Understanding Nothing

This entire debate is well worth a read…

Many Members who have spoken today have expressed concern about the civil liberties aspect of the Bill. I propose to ignore that and to deal with what concerns me, as a practical Yorkshireman – namely, the practical and political issues. This Bill is unnecessary. It sets up a system that will not work, will not achieve its stated objectives and will cost us a fortune. Apart from that, there is nothing much wrong with it. …

Like the dome, identity cards seemed like a good idea at the time, but the dome has proved to be disastrous. I suppose that that is how things work in a presidential system. The source of such ideas is Downing street, where the Prime Minister is surrounded by a heavenly nimbus of cherub geniuses, fluttering in the blue skies that always hover over Downing street. Up comes an idea, lights flash, thunder rolls and the idea is unveiled to an excited world. “I know”, they say, “Let’s have identity cards. It’s a big measure that shows that the Government are active. It will appeal to the police and the Home Office.” Of course, the police and the Home Office are obsessed with people control. Indeed, they would implant all children with chips at birth if they could.

Such ideas appeal to Home Secretaries, who have a career to think of, after all, and who want to be promoted out of being Home Secretary so that they do not have to face such issues any more. Now that we have the idea, all that we need is a problem for it to solve. That is where the doubts begin.

– Austin Mitchell

It is true that some years ago, when considering the terrorist problem in Ulster, I suggested that identity cards might be helpful, but I was persuaded by the powerful argument of the security forces to the effect that – contrary to what the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) said – any benefits that they would derive in terms of combating IRA terrorism would be greatly offset by the problems they would face in enforcing compliance were a minority of the community to resist the use of ID cards. That is a problem that we may well face if we try to introduce this measure, particularly given that – as we now know, and as the Government acknowledge – its principal purpose is to deal with unlawful terrorism. That is certainly the principal demand of the public.

The general public mistakenly believe that most members of ethnic minorities are immigrants, which is not true- of course, most of them were born here and have British nationality – and that most immigrants came here illegally, which is not true either: most came here legally. The general public therefore believe that the police need to have the power to compel people to have these cards about their person at all times, and to have the right to stop and question anyone who looks or sounds foreign, in order to get them to justify their presence in this country. I find that abhorrent, and I am astonished that that there is any Member in this House who does not find it abhorrent that our fellow citizens, just because they are a different colour or have a different accent, could be constantly required by the police – and will be, ineluctably, if this measure is on the statute book – to justify their presence in this country, simply to satisfy the mistaken belief on the part of many people that such a requirement will help to control illegal immigration, which it will not.

This is a fundamental change in the relationship between the citizen and the state. Such a change has only ever been introduced in countries that had authoritarian, fascist or communist Governments. It has never been introduced in a country with a common-law system, and I hope that we will not set the appalling example of adopting that system here today.

– Peter Lilley, Commons Debate on ID cards, 28 June

(The wonderful reasons why the DUP are opposing this bill, even though they believe in ID cards, can be found further up the page!)

Playing with del.icio.us yesterday, I came across the popular post “Six Ways on Getting More Done each day”. I certainly hope its popularity isn’t a sign that people are going to follow its ideals.

1. Focus high importance tasks first

“If you are choosing to watch TV over completing your project that is due tomorrow, you are definitely getting your priority wrong.” Actually if you’re unable to watch TV because you haven’t yet finished a project that’s due tomorrow, then you have a bigger problem. Granted, that problem might be that you work in an organisation that doesn’t give you enough time to do your job, but working late into the night to show actually you can finish things on an impossible deadline isn’t really going to help with that problem long term. Probably just the opposite. But assuming you had enough time to do the project in the first place, then why aren’t you finished yet? If it’s life quality you’re after, then being finished with time to spare wins by quite some margin every time. Kathy Sierra had an interesting post a few days ago about how people can’t be afraid and rational simultaneously. The fear of not getting a project finished on time is a very good way of making sure that the project isn’t actually done as well as it could be. When this happens most people tend to blame it on just not having had enough time to do it well. Kathy’s post made me realise that it’s not the lack of time, per se, so much as the inability to use that last minute time as well as normal.

2. Work smarter

Now, everyone knows that I’m a major proponent of *that*. But I’ve refined my approach quite considerably over time. These days I rarely think that it’s a net win to try to completely automate away something you do. Certainly not before you’ve even tried to do it. The amount of effort involved in doing this is almost always going to be greater than in just doing the task. Hackers tend not to notice this as when you’re expending the energy on something you like, rather than on a boring task, it feels like you’re getting more done. But in general you’re actually getting less done – just enjoying it more. These days I’m a much bigger proponent of automating away one part of the task each time you do it. In general this should be the part that you’ll get the biggest “bang for the buck” in automating based on how long it will take to automate vs how long you spend doing it each time. It’s a fairly tricky equation to get correct, so don’t get sucked in to trying to calculate accurately. Again that just distracts from doing it. When in doubt make the improvement that you know will take least time. If you’re doing the task often enough, you’ll make so many improvements that you’ll manage to get 90% of the task automated away quickly enough anyway. The other 10%, of course, is usually almost impossible to automate away sensibly. The systems that claim to do this usually just play a smoke and mirrors game where the work is instead diverted to some other part of the system. Usually a user who suddenly has to do some new task to work around the lack of fudgability in the system

3. Work faster

Again, people should imagine that I have no problem with this. I certainly agree that almost everyone who uses a computer regularly could benefit from learning to type faster. But I also agree with Dijkstra that, save for secretarial-type tasks, the bottleneck should usually be thinking, not typing. And thinking isn’t something that works well at a faster pace. If anything, for me at least, it prefers a slower pace. Of course, in a great many organisations, appearing to work hard, and appearing to work fast, are seen as good things. Appearing to be just sitting thinking is seen as a bad thing. And as for going for a walk around the park to think … Again, I much prefer the approach of trying to speed up everything you do a teensy little bit every time you do it, and relying on the cumulative effects.

4. Work harder

“Drop your TV watching session. Drop your tea break.” Erm. No. Not at all. If anything, take more breaks. Working constantly just means working less efficiently. I really didn’t think anyone believed this.

5. Concentrate and focus tasks

“Concentrate yourself on one task and only one task.” This is one I’m not sure about. There are certain types of tasks where this probably works well. But most people’s jobs are interrupt driven. Everyone like to complain about how terrible this is, and how much they’d be able to get done if they just got peace to do their job. I wonder how much more we’d all get done collectively if we learned to accept that interrupts are natural, and possibly even good, and learned to work effectively with them.

6. Avoid to make mistakes (sic)

“There aren’t any excuse if you are making the same mistake twice. Note it down as notes and remind yourself when you are doing similar tasks again.” I agree that mistakes are time consuming. But just noting them down to try to remember not to make them again is a huge mistake. Instead you need to identify how the mistake came to be made, and try to make it so that that sort of mistake /can’t/ be made again. Again this is subject to the same sort of rules as #2 above. If you’re making lots of mistakes you certainly don’t have time to stop everything each time and concentrate on the root cause. But you certainly have time to put even one barrier in the way of a future you (or a future someone else) going down that path again. As before, if it’s a common error, the entire path will very quickly get blocked up quite effectively.

Reading back through this, and thinking about my reactions to these points, I think the key to Getting More Done is, like most things, slow steady improvement. It’s not glamorous, it doesn’t sell books, and it’s certainly not easy. But it’s effective. If you can make a 1% improvement on something every day, then you’ll be twice as good in about three months, and over ten times as good in a year. This starts to add up fast. Of course, the more finely tuned you can get everything, the harder it becomes to find something else to squeeze out. But most of us have so much nonsense tied up with everything we do that that problem is usually years away!

My remark in the previous post on how the biggest problem with introducing a corporate wiki is social and cultural, rather than technical, provoked quite a few replies. For the most part they agreed with the point, and several people asked how best, then, to counter this.

I certainly have no silver bullets, but I can offer one observation that has been true for every wiki that I’ve seen succeed: At least one person needs to use it both as their primary source of information, and their primary tool for sharing information to others.

Every time someone asks them a question, they respond “It’s on the wiki” (and if they’re more polite than I usually am, tell them where). Every time someone starts launch into a protracted explanation of something, they interrupt with “Can I read about this on the wiki?” Gradually they train everyone that information flow, at least as far as they’re concerned, happens on the wiki.

For most people who haven’t experienced wikis before there’s a bootstrapping problem. They regularly go to the wiki looking for information and find that it’s not there. If this happens enough times, anyone will get frustrated. Eventually they give up, and revert back to their old ways of working, bemoaning the uselessness of this latest technology. The threshold differs from person to person, but any early stage wiki is usually going to hit a majority of people’s limits fairly quickly unless it’s pre-seeded with a lot of useful information. Most people tend not to really start seeing the value of a wiki until the information they require is there more often than not.

A true wiki champion, the type needed by every successful wiki, somehow doesn’t despair at the absence of information. Rather they see it as another opportunity to make the wiki even more useful. They’ll either make sure that when they find the information, they add it to the wiki, or, if they’re a true master, ensure that the person who does have the information adds it to the wiki for them.

In my experience, this pattern of driving everyone else to the wiki every time they need information, or want to share it, builds a momentum fairly quickly. The death of a wiki is not related to the absence of information; it’s related to the absence of use. One regular user can push those in his immediate work circle to become regular users almost by stealth. And once they cross to acting likewise, the battle is usually complete.

I’d love to hear others’ stories (whether of success or failure), of the issues involved introducing wikis to companies. There’s bound to be lots of useful examples out there to learn from. Post your story somewhere and link to this post, so I’ll notice it. Or just drop me an email, and I’ll collate and summarise.

UPDATE: By request I’ve also enabled comments on this post. In general I have them turned off, for a variety of reasons, but I’ll see how it goes here …

UPDATE 2: Well, it didn’t take long for the comment spam to turn up, so I guess it’s back to email.

After my recent ramblings about wikis I got an email a few days ago from one of the developers of a new hosted wiki service inviting me to check out their service.

The service was quite interesting, and had a few nice tweaks on some of the standard wiki features, but something unidentifiable was missing, and it got me thinking about where wikis are in general, and where they could or should be.

Although wikis have been around for a long time, they’re still mostly geek technology that hasn’t “crossed the chasm” yet. I believe they certainly have the potential to do so, and be hugely disruptive en route, particularly in the whole sphere of corporate knowledge management, in all of its various guises and disguises.

There are a few companies which seem to be actively targeting this corporate space. Jotspot, in particular, seem to have some of the features that might enable them to get a few big ticket sales. (Of course, the primary function of tools like Salesforce.com integration is presumably to assure credibility when talking to Fortune 500 companies – whether customers might actually use such functionality, and my guess is that most won’t, it certainly positions Jotspot as a serious enterprise player). But yet Joe Kraus is clearly also excited by the possibility of the Long Tail, and is looking for ways to tap into that. Their offer of a free hosted wiki for open-source projects is certainly a nice attempt to get the early adopters on board.

I certainly wish them good luck with this, but I’m not sure that, at this stage, the same company is going to be able to sell into the large corporates, and also pick up the long tail. The market is too early, and the technology is too disruptive. As Hugh at gapingvoid points out again and again, the problem with technology implementations is usually a social one, rather than a technical one, and this is rarely more true than with so called “social software”.

We’ve used corporate wikis in several organisations now, and for several purposes, and the biggest issues are most certainly to do with getting staff to embrace the entire concept of wiki, rather than wrestling with technology. We’ve been reasonably successful at this, but it’s been in small companies with little corporate politics. I’ve certainly been in several organisations where the concept of a completely open knowledge base that anyone can not just view, but add to, and edit, however they want, would fill a significant proportion of the staff with horror.

I think the easiest way to get around this will be smuggle wikis in the back door. I imagine a Jotspot implementation that appears to be little more than a new front end into a pre-existing customer database, but which a few select employees start to realise can be extended in interesting ways. Gradually the power of being able to add new semi-structured information on top of the database begins to sink in, and before anyone ever realises that they actually have a “wiki”, it’s become the definitive source of useful information about a whole variety of things that were previously outside the scope of the CRM system.

But simultaneously I think there is a huge opportunity for the smaller, built from the ground up, single purpose wiki. More and more conferences have a conference wiki where attendees can collaboratively create and refine a guide to the conference. When we hosted YAPC::Europe last year, we took this a stage further, and invited prospective speakers to propose their talks via the wiki to seek attendee comments well in advance. This wasn’t as successful as we liked, but several of the speakers told us that the feedback they had received from this helped them prepare better talks.

At the minute, however, it’s still too hard to set up a wiki. Everyone is working on making it much easier, and I’m sure I’ll get email from lots of people telling me that their product has finally solved this, and you can have your wiki up and running in 30 seconds. As most of the people setting up wikis at the minute are techies, the problem isn’t that noticeable. But we have lots of small business clients who have little to no technical expertise, who would really benefit from a wiki. But at the minute they would either have to pay someone like us to set one up, or try one of the hosted wiki services.

But, of course, the hosted services instantly hit the credibility and security issues involved in hosting someone’s private data. These sorts of companies really want their wiki inside their firewall. They’re certainly not going to trust a company they’ve never really heard of, and have no business relationship with, to host all their critical business data.

So we’re still in a dead end. Lots of small organisations would benefit from a wiki, but they don’t know it yet, and aren’t prepared for the social changes that would be needed in their organisation. And for those that do know this, and are ready for it, the process is far too complex. And if they do get up and running, but later realise they’ve picked the wrong implementation, then they’re in even more trouble, because almost every wiki out there uses slightly different formatting and mark-up rules, and even if you can export your data, nothing will actually import it correctly.

This, of course, all adds up to a gigantic opportunity for people willing to solve all these issues. Few of them are simple. The combination of them all certainly isn’t. It’s not going to be an easy ride for the companies that try. But if were, then everyone would be doing it.