekend. I remember reading some research many years ago that claimed that creativity increased by 10% in offices if staff took off their shoes off. Amanda Levete Architects in London seem to have taken the idea one step further by having a company policy to encourage architects to work barefoot.
I’m typing this with no shoes or socks on. I’m waiting for something to happen…
According to Slate.com, the creation, production and disposal (or recycling) of a paper book creates 7.5KG of CO2 emissions. In contrast an iPad creates CO2 emissions of 130 Kg while a Kindle creates 168KG. So, after reading about 17 books on an iPad or around 22 Kindle books, digital devices start to make carbon savings. If only things were that simple.
What we need to know here, of course, is what the carbon costs of operating these devices is (not included in these figures). One of these days I’ll try to figure this out.
What we do know is that a one-off (single) Google search taking about a second creates about 0.2KG of CO2. Multiple searches that last a few minutes are likely to generate something in the region of 7KG of CO2. This is according to Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard who has studied the environmental impact of computing.
Obviously reading an e-book will not create CO2 emissions anything like this, but I suspect that emissions will still be substantial. Bottom line is that if you borrow paper books from your local library (walking or cycling to get there if possible) you are likely to be saving both the paper book industry as well as the planet.
BTW, for my older post about carbon emissions associated with email click here.