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The E Myth Revisited

Book Review-The E-Myth Revisited

There aren’t many books that I read under protest. I don’t mean protest in the sense that someone else is forcing me to read a book, as much as I mean that I’m forcing myself to read it. The E-Myth Revisited is one of those books that I didn’t want to read. I had been exposed to The E-Myth years ago. I knew the fundamental premise behind the book: Make a system for everything. Once you’ve made a system, any lemming can run the system and you can franchise it. Yea, that’s a massive over-simplification but it’s mostly on target. It’s an old book. Published in 1995, it’s definitely long in the tooth. However, as it happens, someone recommended it to me.

Strangely, it was someone who I really didn’t trust, respect, or even like. I believe that she so massively misread and mishandled a situation so badly that I didn’t want to speak with her again. Her parting shot at me – a final attack – included a note that I should read The E-Myth Revisited. I suppose most people would have just written it off however I knew there had to be something there that I had missed in the past. I was right. While the fundamental premise didn’t really fit my situation, it was something that I could learn from – and I think you might be able to learn something too.

Franchise This!

Perhaps my greatest struggle with the book is that it doesn’t really fit my line of work. I deliver professional services and develop intellectual property. In truth, neither of these activities are good candidates for systemization. So the idea that my business could really be systematized and licensed as a franchise was just not compatible with my worldview. It still isn’t.

I don’t believe that you can systematize a professional services company. There are large consulting companies that are built on an army of well-meaning, bright but under-experienced folks executing poorly documented frameworks that are supposed to allow anyone to execute a large project well. In practice, I see numerous failures, cost overruns, and problems that are quietly swept under the rug as the large consulting company marches on to the next deal. (I have to say not all of the larger consulting companies are like this but more than a few are.)

Intellectual property systemization is actually pretty interesting because I’ve spent much of my life in organizations that do intellectual property work. Book publishers are in this line of work and I’ve been close enough to see how trying to systematize book publishing has destroyed quality. Speaking with one of my publishing friends, we were discussing the failure rate of book projects. We were talking about schedule failures (late to market), writing failures (never finished), and sales failures (not enough sales to cover expenses.) The scary thing was we were talking about a net failure rate of 50% or more. Half the books that some publishers were producing would never cover their own production costs.

I mentioned that you shouldn’t expect more than an advance when I talked about the math in Self-Publishing with Lulu back in 2009. (If you’re interested in a more detailed background on publishing and how it works, you can still get an eBook I wrote in 2001 – A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Technical Publishing.) Book publishers make money before your royalty is earned out – but you can pretty quickly see that it takes more than a few thousand books sold for a publisher to really make money.

If professional services and intellectual property aren’t businesses to franchise, then what kinds of businesses are? In short, business-to-consumer companies. If you’re trying to interact with consumers, you’ll find that having a standard plan to deal with the regularly transitioning workforce is a good idea. Having a system allows you to create a copy of your business in another area (that can be relatively close by) which accesses a completely different set of people – because most consumer businesses are inherently driven by location and proximity.

Some business-to-business companies can benefit as well because they’re doing relatively mechanical, algorithmic, repeatable work as well. Even if you don’t franchise your business-to-business company you’ll want to pick up the operational efficiencies that come with having a well-defined and well understood process.

Three Faces

One of Gerber’s fundamental beliefs is that there are three key personalities in each person and that these three are needed for an organization:

  • The Technician – The technical expert with the skills at the core of the thing that the organization sells.
  • The Manager – The orchestrator of work. The “Negative Nellie” which views all challenges as problems to be solved.
  • The Entrepreneur – The visionary with the ability to see the needs of people and design solutions for those needs.

Gerber further believes that most small businesses are created by folks who are good technicians – they’re passionate about what they do and are frustrated with the way that other companies are run. They experience increasing annoyance at the way others are running the business that they are incited to believe that they can do it better. The person who is naturally comfortable being a technician takes on the roles of entrepreneur and manager.

I’ve certainly seen many organizations like this, and to some extent, my organization fits this. I started a consulting company to do it better. To focus on quality and customer satisfaction, to avoid being a body shop and to make a real difference – of course, I may not have achieved my goals.

Aim, Objective, Fire

“If you don’t know where you’re going then any path will take you there.” – Scarecrow, The Wizard of Oz.

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey said “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s no surprise that figuring out where you are trying to get to is an important part of feeling successful in your business and in your life. Yes, most people don’t have a vision for what they want, much less how to get there. Knowing where you want to go, in Gerber’s language, is your primary aim. It’s the answer to questions like:

  • What do I value most?
  • What kind of life do I want?
  • What do I want my life to look like, to feel like?
  • Who do I wish to be?

The last question harkens back to Who Am I? , but in general the questions are to help you evaluate your organization and what you need to do – slowly but deliberately – to get where you want to go. If you value your time at home with your family in the evenings, creating a restaurant isn’t likely to be the best fit.

I want to be able to make it easier for folks to learn – to demystify technology and increasingly enable people to bring forth change in organizations. I greatly value being at home so that I can interact with my son, Alex. Thor Projects, my consulting business, isn’t the best solution to being home since many of my clients are remote and want me to travel. As a result, I’ve shaped my rate structure to favor me working remotely for the client (from my home office.) I not only want to be able to work from my home office, but I also want to see and enjoy nature as I’m working. As a result, I’ve put a large number of windows in my office. In fact, I rarely have the lights on in the office during the day – I enjoy the sunlight through all the windows.

Ultimately, I recognize that the structure of a consulting company doesn’t have the flexibility I want, and so I started AvailTek to hold the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide and other intellectual property. In the end, this will allow me to educate more people and will allow me the flexibility to spend time with Alex. I’ve still not transitioned to full-time work with AvailTek – even though we’ve been selling the Shepherd’s Guide for 5 years now.

The path to the primary aim is the strategic objective. Creating a product company that is capable of sustaining my financial needs is my strategic objective. In my case, getting AvailTek started and creating the content for the SharePoint Shepherd’s brand is all a part of my strategic objective.

Gerber doesn’t spend any time on this topic, but it is a significant part of my experience in the challenges of organizations. That is, converting the strategic objectives into tactical goals and activities. One of the most common occurrences I see in the organizations that I work with is that strategic objectives never get converted into goals and executable tactics. For me, it’s the day-to-day activities driven by the goals that move an organization forward. It’s great to know where you’re going, but eventually you have to figure out how to get there.

Uncommon Standard

There’s a fair amount of appropriate criticism for technical certification programs. At any gathering of technicians, especially in conversation over a couple beers, you are likely to hear their complaints about how their hands-on expertise cannot be captured by a multiple choice test. They are – of course – correct. However, they fail to realize that the goal of a certification exam isn’t to measure the skills of an expert. Instead it’s designed to be a winnowing tool that employers and hiring managers can use to sort out the unqualified from the qualified.

At the heart of any certification exam is a passing score. That is, a standard. It’s a standard that says below this you do not pass and above this you have met the minimum requirements – the standard. In that way, every certification is a standard. Knowing this allows you to focus on the right question, which isn’t whether the certification is good or bad. Rather, the right question is “Was the certification standard set correctly?” That’s the true measure of the value of a certification.

In the context of creating your business, it is the standards that you set which make the business. What is your standard for responsiveness? Cleanliness? Technical skill? When you put all of these standards together you get the organizational standards – and the promise that you make to your clients.

Having a standard is uncommon. Setting high standards is even less common. Being able to articulate what your standards are is less common than it should be.

Start Playing Games with Me

In the context of business, when we say that the management is playing games with us, we almost always think of this in a negative context. We feel manipulated and we don’t like it. However, playing a board game at home with your family doesn’t feel manipulative.

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (of Flow fame) interviewed hundreds of creative leaders and summarized a key point from those interviews, thusly, “You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.” That is to say that those who are in flow – those who are enjoying their work – never feel like it is work.

Gerber shares that people need to want to do work more than they want to do not-work. While a bit oversimplified the core rings true. You want people to be excited to do their work enough that the distractions aren’t consuming. We’ve all seen employees of other organizations checking their cell phone, chatting with other staff members, and generally being distracted from the customers in front of them. If you make the process of being engaged in what you want your employees to do more interesting than the distractions, then they’ll pay better attention to the customers – or so the reasoning goes.

I’m reminded of the suggestions from Drive about how to motivate people. Most workers today are heuristic learners and therefore need to be motivated by mastery, autonomy, and purpose, rather than carrots and sticks. Creating an environment of positive reinforcement for a job well done can be a powerful way to keep employees trying to one-up each other’s level of service to customers – without giving them anything except for good service.

Even in my own work there are times that I just really don’t want to work. It’s amazing to me just how powerful cognitive dissonance can be. That is the desire to do the things that you need to do – and your deeply held desire to do something fun – to reward yourself for a job well done. I find that the better I define small rewards and the clarity around what my end goals are can help me to be more effective at staying on task.

There is No Spoon

Another of Gerber’s assertions is that our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside. That is to say that the more chaotic that we are inside the more chaotic that we make our world outside. While there’s a certain truth to this, I believe that there are times when we will seek the opposite of what we have inside to allow us to focus on changing our world. However, the line from the Matrix, “There is no spoon,” is appropriate here. Much of what we make of our world is how we see it.

I’m reminded of the story from Switch where BP decided they weren’t going to drill any more “dry holes.” In short they decided that the culture was changing from one which accepted “dry holes” (oil wells without oil) to one where “dry holes” weren’t acceptable. They needed to know for sure that there was oil at the bottom when they started drilling – or they needed to not drill.

In the context of your organization, what do you accept as a part of your culture that you shouldn’t? Is it workers who are late to work? Is it a level of distractedness when customers are around? Or maybe it’s just that management isn’t reading books like E-Myth to make the organization better…

Cookie cutter

Which SharePoint Site Template Do You Believe Will Be Created the Most?

We’re putting the finishing touches on the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for 2013 and I was trying to figure out the best way to point users to the right site template to use. As a part of that I decided that it would be fun to stack rank order the site templates that will be used the most – so that I know where to position them on the decision tree. Here’s my order from most frequently to least frequently used:

  1. Team Site
  2. Project Site
  3. Publishing Site
  4. Publishing Site with Workflow
  5. Enterprise Wiki
  6. Blog
  7. Business Intelligence Center
  8. Community Site
  9. Records Center
  10. eDiscovery Center
  11. Document Center
  12. Community Portal
  13. Enterprise Search Center
  14. Basic Search Center
  15. My Site Host
  16. Developer Site
  17. Product Catalog
  18. Visio Process Repository

Do you agree with this order? — Or do you have your own?

How Children Succeed

Book Review-How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

What makes a child successful in life? In my review of Emotional Intelligence I mentioned that tests of emotional intelligence were generally more indicative of long term success than measures of intelligence. However, emotional intelligence – as it was defined in the other book, isn’t all there is to the puzzle. Paul Tough tackles the challenge of the other indicators in his book How Children Succeed. One interesting bit is that Paul is a journalist. That is, his experience is on reporting on other people’s discoveries. That’s both good and bad.

The good is that he’s able to see things objectively. He’s able to draw on multiple sources and correlate differing but related points of view into a single path. The bad is that there’s not the same depth or passion that you’ll find in a book written by a practitioner. That’s not to say that How Children Succeed isn’t well researched. It is. That’s not to say that it’s not well written, because it is. What is does say is that if you’re looking for the richness you would expect to find from someone that has spent their entire life struggling with the question – you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Experience Matters

One measure of how well a child will succeed is to measure the number of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). That’s really all of the major life stressors that they experience as a child. Major life stressors are things like deaths in the family, moves, divorces, etc., the things that trigger stress in a child’s life. It seems that the problem with these experiences is that they may accidentally cause the stress response – the Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis – to get stuck in the on position. The HPA axis refers to the interplay of hormones in the endocrine system that are characteristic of stress.

With the HPA axis stuck on, children are basically trapped in fear mode all the time. Fear, as we learned in Drive, prevents people from being creative or taking risks – risks that are essential to growth. So the higher the ACE score, the greater is the likelihood that a child will grow up with developmental problems. Effectively, a child’s executive function is compromised. That means that they won’t be as able to regulate their emotions or to delay gratification, and will have sub-normal ability to use working memory. Working memory is the space that you use to work with information. Consider for instance, how many numbers you can remember. It turns out that most adults can hold about seven digits of a number in their head at a time (unless we chunk the data as we learned in Information Architecture – Blueprints for the web). The seven digits that we can hold in our head is working memory. With extended periods of HPA axis activation, this working memory is restricted.

Beyond the developmental problems, the HPA axis wasn’t designed to be left on – or even to be hyposensitized. The human biology evolved the HPA axis to allow for short-term focus. It was never designed to be left on for extended periods of time. It evolved when there were periods where we were in eminent danger from a predator. If we didn’t run right away we’d become lunch for a hungry lion. However, the threats we face today rarely have to deal with life and death situations really. Most of the time, our brains make the situation feel life-and-death, which triggers the HPA axis, although in reality, few of us often fear for our lives.

As a point of fact, humans are the only known animal which can trigger their stress response in a way that’s not precisely coupled with the events in the outside world. We can “stress ourselves out.” In ways that no animal in the rest of the animal kingdom can, we are able to motivate and drive ourselves. This is good when we’re delaying gratification and working on future events, but it’s bad when we forget that stress is designed to be a short term thing.

Ultimately, since you can’t always control the number of ACE events which can trigger a bad stress response, what can you do to make things better? It turns out there’s something you can learn from a rat.

You No Good, Dirty Rat

ACE events may negatively impact a person’s potential for lifelong happiness and success, however, there’s a curious activity in mother rats that seems to counteract the negative effects of stress in rats. The curious activity was special attention that the mother rats showed in caring for their young – specifically licking and grooming. Mother rats could nurture better rats – better at socialization, curiosity, and maze navigation. (Maze navigation is apparently a useful skill for lab rats.) It was discovered, through the magic of gene sequencing, that the high levels of caring (bonding) switched on a part of DNA that allows the hippocampus to process stress hormones better.

Licking a child will pretty much universally get you a “yuck” from the child and any other person in the area. Of course, it’s not really the licking that was causing the better response. It was caring. It just happens that rats show caring through licking and grooming. Parents can help their children better cope, and possibly counteract the long term effect of stress by connecting with them.

Safe to Be Vulnerable

As I mentioned in my review of Emotional Intelligence, one of the great paradoxes of life is that to be vulnerable you have to feel safe. Until you feel safe you won’t be vulnerable. Parents who make their children feel safer create a foundation from which their children can leap. That means that the more you bond with, connect with, and care for your child the more they will be able to, and interested in, exploring. So, socioeconomic factors may lead to levels of success and happiness – but that success and happiness are not solely related to the family’s income. They are really related to how safe a child feels. How many, or few, ACEs they have – but more important than that how they’re nurtured. Nurturing a child can be a challenging task even for a healthy adult.

Nurturing children when your own internal state is locked into a fear mode is an almost impossible task. If you were parented with bad habits it’s hard to break those patterns and provide a secure base for your children. It’s hard for you to portray safety when you internally don’t feel safe because your own HPA axis is locked in the on position.

Creating a place of safety isn’t the only challenge. There’s also setting up an attitude of persistence that needs to be considered as well.

Grit for Polish

When you subtitle a book with a word like grit, there’s got to be something that backs it up. Grit, as defined by Angela Duckworth, is “self-discipline wedded to a dedicated pursuit of a goal.” Emotional Intelligence called this persistence. So what makes grit so important? Well, it keeps children in the game long enough to become good at it. Having read Outliers, I have no doubt that there are times in every great person’s life where they felt like they weren’t going to make it. Where they felt like they were stuck in relative obscurity but they were doing what they loved so they kept learning and trying to get better. That’s a dedication to a purpose that Paul Tough might define as grit.

Many folks will equate grit with gritty. However, I do not. I think about how grit is used to polish mirrors. Grit in successive levels of fineness can put a mirror-finish on a surface. I vividly remember using sandpaper with progressively finer grit to polish axels on my son’s Cub Scout pinewood derby racers. We would do all sorts of things to the axels to reduce the friction. Grit can be used to make something “better” than when it started. That’s what I believe grit does for children (and adults.)

Curiosity Killed the Cat

Plato indicated that the desire for truth (curiosity) is one of the greatest motivators in life. This is certainly true for Plato, but not for everyone. In Who Am I? we learned that curiosity is one of the sixteen key desires. In How Children Succeed Tough speaks only briefly about the value of curiosity. However, the point is made that curious students are better students. Curiosity is the fuel that grit consumes to reach a goal. It is the spark that gets things started.

What Kind of Character

Character is a difficult thing to define. Unfortunately, Tough doesn’t really do much to illuminate this topic. There are scattered references to different bits of self-control and self-management, both of which are covered in more detail in Emotional Intelligence. There are references to virtues – but I found the discussion in Heroic Leadership of much more practical value about instilling virtues. So in this way, I’d say How Children Succeed probably doesn’t meet its subtitle, however, it’s still a good read and gave me plenty to think about.

Comedy Update from Rob

A few years ago I posted that I had taken a standup comedy course. I didn’t do much with the class after I took the course. I did another course on Improv with Michael Malone, but didn’t do anything with it. However, I’ve decided to start to try to get up on a regular basis. If you are in Indianapolis and want to know when I’m going to be doing comedy (so you can come laugh at me), I’ve created a mailing list you can sign up for at http://eepurl.com/x9j0z I’ll use that list only for sending out comedy updates. This Wednesday (April 17, 2013) I’ll be at Morty’s Comedy Joint at 8PM if you want to come.

Emotional Intelligence

Book Review-Emotional Intelligence

I read a lot of content on psychology. I love learning more about how people think. I am intrigued by different attempts to understand the human condition. However, I don’t find myself interested in studying the neurology of how the brain works. In Emotional Intelligence, I got both neurology and psychology in one convenient package. The neurology is of lesser practical value than the psychology is to me but it is nice to have support for some of the psychological ideas about how we believe the brain works through an understanding of the chemical and electrical interactions between different parts of the brain. So while I wasn’t looking for the neurology, it was very helpful in terms of validating the psychology.

Emotional Intelligence as a book has components which I can’t really process well. Certainly the neurology is a part of that, but more broadly, I think that there are some important lessons to learn that are woven into the text. Let me catch you up to speed on what emotional intelligence is, and then explore some of the nuances of the book.

Multiple Intelligences

Most of us have heard of the intelligence quotient (IQ). This measure was designed to assess how smart someone is, however, the way that it measures “smartness” is somewhat narrowly defined in the context of academic learning. It says nothing about how socially aware or in touch someone is. Further, IQ isn’t the strongest predictor of success over the long term. In contrast to IQ, the model of multiple intelligences was put forth by Howard Gardner as a model for depicting how people are gifted towards different aspects of the human experience. The idea is that individual areas of intelligence are only loosely connected to one another. Strength in one area doesn’t necessarily imply strength in another area. One particularly interesting intelligence that has emerged from Gardner’s thinking is Emotional Intelligence (EI). That is, how emotionally aware and connected a person is to themselves and to others.

Speaking as someone who has reviewed content for technical accuracy and clarity for dozens of years, I can tell you that statistical sampling doesn’t work when it comes to content. An author can be absolutely brilliant on one topic (say hard drives) and completely incompetent on another (say networking.) Overall they’re gifted. Individually they may – or may not – be in a given subject area. Because of this, it’s easy to resonate with me that we can have areas of strength and weaknesses in our intellect.

The Neurology of Love and War

You’re “keyed up.” You walk across the room unable to hear the voices around you because your heart is pounding out a lightning fast rhythm on your eardrums. As you reach the girl you so desperately want to ask out your mouth goes dry. Your brain is deep within a sympathetic arousal. Your brain has determined (incorrectly) that this moment is critical to your survival and if she says yes you’ll take flight and if she says no you’ll want to fight. Your body has prepared itself for battle. Your focus is so narrow you barely register the other people – even her best friend that she’s talking to when you walk up. In your head, she’s become the central threat of your world.

Six months from that moment, she’s said yes and you’ve been dating. This is when you’re both relaxing hand-in-hand, leg over leg, on the couch watching a movie, you’re likely experiencing a relaxation or parasympathetic arousal. That is, your body detects no danger and has lowered its guard. As a result you’re ready to work with your girlfriend on planning anything – even if it’s a wedding.

You’re seeing rather extreme examples of the neurology that happens in all of us every day. Sympathetic arousal quickens our pace, focuses us in on one or a few things, and gets us ready to fight or flee. This is the body’s normal response to stress and one that’s triggered by the amygdala. Conversely, a state of relaxation allows us to see more of the world. We’re able to see a broader view and accept views that may not be our own because we feel safe.

In Drive, Daniel Pink talks some about how we manage stress and how motivators narrow our focus. Fear works the same way. We ignore the extraneous to focus on the thing that we believe to be the most critical to our survival. When we’re in a sympathetic arousal state – for any reason – we’re going to be focused. That can be bad because the mechanics of our brain that manage stress weren’t designed for the kinds of stress we encounter today. Focus is important if you’re trying to run away from a lion on the plains of Africa – it’s less useful when you’re trying to determine which college to go to.

The Neural Shortcut

Fear flashes. In an instant you feel it. You saw something that you don’t even understand and now you’re afraid. How does that work? How can you be afraid before you even understand? In short, your amygdala. The part of your brain inherited from reptiles which is responsible for emotions and the fight-or-flight response. It’s raised the alarm. But how does that happen before you can even understand what it is that has been done?

Well, that comes from signal splitting and two different processes which are evaluating the signals as they’re coming in. The sensory input that you’re getting is routed to two different parts of your brain. The amygdala which is like the Paul Revere of the brain raising the signal that the British are coming. The frontal lobe also gets a copy. A more recent invention of neural biology, the frontal lobe is our rational consciousness. It carefully considers what we’re getting and does enhanced pattern matching to classify the information we’re getting. The frontal lobe doesn’t make many mistakes but in doing its careful analysis it tends to take longer than the amygdala.

From an evolutionary perspective having a few extra milliseconds to know about a threat can mean the difference between escaping a predator and being its next meal. So the amygdala makes a quick evaluation, determines that it saw a gun. It triggers the rest of the brain into alert. It causes the endocrine system to release chemicals and Paul Revere is on his ride through the body to mobilize every muscle. Sometime later – in the next few milliseconds – the frontal lobe makes its evaluation of the input and decides through longer evaluation that it’s a toy gun or it was just a kid’s finger playing a game of cops and robbers. The frontal lobe then explains “false alarm” and your brain – and body start to come down off of high alert.

The problem is that it’s too late to halt all of the effects. The chemicals that were released in those few milliseconds are already flowing through your body and while they have made you ready to move – to fight or to take flight – they’ve also altered your mood. The effect of that short flash can last hours. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he speaks of the framing of input and how sometimes people make bad split second decisions because their perception is altered by the environment. Gary Klein in Sources of Power goes to great lengths to explore how people make decisions – and in the latter half of the book describes how the context of events often times do change the decisions.

Daniel Kahneman speaks more directly about this in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He speaks about how we have a quick mind that works all the time, silently taking care of things until it discovers it doesn’t know how to process something, when it then engages a secondary and slower system. The trick is that the automatic, everyday fast system doesn’t always engage the secondary processes when it should. We can say the same thing about our emotions, sometimes we’re not aware of the need for some rational counter balance to our feelings.

Emotional Hijacking and Cognitive Incapacitation

What about when the frontal lobes can’t reign your emotions back in? At some level you’re aware that someone didn’t intend to make you angry. They’re not really a threat. They can’t really harm you. Despite this, there’s a feeling that you just can’t shake and more importantly, you’re doing things that you know are ultimately very destructive to you, to others, and to your relationships. Welcome to emotional hijacking. You quite literally don’t have the capacity for reason. Temporary insanity defenses sound insane – except that from a neurological perspective there’s support for this happening. The amygdala takes over control and any of the expectations of a civil society are off the table.

The normal circuitry in the frontal lobe for telling the rest of the brain and body that the amygdala is “crying wolf” are shut down. The frontal lobe simply doesn’t have the ability to regain control. Eventually the amygdala won’t be able to sustain control and will give up – however, that can be hours away.

There’s a different kind of problem that sometimes occurs as well. It’s not about a quick emotional hijacking based a single event. It’s a slow, building level of saturation in the system from which it becomes impossible to think. Consider the quote from Ghost Busters — “I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought” – Dr. Egon Spengler. The line is funny because it’s not an emotional hijacking – the character is aware of his feelings but he’s not wrestling control from rational thought. Instead the ability for rational thought is suppressed due to overload – due to flooding. Rational thought is slower and too much input and memories have overwhelmed the ability to process.

So what do we do about it? Earlier in my career I worked for Woods Industries and one of the product lines was surge suppressors. They work based off of something called a metal-oxide varistor (MOV). A MOV has high resistance at low voltages and low resistance at high voltages. So when the voltage is high (like during a surge) the resistance is reduced and current can flow more freely. What happens is that the MOV shunts the power to ground, suppressing the surge. This works great. However in the process of shunting the power sometimes the MOVs build up damage. The damage comes in the form of a pathway inside the MOV which doesn’t work the right way. Bad patterns develop which make the MOV less effective.

The key is to develop positive patterns that create easier pathways to follow when there’s a chance of emotional hijacking or cognitive incapacitation. In the case of hijacking, it might be a habit of counting to ten before taking an action – basically breaking the hold of the amygdala by introducing a short break. Addressing cognitive incapacitation might require a longer period of time – and an agreement to walk away from the conversation (or confrontation) for a while so you have time to process everything that is coming at you and everything that you’re feeling.

The Tale of Two Minds: How We Do Emotional Processing

It’s widely believed that talking about your anger makes it better. It’s called cathartic. The only problem with this is that it’s not true. There seems to be no therapeutic benefit from talking about your anger. In fact, talking about it in the wrong way can actually reinforce and intensify the feelings and make them more difficult to deal with. If you think about what’s making you angry – if you focus on it, you reinforce the anger – rather than releasing the energy from it. A more effective strategy is to tear the emotion apart and figure out what is causing it.

I once listened to the audio version of the book Destructive Emotions which was a dialog with the Dalai Lama. In that book there was a comment that in eastern philosophy “anger is disappointment directed.” That one statement has been, perhaps, one of the most valuable things I’ve ever heard. It allows me to ask the question when I get angry… what am I disappointed by? This allows me to try to process my emotions and figure out what’s behind them. Fear is similar. Fear is that we feel threatened. A good question is: how do I feel threatened? Once I get that answer, I can ask the “Why?” question.

This activity is the frontal lobe processing the emotions that were triggered by the amygdala. Processing emotions can be very healthy as it allows you to learn how to self-manage your emotions – once you’re aware of them.

The Voice inside Your Head (Cognitive Therapy)

“You’re not good enough.” “You’ll never be fast enough.” “You’re not as smart as your sister.” “You’re amazing.” “You’re special.” “You bring smiles to other people’s faces.” Some version of one of these is playing in your head from time-to-time. It’s an internal tape. It’s a sort of background noise to the way that you think. These little voices keep talking to you over and over and over again. Eventually, whatever those voices say is what you’re going to believe.

One of the most effective therapies developed has been cognitive behavior therapy. That is the process of changing the voices in your head from relatively negative voices to more positive voices. The voices that we start out with are ones which are echoes from what our parents, friends, and our relatives have said. They make up our core beliefs about ourselves and while our core beliefs about ourselves can’t be changed directly, these voices can be changed.

This is particularly true of how we see emotion. If we believe that our anger is justified then our internal voice may reinforce it. If, however, we view the way that we’ve acted as a result of our anger as bad we may choose different ways to express our anger next time. A voice that says I’m a good person but that I’ve chosen some bad approaches will be more effective than I’m a bad person and I’m doing bad things.

It turns out that there’s a difference between guilt – admitting I’ve done something wrong – and shame – believing that I’m inherently bad. A voice that tells me I’m a good person who made a bad choice. By being conscious of the voice that’s playing inside our heads and shaping it in more healthy ways, we can shift our feelings by creating better emotional reactions.

Of Self and Social (The Heart of EI)

What is emotional intelligence? According to Goleman, there are four keys to emotional intelligence:

  • Self-Awareness – This is an awareness of what you’re feeling (and thinking). It’s about knowing you’re grumpy, angry, hurt, or tired. You can’t very well be in touch with yourself if you can’t describe your feelings.
  • Self-Management – The first step may be awareness that you’re angry – but what if the anger isn’t appropriate or it isn’t appropriate to express? Self-Management is a set of skills that allow you to regulate or manage your feelings.
  • Social Awareness – Knowing how you feel may be essential, but in relationships with others the ability to detect their emotional state is critical. It’s the foundation of empathy and the ability to be in relationships with others.
  • Relationship Management – Being able to be in relationships is the pinnacle of emotional intelligence. Knowing how to relate to others at a deep level enriches lives.

Characteristics of Character (Enthusiasm, Persistence, Hope, Unflappable)

What makes someone successful in life? I’m not just saying successful in terms of being financially wealthy but rather successful in a more holistic view of loving their life. As it turns out some of the most telling factors for how successful someone will be in life aren’t about IQ. They’re more about Emotional Intelligence. It turns out your ability to monitor your feelings, distract yourself, manage your responses, read others’ emotions and feelings, and ultimately manage your relationship with others is more important than any other factor in terms of your long term success.

A famous study most often referred to as the marshmallow experiment tested delayed gratification (which is essential for self-management and relationship management) by offering kids one marshmallow now – or two if they waited. This isn’t interesting in itself. What’s interesting is that those preschoolers who were able to delay gratification and get the two marshmallows showed significantly more successful measures of life. In other words, something as simple as whether you can delay your own gratification has a substantial impact on your long term success in life.

However, delayed gratification isn’t everything. Persistence has its place. Consider Lincoln. Our most beloved president had a string of political losses before becoming president. His wife was widely reported to be a very difficult woman to live with. Yet, through set-back after set-back he managed to move forward in his life and lead the country through one of its darkest hours. Consider Einstein. Most folks believe that he was a brilliant man – and he was – but what they don’t realize is that he struggled in school. He often spoke of the fact that he wasn’t smarter than others – just more persistent. If persistence makes folks like Lincoln and Einstein … sign me up.

What is perseverance when you have no enthusiasm or passion for what you’re doing? You may keep moving forward but it will grind you down. It will wear at you. We’ve all seen the army of bitter people who continue to struggle to move forward but they aren’t enjoying their world. They’re simply surviving. There’s something to be said for bringing enthusiasm to each new challenge. Consider Edison. He was creating things that didn’t exist before. While we may be mystified by LED and compact florescent bulbs, consider a time when even the incandescent bulbs didn’t exist. Candles and lamps provided light at night. Edison reportedly had a thousand failures at creating a light bulb, however, he refused to count them as failures. Instead he chose to say that he had discovered a thousand ways NOT to make a light bulb. That’s enthusiasm.

Oprah liked the book The Secret and drew heat for it. The central premise of the book (as I understand it, having not read it) is that you attract what you think about. If you think positive thoughts positive things will flow into your life. I don’t go this far in terms of my beliefs, however, I will say that looking for the positive in every situation – finding a way to cultivate your hope for a better future is important. As I mentioned in my review of Who Am I?, Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp detainee, observed that folks who had a meaning for their life were the ones that survived – hope is that sort of meaning. I hope (or believe) that my suffering will serve others – and in that I can survive even the most miserable circumstances. Hope is a key characteristic of a happy life.

Hope waxes and wanes in each of us, however, there is a characteristic of unflappability – an inability for people to be disturbed by what is happening around them. Unflappability can actually be caused by two different things. One is an inability to process your environment emotionally, which would be bad. However, there’s another side. That side is the mastery of the ability to be aware of and manage your emotions so well that seemingly nothing fazes you. This can be very healthy.

The Great Paradox: You Must Feel Safe to Become Vulnerable

I learned more about how trust is reflexive – that is, the more you trust, the more others trust you – from Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace and Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life. There’s a sort of inherent elegance in this. There’s almost an innate understanding that you trust those who trust you. However, there are parts of the human experience in which the way to get trust is counter intuitive. Trust is allowing yourself to be vulnerable – vulnerable to a failure in another person.

However, someone else being vulnerable to you isn’t going to be enough for you to be vulnerable. You have to feel safe. Certainly trusting the other person is a good start, however, you have to feel safe in general. The trick is that being safe and feeling safe aren’t the same thing. Many people have an anxiety when flying on a commercial plane. Of course, flying in a commercial plane is substantially safer – statistically speaking – than driving your car to the airport to get on the plane. This doesn’t stop the anxiety.

Conversely, you probably feel very comfortable in your own home. However, in-home accidents are a leading cause of death. So while you should feel safer in an airplane and less safe at home, the opposite is true. It’s an odd thing to realize that you have to feel safe to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Finding Emotional Intelligence

No one book will dramatically change your life and improve your emotional intelligence overnight, however, if you’re looking for a way to get in better touch with your emotions, to control your responses, to understand others, and to be in relationships with others; Emotional Intelligence is a great place to start.

Who Am I?

Book Review-Who Am I?

After trying to figure out the meaning of life, trying to figure out who you are has to the biggest question of life. Over the years, countless folks have tried to simplify the complexity of people, their motivations, desires, and their expected behavior into a set of simplifications that would allow people to be classified. Some of them with more success than others.

They’re looking for the displacement (Archimedes’) method for measuring an irregular solid – something that makes sense, is relatively easy to do and has good results. Whether you’re fond of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Disc profiles, the Enneagram, or something else, many people have tried to figure out how to classify people so that they can better understand themselves and others. In Who Am I?: The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalities Steven Reiss shares his research into the sixteen desires that he believes motivate our lives. They are (in Reiss’ words):

  • Power is the desire to influence others.
  • Independence is the desire for self-reliance.
  • Curiosity is the desire for knowledge.
  • Acceptance is the desire for inclusion.
  • Order is the desire for organization.
  • Saving is the desire to collect things.
  • Honor is the desire to be loyal to one’s parents and heritage.
  • Idealism is the desire for social justice.
  • Social Contact is the desire for companionship.
  • Family is the desire to raise one’s own children.
  • Status is the desire for social standing.
  • Vengeance is the desire to get even.
  • Romance is the desire for sex and beauty.
  • Eating is the desire to consume food.
  • Physical Activity is the desire for exercise of muscles.
  • Tranquility is the desire for emotional calm.

 

Reiss is careful to point out that this is the refined list of the most important characteristics to influence behavior and that some desires – like the desire for shelter may be important to biology but not psychology.

Scales

The idea is that people are motivated to behave in ways consistent with their desire for these 16 areas of their life. That doesn’t necessarily mean that someone who is a high-status person will always seek status rather it means that someone who is a high status person will seek status to reach their perceived normal level. If they get too much status they’ll find a way to lower themselves. It’s all about a natural desire for where you are at – a sort of normal set point, not some absolute desire. This is consistent with the way I view the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as well.

From my point of view we have a natural place where we exist on any scale – whether it’s Dr. Reiss’ scale of honor or whether it’s the intuiting-sensing scale of the MBTI. From that natural set-point we have a set of adaptation skills. That is a range in which we’re comfortable operating. If we’re a highly internal person (MBTI type I) then we might be OK in gatherings of 20 people or less. Or perhaps we’re OK in groups up to 100. However, when we’re at Disney World waiting for Space Mountain we might find ourselves overwhelmed. Mostly changing our core motivations isn’t something that is generally believed is possible – at least it’s not easy. However, creating a range of where we’re comfortable operating is something that we can do.

For instance, it’s possible to condition ourselves in areas just outside our comfort zone to expand it slightly. Like sitting in the middle of a busy mall for 10 minutes before heading home. This conditioning may not change our core desire for tranquility (Reiss) but it will, over time, change our ability to accept a different level of tranquility than we would prefer.

Just as we can change our comfort zone for a particular motivation we can also have others influence our behavior through social conditioning (upbringing, culture, etc). For instance, consider a person with a high romance component who is taught that sex before marriage is bad. In this case, the person may not do behaviors that bare out their natural desires, but they still may have them. It’s worth mentioning here that Kurt Lewin said that behavior is a function of both person and environment. That is just because someone is naturally inclined one way doesn’t mean you can’t create an environment that will discourage that natural behavior.

Means and Ends

Aristotle divided human motives into means and ends. Ends are the things that you want intrinsically. Means are what you want in order to get to the ends. For most folks (except perhaps those who are high saving) money isn’t really the goal. Money is just a means to whatever ends they want whether that’s a better car, a vacation home, or something else. They say that most marriages end over fights about money – however, I’d put forward the idea that marriages end because of a difference of ideals and it just happens that money is the means to most of those ideal ends. Separating the means and the ends is useful because it changes the reasoning for behavior. Someone who likes physical activity may exercise because they enjoy it – thus it’s an end. However, someone who is high on romance may do exercise in order to reach their ideal form of beauty – thus exercise is a means.

Addictions

It’s been said that our addictions are the result of our natural desires gone awry. They may have gone awry because of a bad set of situations that have “taught” us the wrong answer – like an elephant that won’t escape when tied with a rather flimsy rope. The elephant has a specific kind of learned – or in this case conditioned – helplessness around pulling loose his leg. An addiction is a habit that has such control over us that we quite literally feel powerless to stop.

It’s our strong desires that drive our addictions. Our natural desires are under-met and therefore we create solutions which eventually ensnare us in a hopeless attempt to figure out how to get our needs met – generally with an unfulfilling approach.

The Meaning of Life

Reiss toys with the idea of the meaning of life through referring to the works of a former concentration camp prisoner, Viktor Frankl. Frankl observed that the survivors of the camp were those that found a way to divine meaning from their lives. It didn’t matter who was strong or weak – it was most important that the person be able to find meaning in their life. This is consistent with The Time Paradox, The Happiness Hypothesis, and Stumbling on Happiness. People who had the ability to stop chasing the everyday addition to distraction and were able to find meaning in their lives are – overall – happier than their peers.

Not Being Understood

I have a high need to be understood. I’ve spent a ton of time learning how to communicate more effectively, considering different learning strategies, better learning how to predict what others are thinking, and so I was encouraged by a rather short section in the book on understanding – and how there are two different drivers for a lack of understanding:

  • “Not Getting It” – This is driven by a serious value system difference that makes it impossible for two people to understand each other. Further communication on the matter will make the problem worse, not better. Please excuse a rather sensitive example that I’ll use here. I don’t accept or agree with adultery. I just don’t. No amount of discussion with someone who has committed adultery will make me understand it. I have several folks I’ve met for which this is a reality – but no amount of discussion about it will make me understand.
  • Misunderstanding – Generally further discussion can clarify any misperceptions that have come to be between two folks who are misunderstanding one another. I find that often if I just focus on one word at a time – verifying the shared meaning of one word after another we’ll eventually find the misunderstanding.

Perhaps equally intriguing was the ideas that there are two factors that make understanding more difficult:

  • Self-Hugging – The natural belief that our way is the “right” way to do things. For instance, whether toilet paper should unroll over or behind the roll. Whatever your belief is – you believe that your answer is right. This is a result of confirmation bias (we see what we look for).
  • Everyday Tyranny – The belief that what is right for us is right for everyone. For instance, I’ve been an independent consultant most of my adult career. It’s right for me – but I know many people where the challenge and lack of stability would drive them mad. Imposing what works for me on to others would be a form of everyday tyranny.

The Psychology of Dependence and Religion

It used to be believed that dependence was a sign of a weak will and by extension the idea that people are dependent on God (or religion) were somehow psychologically weaker or less advanced than those without a belief in God. Certainly there’s a pattern, which Stephen Covey describes in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. However, the point of interdependence – which Covey recommends – is a selected dependence on others. It’s an intelligence and awareness about the dependence.

Dr. Reiss states that there’s no statistical difference in the psychological health between those who have religious beliefs – and those who do not. On the other hand, churches and synagogues in the United States provide more than twice the philanthropy of social causes.

Putting It Together

So the book included a quick and simple approximation of the assessment test which I codified into an Excel Spreadsheet which you can find here. If you’re interested in finding out more about who you are, I highly recommend Who Am I?

 

 

SharePoint REST TypeScript Library

At the end of November I posted a blog post titled SharePoint, REST, TypeScript, and the Library where I talked about the TypeScript library I built to demonstrate the power of TypeScript as a tool for large scale JavaScript. JavaScript gets messy quickly, particularly when you have to make a series of calls and deal with deferred callbacks.

I’ve had a few dozen people ask for the code and I’ve finally gotten around to publishing it into codeplex at http://sprestts.codeplex.com — if you’ve offered to help and you don’t see an invite from me in the next day or two go ahead and send me a follow up email and I’ll get you added.

SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis 2013

Last Saturday (Jan 12, 2013) Indianapolis held a SharePoint Saturday. We were honored with…

  • 472 registrants
  • 302 attendees
  • 96 evaluations
  • 30 sessions
  • 10 sponsors
  • 1 good time

Our overall satisfaction score for the event was 4.53 – which I think is really, really good and it’s a testimony to the great steering committee that we had. I’d like to recognize them here.

I couldn’t have asked for a better team. They really made the event a pleasure.

Infographics

Book Review-Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling

One of the problems I have with my blog – and I’m keenly aware – is that its text based. While I insert the occasional graphic, because of the logistics of the medium it’s difficult to get the level of images in the stories. I also find that I’m often trying to convey complex items where words aren’t always the best choice. That’s why I try to introduce bullets, tables, etc., to help with the comprehension. The ultimate solution is to use Infographics – something that requires design skills that I don’t have. So when I started reading Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling, I knew I wouldn’t likely be able to produce the end result. I’d have to be content with just knowing what made a good infographic and a few tips I could use.

The “big rock” division that the book lays out is whether the intent of the Infographic is for explorative reasons – or narrative reasons. Explorative are more minimalist in their representation and tends to convey concepts and relationships where narrative tends to deliver much more information. It informs and entertains.

The book is full of examples of infographics – and a great deal of information about how they were formed. However, I think the book for me had three keys. First, is an idea that there are three key reasons to do an infographic – one for appeal, the second is for comprehension, and the third is retention (of the information). They break out three key markets (academic/scientific, marketing, and editorial) along these three dimensions as shown below.

I also found the idea of the quality of an infographic as being defined by it’s beauty, soundness, and utility quite useful, however, the best part was probably the process for creating an infographic:

  1. Idea
  2. Research
  3. Content
  4. Story
  5. Design

These five steps are the approach that the authors use to get good results from their infographics projects – and they’re probably a great idea for you to use as a starting point as well.

If you’re trying to communicate visually, pickup Infographics.

The Art of Explanation

Book Review-The Art of Explanation

I spend quite a bit of my time in the professional world trying to explain things. Sometimes it’s to clients. Sometimes it’s developers. Sometimes it’s to the infrastructure team. Whomever it is, I know that sometimes my explanations work – and sometimes they don’t. The Art of Explanation holds the keys to at least some of the problems I have when trying to explain things. I wanted to share some of the highlights from the book with you but before I do that I have to share a story.

Many, many moons ago. My guess is about 20 years ago, I was a LAN manager for a manufacturer. I was the guy that got to go solve the problems that others couldn’t solve. In the age when the Internet wasn’t commercial yet and email was truly store and forward. I got called to help the sales secretary with something – I don’t remember what. I do, however, remember being very frustrated and coming back to my boss at the time. He said something that has never left me. He said “Rob, you were trying to teach her why it worked and all she wanted to know was how to make it work.” For me, I really want to build the mental models that Gary Klein talks about in Sources of Power. I want to understand how the pieces work. However, many people just want to do whatever it is so they can get on with their “real” work. I can try to explain how something works – and the person I’m talking to doesn’t want to know.

The book starts by describing that people who don’t know much need to know “Why” and the more they know they cross over into wanting to know “how.” That isn’t new if you’ve ready about The Adult Learner. One of the clarifications that I believe is important – that the book leaves out – is that it’s just the “Why I care” and not “why it works that way”. Similarly, there’s the “How do I do it” – and not the “how it works.” For the most part, people don’t care how it works – or why it works that way these days.

The Art of Explanation also speaks of how you can’t really understand the trees until you’ve seen the forest. You have to have a context to place the idea in or you won’t be able to remember it. That’s one of the reasons why explanations are not facts. Facts exist without context. To be good at explaining, you have to provide some context.

Interestingly, Efficiency in Learning says that you should “Teach System Components before Teaching the Full Process.” (Guideline 13). This would seem to imply that teaching the trees before teaching the forest is appropriate, however, the kinds of information are different.

Consider the movie the Karate Kid. One could say that “Daniel” was taught karate through the fundamentals. However, there’s a difference. “Daniel” was motivated to work towards a goal. He understood the forest. He knew where he wanted to be. Once he had that vision and the desire to get there, he needed the fundamentals taught to him. In effect “Daniel” had already received the “Why” – he already cared because he didn’t want to be bullied any longer.

From a learning standpoint, he was taught the fundamental moves – and then he was taught (very quickly in movie-time) how to apply those fundamentals to the appropriate situation. This hints at another aspect that the book makes clear, through a quote from Robert McKee’s book Story. “Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.” This reminded me of my blog post Apprentice, Journeyman, Master. (In which I speak of another aspect of the Karate Kid movie.) In other words, we need to have a way to explain the basics. The rules. The foundation. Then we need to learn the principles behind the rules and know when to break the rules to stay in alignment with the principles.

Pervasive Information Architecture pointed out that we grasp the abstract through means of the concrete. That would seem to imply that we should provide concrete examples of everything – which is hard to do when explaining the forest, however, I believe they’re talking about two different points in the learning process. The first point is where the person doesn’t know why they need to know or why they care. (The learner’s need to know from The Adult Learner.) In most explanations the audience doesn’t know why they need to know – or at least they don’t know why precisely. They key point is to help folks see the broad environment when they’ll be working – before getting to the detailed specifics – the trees of the situation.

My point in raising potential objections to talking about the forest first is to show that they’re less about objections – and more about just slightly different views of the problem.

The Art of Explanation talks about how context is important – if content is king then context is the kingdom. The funny thing is that it also talks about recipes and the fact that they don’t need context. They’re designed specifically to be context-less. That’s actually the core idea behind the Shepherd’s Guide. It’s a set of recipes for getting things done with SharePoint. The context of the comments we read, the perspective they’re coming from is a core part of the message. The information that applies to one person in their situation – their context – can be completely inappropriate to another person in a different situation.

Thinking, Fast and Slow talked to the way that people think – and how we feel. The Art of Explanation makes the point that you want to help people get their mind into the story of what’s happening. You want them to feel the pain of the actor in the story. I know from my work writing marketing copy that only writing to the intellectual and rational doesn’t work. We need to speak to the elephant as well as the rider. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis.)

Then there is the curse of knowledge. That is, the more you know about something the harder it is to explain it to others. Of course Einstein said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” I think he was talking about the folks who like to pretend they know something but then can’t explain it – mostly the more you know about a subject the less that you can remember what it was like to know nothing. (Back to Thinking, Fast and Slow and what you see is all there is.)

Before getting to the concrete tips from the book (blended with my thoughts), I need to rewind one last time and talk about how the features of something aren’t equivalent to its utility. Diffusion of Innovations makes it clear that the consequences of an innovation are difficult to predict. Similarly, it’s hard to explain how a tablet will be used. Enumerating it’s weight and battery life don’t communicate to you that it’s a great consumption device for browsing the web and reading books – the features (lightweight and long battery life) don’t automatically convert to how someone can use it.

The Art of Explanation considers these the key components of a good explanation:

  • Context – The agreements and shared experiences we start with.
  • Story – The big ideas of the narrative.
  • Connections – Analogies and metaphors to connect the new concepts with what people already understand.
  • Descriptions – Details and benefits.
  • Conclusion – A summary of what was learned.

The book also talks about the different mediums and their suitability of differing explanations. I’ve adapted this information into table form.

Type Time to Produce Scanability Communicating Concepts Communicating Details Ease of Replication
Text (+) Quick (+) Scannable with appropriate headings (-) Difficult for people to see the forest for the trees (+) Because it can be reviewed, good for communicating details Excellent
Image / Graphic (-)Difficult to produce, sometimes require specialized skills (+) Can be scanned with relative ease due to the compression on to a single page (+) Good for communicating high-level concepts (-) Insufficient space and the large time to produce Good
Audio (-) Somewhat harder to produce, requires audio recording equipment and awareness about good quality levels (-) Audio cannot be scanned and search engines don’t index into the time when a word was said. (+) The ability to hear intonations in voice or other-non word audio can enhance the feeling and therefore the overall feel. (-) Lack of scanability and general retention of facts from audio will reduce usefulness for facts. Good
Video (-) Much harder to produce good video explanations. Requires equipment and skill. (-) Video cannot be scanned and search engines don’t index into the time when the word or concept was discussed. (+) Allows for audio, text, visuals, motion graphics, etc. Extremely good at allowing users to grasp concepts (-) Lack of scanability creates some level of challenge for communicating details. However, because of multi-modal communication (visual and auditory) it can be somewhat effective. Good
Live Demonstration (-) Preparation time can be large (-) Only the materials are potentially scanable. See comments for the type of materials (+) Interactivity allows you to adapt the message to the audience. (-) If backed up with written materials. Used to create AWARENESS and use other methods to create RETENTION. Bad

The Art of Explanation is a great book – if you want to learn how to explain things better.

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