Article: Seven Omissions That Will Doom Your SharePoint Launch

Robert Bogue September 6, 2012 No Comments

Review these steps to make sure your implementation meets your objectives and keeps all those involved happy as it evolves.

Sometimes it’s not the things you do that cause problems, but what you forget to do.

Miss a utility bill, and you might be trying to read in the dark. Miss a car payment, and you could end up walking to work.

Here are seven elements that, if missed, might doom your SharePoint implementation.

Define the goal

Sometimes we get so engrossed in our activities and projects that we forget to look at the horizon and set goals. It’s all too easy to succumb to the pressures of the daily deluge of information and just keep plodding along; however, that makes it difficult to define goals.

In implementing SharePoint, are you trying to get communications out quicker? Are you trying to increase the number of stories or reduce email? I’m sure you’d like all of these results, but what do you want—or need—most? You should remember the broader picture of why you’re putting forth any communication: Is it to improve employee engagement and/or efficiency?

Book Review-Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

Robert Bogue September 3, 2012 No Comments

One of the sad things about having read a few books at this point is that I can’t always recall what put me on to the book in the first place. While I can’t remember where I picked up on Redirect, it’s a book that took a winding path that challenged what I “knew” about psychology. I’ve seen this model before where the conventional wisdom is wrong. (See Efficiency in Learning) It’s great to find a research-based book that speaks about some of the common problems that humans face.

The central thesis of the book is that an approach that Timothy Wilson calls “Story Editing” is a powerful way to drive self-sustaining change. The idea of story editing is that we all have our own inner monologue going on at every moment. It’s this inner monologue that we try to bring our life in harmony with. If the inner monologue is positive and powerful – so shall we be. However, this story is often subtly influenced – and influenced in a negative way. Story editing is changing that core story (and the smaller stories that surround it) so that it is more positive.

To accept this you need to start with a belief that we can all change – that we’re not a fixed quantity but an infinitely expandable capacity for learning and growing. This was the central core of Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. Once you’ve accepted that you can change it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to realize that you can influence the direction in which you grow.

Redirect speaks of Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and its use in counseling to improve the outcomes by working directly on the way that people interpret the world around them. It’s all about that internal monologue and changing the bad patterns (e.g. “I’m not good enough”, “Bad things happen to me”, “I can’t do that”) into positive patterns (e.g. “I’ll get good enough with practice”, “Bad things happen to me but they help me become better”, “I can’t do that – now”). To some extent we all have these internal monologues – these tapes – playing in our head. CBT is generally regarded as an effective psychological treatment.

Of Chickens and Eggs

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? When we confronted by correlated data – such as chickens and eggs – we often consider which of them is causal. That is which one causes the other one. We know that chickens come from eggs – but if eggs come from chickens where did the first egg (or chicken) come from. (For more about correlation and causation see Thinking, Fast and Slow.) Sometimes we get the answers wrong – or backwards. So with that preface, does behavior lead or does thinking lead when we’re trying to change behavior?

It’s true that for the most part a person’s thinking and behaviors are aligned. Notwithstanding the internal conflict of the Elephant and the Rider (see The Happiness Hypothesis or Switch) most people will generally align their thinking and behaviors. Sometimes the behavior shifts to the thinking and sometimes the thinking shifts towards the behavior. (This is called rationalization – “It’s OK that I behave that way.”)

The answer, it turns out, to whether thinking or behavior leads is “sometimes.” (I realize this is a non-nonsensical answer.) In some cases changing the behavior will cause the thinking to change. In some cases you can’t change the behavior with the same thinking. Most of us would, however, say that thinking should precede behavior. In fact, that’s the standing assumption in the Diffusion of Innovations and the Knowledge-Attitude-Practice model. However, in some cases doing the behavior is the key to success.

By the way, eggs came first, they just weren’t chicken eggs. They were reptile eggs.

Heading to Happiness

It seems that every book has to take a crack at what happiness, and Redirect is no exception. In a bizarre sense of irony the book says “I have a wise friend who points out that whenever there are multiple solutions to one problem we can be pretty sure that none of them works.” While there’s some alignment about how to be happy, there are certainly a great number of different flavors. I’ve already reviewed The Happiness Hypothesis and Stumbling on Happiness – as just two books that speak about happiness. If you want to lose a day go to the self-help section in the bookstore and search for happiness.

One of the common threads to happiness is relationships. That is the more time that we spend in, with, and for our relationships the happier we are. Certainly this fits with our friends and our families – however, it is also can fit with the people we form relationships with while we’re volunteering and doing service to others (which as it turns out is a key in improving outcomes with teenagers.)

Another thread among the books is what Daniel Gilbert called the psychological immune system, which we were talking about rewiring above with CBT. Basically it’s the way that the internal monologue happens in your head. In Redirect, it’s framed in the context of how optimists see their world. It’s not that they don’t see reality; it’s that they believe that they can overcome the roadblocks in their path. They believe that they are not overwhelmed or crushed.

There are a few clues to being happier in the absence of making a new set of friends – which is recommended. One of the clues comes from the therapy of writing. The book opened with a discussion of how many police departments used a policy called Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) where people who have gone through traumatic incidents are asked to relive it. The problem is that this sort of forced approach can do more damage than good. What works better? Getting folks to write about their experiences a few weeks after the event –there is no expert guidance and no formal program. Just sit and write down feelings about the event.

It turns out that writing is therapy. That’s not just a saying. It’s not some vague concept. Writing about your thoughts is really therapeutic. The theory is that it allows you to integrate the world into the single worldview that you desire – but no matter how it works, it does work.

Before I go too much further, there’s another critical point to be made. That is that some folks have encouraged the use of gratitude journals where you write a list of things that you’re grateful for. For some reason these gratitude journals can backfire and can actually decrease a person’s happiness. One theory is that this process robs the positive moment of its mystery and that mystery is part of the fun. So writing is therapy – but not when you’re writing about how great things are.

The Inside Out and Upside Down

One of the crazy things about our brain – which I relearned from Redirect – is that in order to not think of something we must first think about it. If I tell you not to think about a white bear, you must first picture a white bear to exclude it from your mind. This means that it’s generally a bad idea to use the word not in a sentence because the inversion may be missed. The very thing that you are trying to drive folks away from may be what you drive them to.

Equally crazy is that a moderate warning is much more powerful than a strong one. In the presence of a strong motivator (to not do a bad thing) you’ll associate your behavior to the strong motivator. However, in the presence of a more moderate motivator, you’ll rewrite your internal monologue to indicate that you’re a fundamentally good person and you’ll do the right thing even when motivators are all gone. We aren’t trying to teach our children to behave when we’re present – we want them to behave all the time.

While finishing with motivators for behavior, social norms are incredibly powerful. If we believe that we’re using more energy than our neighbors we’ll start to conserve but if we perceive that we’re using less energy than our neighbors we may adjust our energy usage upwards to meet the perceived norm. This is powerful when you’re trying to create a better outcome for a small number of outliers doing more of a bad behavior than you want – and a caution to applying a norm to those who are doing less of the behavior.

It’s useful in that social norms are based on perception. If we believe that our friends are consuming more energy we’ll adjust our energy usage upwards – whether this is reality or not.

If you’re curious about commonsense that doesn’t really work, you’ll want to read Redirect.

Article: SharePoint or Point Solution – The Series

Robert Bogue August 24, 2012 No Comments

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had a series of blog posts on the Colligo blog about whether you should consider a “point solution” or SharePoint. The entire series is now posted:

Check out the whole series.

Book Review-Thinking, Fast and Slow

Robert Bogue August 21, 2012 No Comments

In Boston at SPTechCon, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote titled “SharePoint Psychology”. After that Jeremy Thake and I were talking about the keynote and he mentioned that to him many of the concepts were familiar. He traced his thoughts back to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Having not read the book I put it in my queue to read. Knowing that Jeremy aligned it to my previous reading and works, I decided to prioritize reading it. There are a few important bits about the author and the book before I start to review the contents.

First, the author is the winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. There is certainly sufficient information in the book to support this. While it is at its core a psychology book, there’s a great deal of the focus which is on how people work in an economy and how the rational behavior model isn’t sufficient to describe human behavior.

Second, the book is 512 pages. It’s not the short, mind-candy, reading of Who Moved My Cheese. It’s the same length as the Diffusion of Innovations book I recently reviewed. My notes for the book (the process I use is outlined here) are 25 pages in length. Needless to say this is a short summary of what I got from the book – no matter how long it may seem.

With that out of the way, I think Jeremy is right. The undertones and overtones of Thinking, Fast and Slow are woven through out other books that I’ve read like Demand, The Happiness Hypothesis, Switch, Sources of Power, Finding Flow, and Social Engineering. In fact many of the authors are quoted in Thinking, Fast and Slow and Gary Klein – the author of Sources of Power – was a reported one time collaborator of Daniel Kahneman’s for a while though they approach decisions from opposite sides of the table.

Of Two Minds

When folks say they’re of two minds about something perhaps they’re exposing their inner conflict or perhaps they’re showing you a glimpse of how they think. Kahneman proposes a model where we have two different but interrelated systems for processing information. System 1 is the automatic and rather mindless operating mode that we find ourselves in daily. It’s the threat management engine that watches for urgent threats to us and in its constant vigilance it is called upon to make very complex assessments with relatively little information. This mode of operating – this system – is designed to jump to conclusions without realizing how far it has jumped.

The other system, called System 2 throughout the book, is the deliberate processing of information. This system is “in control” in that its answers are generally the more thoughtful ones and the ones which tend to be more accurate – except when it collaborates with System 1. System 2 is lazy. Honestly trying to keep our brains actively engaged in thinking about every little thing will drive us crazy. So it’s important that System 2 be lazy, to ensure that it’s not left on too long. The collusion between System 1 and System 2 happens when System 2 doesn’t bother to check the facts for the assumptions it got from System 1. System 2 in its laziness will just assume that System 1’s information was accurate – or at least it will accept System 1’s assessment of how accurate the information is. The problem is that System 1 – our automatic operating mode – isn’t designed to assess the accuracy of the information. It’s designed to create coherent stories that it can base evaluations on.

I’ve often said that I construct mental models for people I meet – based on Myers-Briggs and others. I then run a mental simulation of how I believe they’ll react to information and how I believe they’ll behave (Sources of Power talks about mental simulations). This is my way of leveraging a coherent story about a person that I’ve made up – to be clear it’s made up. However, some folks (Chris Riley for instance) are amused by the fact that I can get pretty close pretty quickly. For me, most of this process is automatic. I’m building on the automatic capabilities of System 1 to do on-the-fly assessments and then trying to leverage them in a quasi-conscious way.

Before we leave the idea of two minds, I’ve got to be clear that the personification of the two systems allows them to be more clearly understood, Kahneman was clear that his academic colleagues would object to this. From my point of view I believe it’s eminently helpful in creating understand.

Jump to Conclusions, Please

One of my favorite Emerson quotes is “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The key word is foolish. Our automatic mode of processing information is ever vigilant for information that matches its conception of the world and integrating information that’s consistent with our view of the world. In essence, System 1 is in place in part to keep a single unified model of the world that it can use to predict situations quickly. System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions. It is designed to predict that a red light will come after a yellow one – and it’s designed to do this very quickly. It’s designed to determine when to engage System 2 and when to continue to operate on the mental model that it has created.

System 1 operates with heuristics. That is to say that it uses rules of thumb to operate. It assumes that all things will be the way they normally are. This plus a vigilant observation for items which violate the expectations is very effective as an operating mode. Where problems occur is when the heuristics that are being applied by System 1 are wrong or inaccurate. It takes careful analysis to determine why an operating mode may not be right – and most of the time System 2 doesn’t get the message that it’s needed.

I wrote a blog post about the Apprentice, Journeyman, Master journey that we use to train in industries where tacit knowledge is the lingua franca. What I failed to mention in my post was that apprentices are assigned simple tasks which don’t require much global knowledge, just a few basic local skills. Journeyman are taught to use “rules of thumb” or heuristics to do their slightly more complicated and global understanding dependent work. Masters can use the “rules of thumb” but their expertise is in knowing when they don’t apply or they don’t have to apply. In a trade the master is, hopefully, constantly looking over the shoulder of the journeyman and the apprentice – noticing when they’re not executing a skill correctly, or when they’re incorrectly using a “rule of thumb” where it shouldn’t be used. Of course, if the master it is busy it’s possible he’ll miss something critical that he should have stopped.

This is the problem of System 2. Being lazy, System 2 by default it will rarely (if ever) check the work of System 1. As a result, System 1 applies the wrong heuristic or applies the right heuristic too broadly. This leads to a systemic bias – and this is often the way that we go wrong. Consider the situation where System 1 quickly substitutes a difficult problem to solve with an easier problem – and doesn’t even tell System 2 what is going on. One of the quoted studies asked students about the number of dates they had in the last six weeks and then asked them how happy they were. These two answers had a very high degree of correlation – so the students substituted how happy am I with my love life for the question of how happy am I, in general, without notifying System 2 that the substitution had been done.

I mentioned in my review of both Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis about the Elephant, Rider, and Path. I believe System 1 describes the Elephant well, mostly in control. System 2 is the rider. He believes himself to be in control but really is subject to the elephant much more than he realizes. The elephant and the rider are even more concrete ways to see the model Kahneman proposes with System 1 and System 2.

WYSIATI

One of the recurring themes in the book is What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). This is a bias that you’ll develop that the entire world is similar to what you’ve seen. For me, I see this bias most prominently with folks who never travel. They may know that China is different from Illinois abstractly but they don’t understand the extent of the differences. If you pull four red marbles and a single white marble from a pot, you’ll automatically make the assumption that the pot contains 80% red marbles when you haven’t pulled enough marbles to really know. This WYSIATI makes us believe extremes. Whatever we see at the moment we believe will continue forever.

Babies when they’re developing cry when their mother leaves the room because for them their mother is gone forever. It’s difficult for them to realize that people will come back. Whatever they can see is all there is. If they’re in a room alone there is no one else in their world. It takes time for them to be able to realize that what they’re experiencing (or not experiencing) at the moment will not last forever. (I want to attribute the preceding to Brain Rules, but I can’t be sure.) In Thinking, Fast and Slow there’s an interesting discussion about how people experience their world and how they remember it. If you offer students 60 seconds of their hand in cold water or 60 seconds in cold water followed by 30 seconds of slightly less cold (but still painful) water they’ll pick the 90 seconds. It seems that the way that we perceive time and pain is different than how we remember it. So it’s no wonder that we believe that WYSIATI. For most animals – including young humans – remembering something that’s out of sight is difficult.

How We Learn

I mentioned above that our automatic system (System 1) is always running, always trying to integrate information into a mental model that will allow it to predict events – particularly negative events. I have mentioned a few times in previous blog posts, the work of Marcia Bates where she asserts that 80% of the information that we learn comes to us from undirected and passive behavior. That is to say that are learning – and integrating that learning – all the time. We don’t have to be actively pursuing specific information (which by the way Bates estimates at 1% of our overall learning).

I recently had an opportunity to see this in action. During a road trip my wife was working on a puzzle book. The page she was on was one where the answer was two words the first word beginning in the letter E and the second word ending in the letter E. She turned to me and asked me for the nickname for Ireland. After an incredibly brief pause I answered Emerald Isle. This startled me. I don’t ever remember studying Ireland. I don’t anticipate that this was ever anything that I consciously was aware of knowing and yet after a microseconds’ search of my entire library of experiences I was lead to the answer. This isn’t good for those in the business of training and development including me.

Kahneman diverts his attention to speaking of expertise and outlines how we learn well from high-validity environments – that is places where there is a true causal chain and when feedback happens regularly and reliably. We’ve all gone to a hotel and struggled to get the water temperature right for a shower because we have to wait some period of time before our adjustment in the controls results in the final adjustment to the water coming out. The longer the gap between feedback and the less clarity to the feedback the less likely we’re going to learn well. We need reliable feedback in order to make adjustments.

One caution is that we sometimes see patterns where none exist. We are too eager to assign a pattern to the random. We’re equally likely to confuse correlation with causation. That is to say that just because two variables seem to be related we may choose to believe that one of the variables causes the other. The most poignant example for this to me is the housing bubble in the US. One of the factors was the decision to encourage home ownership. This was due to the fact that economic stability and home ownership were shown to be correlated. The error was in the belief that home ownership caused economic stability (instead of perhaps the other way around.) As a result, policies were enacted both explicitly and implicitly that led to many more folks owning homes than previously. When the economy sputtered and the housing market crashed numerous home owners defaulted on their loans taking out a significant part of the financial industry and setting off alarm bells. The belief that home ownership caused the desirable state of economic stability created a policy that lead (in part) to the collapse. These policies created artificial home ownership in a group of folks who were not able to maintain them. This was a costly misstep on the road to learning.

In my world it’s interesting to speak of experts – those who have reportedly learned a great deal about a topic. It’s interesting because of my work with certification exams and training where we establish a baseline that is typically quite low across a broad set of skills. Candidates that pass the certification exam have shown reasonable competence across the skills measured by the test. Even here, however, some candidates have extremely good skills in one area and missing skills in other areas. It’s a balance to ensure that there’s a baseline set of skills to support the designation earned through the certification.

So called Experts are even more diverse in their skills. Some who would consider themselves to be an architect are great at the IT Pro side of things and lousy at the development side of things – or vice versa. Kahneman offers a simple explanation. Expertise isn’t a single thing. It’s a collection of mini-skills. That is a set of skills that overlap and build on one another. It’s completely possible to be an expert and to have areas of missing skills. That’s because they never built those skills – but those mini-skills as a total percentage of the area of practice are relatively small. For instance, I’ve never worked with multi-tenant environments in SharePoint. It’s a skill set that I’ve never developed. Does that mean that I’m not an expert? No, it just means I’ve got more to learn when the opportunity arises.

Kahneman points out that even experts with experience and skills can often produce bad results unintentionally. He relates a project where an expert was brought in to be a part of the group. One of the exercises was to estimate the remaining time on the project. Everyone on the project produced similar estimates around a two year estimate – including the embedded expert. However, when the expert was questioned about other projects similar to this one the result was a completely different – seven year – answer. The expert had the requisite knowledge but it wasn’t integrated to a single thinking. Kahneman refers to this as an inside view (the first estimate) and an outside view (the second estimate). Sometimes we have the knowledge and experience that is necessary to realize the folly that we are on but we remain ignorant of our delusion.

Humorously, Kahneman points out that even when taught extensively, students don’t always apply what they learn of human psychology. It seems that we may be caught in the same trap described in Diffusion of Innovation where we the progression between knowledge, attitudes, and practices isn’t linear. We can intellectually be aware of information and at the same time not use it to influence our behavior. We continue to see the illusion even after we know it is an illusion.

As a sidebar here, it occurs to me that reflection time is absolutely critical for the ability to identify when a delusion is happening. I think of all of the times that I’ve been on delusional trips and I realize that they’re caused in part because of a lack of reflection time on my part. I fill my “me time” with a desire to read more or to do more. As a result, I reflect less and end up allowing delusions to continue to the point where they can no longer be supported. If you’re trying to ensure that you’re not being delusional in any aspect of your life, make sure that you have time to reflect. I believe it’s this reflection time that allows you to build the connections that System 1 needs to leverage the information in the moment. I mentioned above that I’ve got a process for reading books. However, I didn’t say that I spend a lot of time capturing the notes, copying them and refining them into notes. I spend even more time on blog posts like this one trying to understand what I got from the book and to connect it to the other things that I’ve learned from other readings and experiences. (While this is a labor of love – or at least passion, it is still a labor.)

When Gary Klein was studying fire commanders for the research that eventually found its way into Sources of Power, he rejected intuition. There had to be a reason. However, time-after-time fire commanders said it just “felt wrong.” Intuition is just subconscious recognition. In the case of the fire commanders it could have been a violated expectancy or it could have been an opportunity that others would have missed because of the recognition of a pattern. So if intuition is simply recognition at a subconscious level, shouldn’t we be able to encourage the incorporation of experiences into our thinking to make them available not as a carefully considered variable but as a part of our automatic operating system, System 1?

To understand how to integrate our experiences, I want to rewind and connect some learning from Lost Knowledge. This title was focused around the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge – or holding on to tacit knowledge as much as possible. The problem with tacit knowledge – and the experts that hold it is that expertise is notoriously fickle. Give the same expert the same evidence twice and you’re likely to get two different answers. Kahneman speaks about judges whose case reviews for parole would vary based on the time of day that they saw them (and by extension their blood sugar level). To eliminate the unseen biases that influence an expert, we need to pull up the key criteria that they’re subconsciously using.

Ultimately, the conversion of tacit information into explicit information is about the identification of the specific attributes and characteristics that influence the situation. From there it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to getting to a formula that can be used to create a quick assessment of a situation given a relatively complex situation. The process of converting tacit into explicit information is the process of converting intuition into a repeatable formula. That isn’t to say that the process will be easy nor that everyone will like it. Ashenfelter converted the tacit knowledge about the impact of weather to the value of wine in the future. His algorithm has a 90% correlation to the price of wine in the future but wine connoisseurs were quite unhappy about this. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still the right thing to do. It converted what the industry implicitly knew into a very repeatable formula – which is a good thing.

The Specifics

In parting I’d love to leave with the specific heuristics, biases, and effects mentioned in the book (along with a few that were just related thoughts) and my own definitions for them.

Heuristics

Availability Heuristic – We believe that things which are easier for us to retrieve in our minds are more frequent.
Affect Heuristic – Your likes and dislikes sway your perception of the entire system. If you like the benefits of a technology, you’ll deemphasize the risks.

Biases

Imaginability Bias – We assess the frequency of a class of events based on the retrievability of a few instances (See Availability Heuristic)
Hindsight Bias (“I knew it all along” effect) – We believe that we remember our past well, however, our memories are subject to reevaluation when we learn something new. We tend to believe that our previous perceptions match our current perceptions.
Confirmation Bias [From Sources of Power]– We tend to seek and be aware of information that confirms our position rather than refutes it.

Effects

Priming Effect – The effect of priming someone with some information to cause a temporary bias in responses. Sales people are taught to get their prospects saying ‘Yes’ to lead them to say yes when asked if they want to buy.
Halo Effect – The tendency to view all aspects of a person favorably or disfavorably based on a very narrow interaction. Consider your perceptions of a person that was volunteering with a cause you liked. You’re more likely to believe that person is good – with insufficient background.
Framing Effect – A decision can be framed (presented) in a way more likely to lead to one outcome over another. Consider a discount for cash or a surcharge for credit. One will cause a negative emotional reaction (surcharge for credit). The framing will drive behavior towards paying with cash.
Exposure Effect – If we’re exposed to something – even briefly and unconsciously – it will have an impact on us. (See Subliminal stimuli @ Wikipedia)
Illusory Correlation Effect – The impact of randomly occurring stimuli being erroneously correlated in a person’s mind.
Ego-Depleted Effect – In sugar deprived situations the increased tendency to make intuitive errors. i.e. System 2 doesn’t get engaged.
Anchoring Effect – The effect of presenting a person with an initial value from which they will adjust their perception. Adjustments are frequently insufficient and therefore anchoring creates bias in the perception of the person.
Above Average Effect – The belief, with moderate skill, that the person has above average skill. E.g. 90% of the people believe they’re above-average drivers.
Endowment Effect – The resistance of a person to trade something that they have. Possessions have a higher value than what would be paid to acquire them. Exceptions are those items held “for exchange” like money.
Possibility Effect – The tendency of people to weight small possibilities with more weight than would be statistically appropriate.
Certainty Effect – The tendency for people to weight certainty with greater emphasis than it should be when compared to a near certainty.
Disposition Effect – The bias in investments to sell winning stocks when compared to loosing stocks.
Polarization Effect [from Unknown] – The tendency to be prone to one result or the other and not a moderated answer. A bias away from indifference.

So Read It Already

If you’ve managed to plow your way through to this point in the post… You need to pickup – and read – Thinking, Fast and Slow.

EweTube Galore – 116 Videos for SharePoint 2007 uploaded

Robert Bogue August 13, 2012 No Comments

Over the last few days we’ve uploaded the SharePoint 2007 videos to YouTube (Or is it EweTube?) to make them easier to find. You can check out my channel to see the complete list. Of course, the entire corporate license including videos is available for free on the Shepherd site. I think it’s a better experience because you get both the text and the video on the same page – but if you’re on YouTube looking for SharePoint content, the uploads there will be more findable.

Enjoy

SharePoint or Point Solution: The Need for Point Solutions – Part 1

Robert Bogue August 8, 2012 No Comments

I’m doing a series of blog posts on the Colligo blog. The first installment is live… here’s the first paragraph:

When you go through the process of implementing a core system (e.g. ERP system) for your business, you assume this system can meet all of your needs, but rarely does the implementation in your organization match the utopia you hope for. In this first of a series of three blog posts, we’re going to compare the benefits of purchasing a series of so called “point solutions” to tack on to the core system – or whether SharePoint may be the right answer for your situation.

Our first stop on this journey is exploring the need for point solutions. We’re going to explore the causes for core systems not meeting every need. We’ll also explorer how to identify where the gaps are in what your core system does today.

Resizing an Artboard in Adobe Illustrator for Transparent PowerPoint Backgrounds

Robert Bogue August 6, 2012 19 Comments

Many moons ago in a land far away I created a process to get transparent backgrounds from slides so I could import them into Sony Vegas. This is something that people in the forums are still trying to figure out. However, I’ve run into some problems along the way.

From a batching perspective, which was what I was after, I forgot to mention last time that I’d do a Save As in PowerPoint and select EMF. I’d then answer that I wanted to export every slide. This would create a folder with each slide as a separate file named slide1.emf through however many slides I had.

On the Illustrator side, I perpetually forget how to do the batch operation. I have to open the Actions Window. I’d record the Export to PSD operation. This was as simple as creating the action turning on recording and doing an Export from the File menu. Once the action as created, I could use the batch operation in the menu at the upper right hand corner of the Actions menu to run an action on a set of files in a directory. The batch menu allowed me to select the directory for the source and a place to override the exports. With this I’d leave Illustrator running for a few minutes and I’d have my slides saved as PSD files – with transparency that Vegas could read. CS 6 now even lets me put that window in the background – previous versions required that I leave Illustrator as the application with the focus.

That all works good – except when I get errors exporting the files – I’ll either get "Photoshop file could not be saved" when I’m working from a source Illustrator (AI) file or more frequently in my scenario "Unable to export at this resolution. Please lower the resolution and try again." Of course, lowering the resolution didn’t help. As part of the debugging process I decided that I wanted to see if I changed the artboard size in Illustrator to match the slide if that would help. One would think this is easy, in fact there’s a menu option for it:

Yea, that option doesn’t record in an action (although it can be added manually through the menu in the upper right of Actions with Insert Menu Item (which raises a dialog that’s not a dialog). However, that won’t help because the Fit to Artwork Bounds option only works if the artboard is larger than the current art. If it’s not (as in my case I get an error message)

Arg. The funny part is that the error message is a red herring. It’s non-sense. It just won’t expand the artboard to fit the artwork.

I was looking for other options and ultimately stumbled on some script that didn’t work. It showed me one of the reasons I really hate JavaScript debugging:

If you do some digging, you’ll find that this error means that "Illustrator doesn’t like you. Please go away and never come back." There might be some error in translation but it’s pretty close. (Ok, it really means there was a parameter that was out of bounds.) However, I did eventually find a script that would work after some serious tinkering. Here’s what works:

#target Illustrator
function PowerPointArtBoard()
{
if (app.documents.length > 0)
{
var activeDoc = app.activeDocument;
var pageItemsCount = activeDoc.pageItems.length;
if (pageItemsCount>=1)
{
var artBoard = activeDoc.artboards[0];
var bounds = [-55, 665,665,125];
var artboards = activeDoc.artboards;
var newArtBoard = artboards.add(bounds);
artBoard.remove();
}
else
{
alert("there is no art in the active document");
}
}
else
{
alert ("there are no open documents");
}
}
PowerPointArtBoard();

To use it you run the Adobe ExtendScript toolkit and then save the resulting file into C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS6 (64 Bit)\Presets\en_US\Scripts. (Obviously check the path for version number and for the language you have installed.) Once you have installed this you can relaunch Illustrator and the script name (minus the extension) will show up in the File-Scripting menu. With that you can use the Actions-Insert Menu Item above as a part of your Action. This means you can change the artboard before your save/export.

Astute observers will realize that the bounds for the artboard are hardcoded. Yes they are. They’re designed to create the right artboard size for a PowerPoint .EMF export. I tried every form of figuring out how to get Illustrator to create the correct bounding box and realized that the scale was wrong. I decided that I didn’t care for my purposes. Ultimately, this approach will ensure that I get the right bounding box even if I don’t put the transparent box around the slide (as I indicated I was doing in the last post.)

Really insightful observers will realize that I’m creating a new artboard and then deleting the original. Yea, Illustrator doesn’t let you change the rectangle of the artboard programmatically. So this approach works since it makes the new artboard with the right dimensions the default artboard.

For the moment this creates a work around for the issue with illustrator not saving… I can go into Photoshop and open the Illustrator file and have Photoshop do the conversion. The major issue with this approach is that Photoshop doesn’t have a way to do batch operations so I have to do these imports/saves by hand. At least I can get the files into a transparent background Photoshop without having to manually remove the background.

Book Review-Fascinate

Robert Bogue July 30, 2012 1 Comment

As I mentioned in my last post about my experience with the National Speakers Association (NSA) that one of the speakers was Sally Hogshead. Sally convinced me, among other things, to buy her book Fascinate. But before I get to the book, I should explain how things worked at the conference and what caused me to buy – and read the book.

So Sally got a vignette. It was a small sliver of time between different parts of the program and the sliver of time introduced her fundamental beliefs around fascination and offered the attendees at the conference the ability to take a personality test for free. In a room full of speakers this was all we needed to spring into action. I literally took the test on the floor moments after Sally left the stage.

I found out the next day – in her regularly scheduled time — that I was far from being alone. It seems that numerous people had taken Sally up on her offer and she had a whole set of data from professional speakers. And in Sally’s words the results were “statistically significant” – that is to say the difference between all of the folks who had taken the tests and between all of the speakers who had taken the tests were very different. She didn’t provide the slides and I wasn’t quick enough to copy all the results but I can say that the distributions were not remotely close. My memory, which may be faulty, is that the results of the tests showed a strong bias towards prestige and power – and away from trust. Speaking as someone who scored with both mystique and rebellion – there were healthy doses of those characteristics as well, but I’m a bit ahead of myself. Let’s work backwards a bit.

The story gets a bit interesting. Sally Hogshead has a long history in marketing. That is a place she’s been quite successful. The book, Fascinate, was born out of her perspective on marketing. It was and is a book on marketing. However, somewhere along the line she realized that the core insight she had into humans was more valuable when applied to individuals than applied to marketing – or at least as interesting as the implication in marketing.

She identified seven triggers – seven ways that we express our ability to fascinate. They are: (The descriptions are mine)

Passion – Creating a craving in another person.
Trust – Fascination through comfort. You’re reliable and dependable which helps them to be at ease.
Mystique – You create curiosity about you and your message.
Prestige – You are a person to envy. You make other covet what you have and who you are.
Power – You encourage others to follow you; to allow you to control them.
Alarm – This is the siren of urgency. You trigger folks to act quickly.
Rebellion – You encourage folks to view the world differently; to rebel from the status quo.

Before I leave this I need to do a bit of reconciliation. The book speaks of passion as lust and of rebellion as vice. You can see Sally explain the differences here.

Basically after the test you’ll find out which of these techniques you use most often. There will be a primary trigger and a secondary trigger. You’ll also get a response with your dormant trigger – which is basically the approach you use least often. (In my case power.) I already mentioned that I’m mystique and rebellion – those intersect into an archetype. The 7×7 matrix leads to 49 different archetypes which you can read about on the HowToFacinate.com site. But I should get back to the book.

At its core the book is a marketing book. It exposes a way to look at marketing a product, a service, or a brand. There are components of this puzzle I’ve seen shadows of before in Demand. Fascinate offers a different approach focused around building your own formula with the seven triggers. While there’s scant information on how to precisely mix these triggers to create your own formula, the fact that there is greater definition of the triggers and how they work means that you’ll be able – if you want – to build your own map for how to put the pieces together.

I believe that the framework here is already been more helpful in my considerations for how I’m going to brand and market. Admittedly I’m struggling with making the content work for me – but I believe that has more to do with my struggles with marketing in general than the content of the book. If you’re trying to figure out “what you want to be when you grow up” – or who – it’s a good book to learn more about the model – and yourself. Pick up the book and Fascinate yourself.

My Experience with the National Speakers Association – thus far

Robert Bogue July 28, 2012 No Comments

When I joined the National Speakers Association and attended the conference I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t fundamentally view my world as if I’m a speaker. I don’t believe that my primary calling in life is to keynote conferences. However, when I reviewed my speaking last year, I realized that I was in front of crowds publicly about 50 times. Effectively I was in front of a crowd for an hour every week of the year. That isn’t the distribution of the talks, they come in clusters where I’ll speak four times in two days as was the case at SPTechCon in Boston last week. (My first keynote was fun as I got to involve my son.)

However, while I get paid to speak, I certainly don’t get the stratospheric speaking fees that some notable speakers get. I’d love to get Bill Clinton’s speaking fees, or Michael Jordan, etc. Given that many of my talks are for SharePoint Users Groups where I get paid in pizza and the occasional gas card, I certainly don’t get paid in a meaningful way for every talk I give. I do, however, enjoy sharing, as those who have seen my talks can attest. So going to a group whose mission is to help professional speakers become better was at least a little bit intimidating.

Luckily the NSA has a program – the buddy program – run by Michael Goldberg which pairs experienced conference goers with first timers. My buddy was Karen Jacobsen. It worked out great since the conference was in Indianapolis – my home town – and so I was able to provide some ground transportation and some suggestions for things for Karen and her son to see and she was able to introduce me to her friends in the NSA. Karen hails out of New York so I got to meet many of the New York chapter of the NSA’s active members. It was great to meet so many helpful and friendly people.

So between the introductions from Karen, the first timers reception, and the fact that the conference was in my home town, I was about as comfortable as I could be in a new environment. Because of that I could turn my observations up to 11 and really try to figure out what was going on.

Perhaps the most striking observation is that no two people seem to do their business the same way. Some of the presentations preached focus in what you do (Peter Sheahan) while others (Connie Podesta) preached generalization. The odd thing is that everyone who was on the platform seems to find a way to make their business successful. It was truly interesting to me to see some folks who swore by having additional products and others who had no use for them, deferring to additional consulting, coaching, training, or mentoring opportunities to drive their revenue engine.

Off the platform I met a wide range of folks. Some were “starving artists” who weren’t sure what they were going to be when they grew up and were clearly not making it in the speaking business. (I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up either.) Others were looking for contacts – I’ve gotten a call or two already. Others were successful in their business and were looking to become better – or to share what they’ve learned. I met someone displaced by the financial industry downturn and someone who does forensic engineering. It was definitely a cornucopia of different folks who were available to meet.

The presentations were some of the most amazing I’ve seen. Robert Fishbone launched the conference with the assistance of the drum line from Center Grove High School. He had everyone standing and “shaking their booty” – and absolutely fired up to be a part of the conference. Jeanne Robertson‘s talk was a delightful mix of Aunt Bee and Lucille Ball. I can say I’ve never seen anyone execute with such precision. Her stories were entertaining and funny. Her stage presence was flawless. My improvisation course taught me the importance of establishing the place for everything on stage – and I saw her execute that with mastery. I should say that all of the main room speakers (and all but two of the breakouts) were very compelling – so the fact that I’m not calling out others shouldn’t diminish their value – it’s just these were completely over the top. (One short note, Sally Hogshead is getting her own post as a part of my book review of her book Fascinate.)

I can say that I used some of what I’ve learned already. Brad Montgomery suggested using the audience to move you from one point to the next. His idea was to find someone in the audience and ask them to help. At a key point they would ask the obvious question – or at least it would be obvious that they were setup to do the question. I adapted this to have my son ask a prompting question from one topic to the next in my keynote which was met with applause – for him.

I’m also looking forward to the connections I made. Roger Courville and I are scheduled to speak next week – so I can learn more about his experience with the training market – and his thoughts on how I can capitalize on the things I’m already doing. (Roger is an expert in virtual presentations.)

Ultimately I’ll be sifting through the presentations and notes I took for weeks if not months trying to filter down the fountain of information I got into the pieces that are uniquely applicable to me.

I should also say that the benefits of the membership, including the Voices of Experience (VOE) CD (seriously, this needs to be a private podcast) has already been valuable. I believe I’ll be making special participation coins to give to the audiences where I’ve spoken – and where folks have participated. I’ve got some big ideas spurred on by a VOE talk.

It’s been a good ride thus far with the organization and I’m excited to see where the journey leads next.

Book Review-Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t

Robert Bogue July 27, 2012 No Comments

I had read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t by Jim Collins years ago but I decided to re-read it because for whatever reason when I read it the last time, I didn’t have any memorable pull quotes – I didn’t have anything specific I could say I got from it. That may seem like an odd reason to reread a book – and it is. I knew there was some wisdom here that I just couldn’t put my fingers on. I decided to apply my new approach to reading and researching to the book. (See my post “Research in the Age of Electrons“.)

One of the challenges with the Good to Great book – and I believe why I had trouble identifying specific call outs, is that it’s focused on large organizations. My organizations don’t classify as large. With only myself as an employee and with a handful of contractors – the kinds of pressures that large organizations face are just not the same ones that I face in my organizations. However, that being said many of my clients are large organizations and many of those large organizations are struggling with greatness.

The core of the book is looking for common characteristics of organizations that were able to sustain better than market performance (3x) for a long time (fifteen years). Along the way there were some pretty interesting observations including the fact that CEOs coming in from the outside were negatively correlated with greatness.

Perhaps what intrigued me the most during this rereading was the idea that motivation, alignment, and commitment seem to happen magically if you can determine the one central mission of the organization and get the organization started on that path. Ultimately the book calls the one thing the hedgehog concept, a simplification of what the leader or organization is passionate about, what they can be the best at the world at, and what drives the economic engine. The idea is that we’re all off chasing distractions and those distractions rob us of the power we need to be truly great.

I was struck by the ability for organizations to be able to focus on the key things and ignore the rest. Even in the description of the process Collins refers to “dogs that did not bark” which comes from a Sherlock Holmes story. However, it reminded me of Sources of Power by Gary Klein and more specifically about the idea that experts make decisions by seeing the critical elements and establishing expectancies. When those expectancies are violated they know they need to reevaluate.

I was also struck by the dichotomy that the book calls the Stockdale Paradox – “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” The knowledge that you’ll reach your goal – not on the timeline you want – and only after you face reality.

One of the key messages – and speaking as someone who continues to try to find the right people is very difficult – is getting the right people on the bus. That is, getting the right people onboard with the company – and then figuring out where the organization is going.

It didn’t escape me that much of what the book talks about is subtle. The difference between a vision and the singular focus of a hedgehog concept is hard to see. The difference between respectful disagreement and scientific inquiry compared to a more typical meeting is difficult to diagnose. The short of it is that you have to know what you’re looking for – and that can be tricky.

As I’m considering what friction exists for motivation, Good to Great offered some great insight for me, perhaps it can for you too.

Public Speaking