Is Elon Musk Destroying Twitter to Make the World...Better?

Watching the drama unfold regarding Elon Musk’s newest toy, I began to think about Twitter in general.  In a moment of clarity, I reached an alarming conclusion: Twitter is incredibly dangerous, and probably needs to be stopped. 

The Growing Power of Twitter

It isn’t the idea of Twitter that’s dangerous.  Like most of the earlier generation of Social Media platforms, it was conceived as a tool to foster honesty, connection, and communication between individuals, or perhaps small groups.  The real danger of Twitter lies instead in how it was adopted and co-opted, and how it is run and controlled.

As early as the first Obama campaign, Twitter began to show its power: it was used to organize flash mob style rallies - news of which spread virally on the platform.  People sat up and began to look at this tool and how it could be leveraged.  Already at that point, celebrities were tweeting, bypassing agents, marketing teams, and reporters to communicate directly with their fans.  It didn’t take long for corporations and politicians to follow suit.  After a while, most didn’t bother with “official statements'' any more - they just tweeted.  As confirmed accounts, their identity could be safely assumed, and it is very hard to mis-quote a tweet. By the Trump era, foreign policy decisions, intelligence on foreign governments, and executive decisions were being tweeted as standard procedure (and not only by the President).  When COVID began, public health announcements and orders were added to that list. 

The system allowed the public to consume statements from public figures without a filter.  But, those public figures could not control either the interpretation of or the reaction to those statements.  And because so many people were reacting at once, the reactions began to have powerful and unpredictable effects.  Additionally, and harder to see, the algorithms that Twitter uses to prioritize tweets amplified those effects.  Not out of some evil plot, but because they are designed to maximize attention, reaction, and drama.  Those algorithms are the ultimate sensationalists, and they constantly tweaked the priority, visibility, and order of the tweets and responses to have the greatest impact- no matter what impact that was.

Mouthpiece to the World - Optimized for Drama

So here is Twitter: the world’s most trusted communication tool because it’s straight from the horse’s mouth.  Twitter rapidly outpaced journalism itself - many news stories in the Twitter era are simply informing the reader that someone tweeted something.  There just isn’t time for more before someone else tweets something even more newsworthy. But the feedback loop for reaction is global, amplified, and fast, making responses to mis-steps big and small instant, massive, and visceral. Both the call of the bandwagon and the wrath of the mob became voracious beasts, casually making fortunes and ruining lives in its path with a hundred million casual likes, or swipes, or comments.

I first noticed this (and I suspect he did as well) when Elon Musk’s tweets started to have major effects on the Stock Market.  One of his tweets caused a cryptocurrency named after a dog meme on the internet to skyrocket in value. I suspect that the events of the Trump and COVID eras made him more concerned.  It became obvious that everything from Presidential elections to the Declaration of World War 3 could and probably would be initiated on and greatly affected by Tweets and reactions to them.  The monstrous feedback loop had moved on to larger prey - no longer did it make or break the fortunes of just individuals; now it attacked the pillars of whole nations.  Now the algorithms promoting drama over reason and outrage and fanaticism over reasoned response were affecting stability at a global level.

The leadership of Twitter prior to Elon's purchase was not blind to this.  Their solution was to move to silence users who were actively taking advantage of Twitter's power to promote hate and to foment violence.  While this approach had merit, it didn't take into account that the leadership of Twitter was no more immune to the monstrous feedback loop than anyone else.  Twitter would reflexively defend itself when attacked, it seemed.  The outrage - focused and amplified by Twitter itself - against these changes made it more and more difficult to continue making them.

The insidious thing about this is that it was -is- largely invisible.  The mob was ever fickle, after all.  It was only when I stopped to really think about what Twitter had become that I realized - with horror - what role Twitter (and to a lesser extent all social media) was playing in the growing instability and extremism that was sweeping the connected world.  And the only reason I stopped to think about it at all was to try to make sense of the actions of its new owner Elon Musk.

Enter Elon

When Elon Musk first tweeted about acquiring ownership of Twitter, I didn't pay it much heed.  Elon had a habit of tweeting ridiculous things on weekends.  Personally, I suspected it was a form of entertainment for him - a modern day "Boy who cried Wolf," watching the world work itself into a tizzy over patently absurd things.  But, as it became more and more likely that he was going to actually become the sole owner of the platform, I realized that this purchase seemed different from the other companies he had helmed.

Without exception, all the other companies that Elon Musk has founded or purchased have an altruistic and globally positive mission. Paypal wanted to fuel the e-commerce revolution; Tesla aims to accelerated the end on fossil fuel reliance; SpaceX works towards reducing the cost of space access by a factor of 100 and to put a million colonists on Mars.  Neurolink aims to give us a fighting chance to compete with AI (I said altruistic, not realistic); and The Boring Company wants to move traffic jams below ground.  But with Twitter, there was no such announcement.  Just vague comments about "freedom of speech" and "fairness."  It was uncharacteristic enough that I began to wonder if owning Twitter was just the world's most expensive mid-life crisis.

After all, his fortunes were primarily the result of Tesla's viral success on the Stock Market: the people who believed in the dream and goals of the electric car company could and did purchase stock in it.  That dream, not the profitability of the company, drove the stock price to unimaginable heights.  It probably is what allowed the company to ultimately transition to modest profitability.  It also made its largest shareholder almost unimaginably wealthy.  While I can't say for certain that Elon didn't seek out this wealth, it did seem that he wasn't particularly interested in the competitive scorekeeping that Billionaires play against each other.  Perhaps the money didn't mean enough to him that dumping most of it into buying the world's most expensive toy wasn't a completely far fetched idea.  

So, it was with an expectation of more entertaining chaos that I made some popcorn and sat down to watch. 

Methods to the Madness?

The first months of Elon's command of Twitter were chaotic to say the least.  In between seemingly random cuts, layoffs, and changes, stories began to emerge that painted Twitter not as a stalwart bastion of direct individual expression, but as a company that had lost control of its own direction and that was desperately trying to remain profitable and to keep its IT infrastructure from collapsing like a house of cards.  The truth of these stories remains unclear, but it is increasingly clear that the leadership of Twitter was not comfortable with its role as the world's first and final arbiter of public statements. 

As Elon continued to make ludicrous and ill-conceived changes, I began to think he’d gone over the edge, Howard Hughes- style. The changes he would announce and the effects he would predict seemed ludicrously - even childishly - mismatched.  It was obvious that his changes would not do what he said he wanted them to.  People began to lose faith in his business acumen, and I continued to wonder what he was up to.  Because while his business decisions rarely have to do with profit (at least directly), they had always been in service to the company's vision.  Without an announced vision for Twitter, it wasn't obvious that Elon may not have actually lost his mind. 

Over time, though, I started to notice a pattern in his changes and decisions.  If Elon had reached a similar conclusion to my own about the danger that Twitter posed to the stability of the world, then it stood to reason that he would try to reduce that danger.  That would be consistent with his actions across his career to this point.  He could just shut the service down, but that would likely have an equally devastating effect on global stability.  But as more and more people complained about the effects the changes he had initiated were having, I began to ask myself "what if Twitter wasn't the world's most trusted communication tool any more?"

It dawned on me that the only way to effectively and permanently mitigate the havoc that Twitter's Feedback Monster was wreaking on the world stage would be to undermine one of the pillars that support it: the trust in the identity of the user. At the same time, changing the reputation of the platform away from a home for reasonable discourse and leaning into that of a home for "entertaining" chaotic mudslinging drama fed by anonymous trolls helps to reduce expectations by Twitter's audience that anything posted has anything but the most tenuous connection with fact or truth.

How to Destroy Legitimacy while Maximizing Drama

There are three strings to this plan, as far as I can see:

• Firstly - anyone can be anyone. By removing the verification service and replacing it with a subscription, users will be unable to trust the identity of Twitter Users.  Pay $8 a month and you can pretend to be whoever you like.  There will be a million copycat accounts for anyone controversial: 500 Donald Trump accounts; 1000 President Xi JinPing; and 5000 Elon Musks - each spewing contradictory nonsense.  No more “most trusted communication tool.”  If the President of the United States tweets a declaration of war, no one will know if it is official.  Without that trust, it stops being a place to find official communications.
• Secondly - anyone can play.   By publicly refusing to place a moral governance on the userbase, Elon further delegitimizes the tool as being for the “Public Good.”  While it is unfortunate that communities that had previously found Twitter to be a relatively safe space will now be forced to move to avoid being attacked by the more loathsome and predatory denizens of the internet, the very presence of those denizens turns people away from the platform, making it less and less a place for legitimate communication, and more and more a place for "exciting drama," and chaos.
• Finally - reliability.  Several of the introduced changes eliminate redundancy and erode the reliability of the platform.  More downtime, system services being turned off, and critical staff being laid off all contribute to a sense of unreliability.  Twitter has already become a place you shouldn’t be comfortable relying on for time-sensitive announcements, and while I do expect it to stabilize to an acceptable standard, I doubt that Twitter will commit itself to a level of reliability acceptable for important and immediate public statements.

What does all this Mean?

The overall effect of these changes are broadly twofold. Firstly it erodes trust in the efficacy of any particular tweet. There is now no real assertion that the person is who they claim to be, that the statement has any relation to a truth or opinion related to that person, or even that Twitter is reliably available to check what was said in any case. Secondly, it moves discourse on the platform towards extremes of drama and excitement. Anyone can say anything in anonymity or while playing whatever role or guise they choose with the algorithms promoting and cherry picking the juiciest tweets’ visibility for maximum viral effect. This will keep the advertisers very happy, as it means traffic to the platform will remain high. Together, these two effects allow Elon to simultaneously neuter Twitter while also turning a profit. Even if this wasn't actually his plan, it looks like he will have achieved this within a fairly short period of time.

A Futurist's Guide to the 2023 IPCC Climate Change Report

Introduction

Two weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report which sums up the previous six years' worth of research, climate change data, and carbon emissions.  It also contains the most recent predictions and recommendations.  I wanted to write my take on it, but my usual format of a couple of paragraphs on Facebook wasn't up to the challenge.  So, after reading, absorbing, and ruminating the report and its implication, I dusted off ye old blog to record my thoughts.

What is the IPCC?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a United Nations body created to act as a central clearing house for all global research on climate change.  It essentially allows the entire scientific community working in the area of climate change to see all of the data, research, simulations, and so on, and gives that group a single voice to share its results to the world.  To learn more, check out https://www.ipcc.ch/about/.

What does the latest report say?

This report is dire.  It's hard to find positives within the report, to be honest, and processing this after reading the report has been one of the reasons I've taken two weeks to write this.  We are now well past the point of warning about climate change.  It's happening, and it's getting worse.  In fact, it's getting worse faster than was predicted.

In the spirit of not giving up hope, the scientists of the IPCC use terms like "It's not too late." but the rest of that sentence really tells the tale: "It's not too late to avoid the worst case scenario."  According to the report, it is extremely likely that we'll barrel right past the point of "Things get really bad" - 1.5 degrees of warming and it's looking more and more likely that we'll hit "You do not want to be here" temperatures of 2.0 degrees of warming.

To give this some context, the report calls for a 43% reduction in carbon emissions globally by 2030 - that's seven years - to avoid 1.5 degrees.  In BC, if we outlawed all internal combustion engines in the entire province we would still miss that goal.

Here's the report itself if you want to read it and/or check my interpretation: 

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

What does this mean for the future - our future?

Ok, time to put the depressing UN Report down, put on my Futurist hat, and get to work.  Let's break this down, and figure out what it means and what we can do.  Because there are things we can be and need to be doing - things that will make a difference in not only our own lives, but in those lives around us as well.

We Aren't Going to Stop this from Happening

Maybe we could have, and maybe we still can, but it's become pretty obvious that, despite everything, we are not going to prevent Climate Change from rapidly worsening past points that the UN considers "existential."  

Let's all take a deep breath and accept that.  

Now this doesn't mean "Eat Drink and Be Merry" - we still need to work towards carbon neutrality, because we will want to reverse the Climate Disaster at some point, but things are going to get dicey for a couple of generations at least.  With that accepted, need to shift our thinking away from "preventing" climate change, and to "surviving" - and some day "reversing" - climate change.

What is going to happen?

It is hard - to the point of impossible - to predict exactly what's going to happen as the global temperature rises.  We've seen many effects of increasing just 0.9 degrees - droughts, floods, fires, superstorms, shifts of growing seasons, mass extinctions, etc.  We will definitely get more of all of that.  However there are also more subtle changes - for example the jet stream has stabilized over North America, meaning weather systems last for weeks instead of days.  As the global weather system gets more and more energy, things get more chaotic.  Like shaking a snow globe harder - you can't predict the behavior of the snow.

I think of it as "driving into a hurricane:"  -the deeper we go, the worse things will get, but exactly what we'll see and feel - there is no way to know.  So all I can say for sure is that things will get harder as we continue to warm.  And we need to be prepared for that - prepared and adaptable.

We Need to Survive as a Civilization, not just as People

As "romantic" as it is to imagine post-apocalyptic living in a mountain cabin away from everything, most people need the supports of civilization in order to survive.  Clean water, electricity, medicines, and other civil supports need to continue in order for the majority of citizens to stay acceptably healthy.  So when we are talking about surviving climate change, what we mean is keeping the lights on, the hospitals open, and the prescriptions delivered. If we fail in this, we will need to start over as a species. We are far too stubborn to be anything other than the last surviving animal on this planet, but as a goal, I think being reduced to the stone age isn't ambitious enough.

How to help Civilization Survive

Congratulations if you've made it this far - it's heavy stuff and hard to read.  Now we come to the "what can you do" part of the article.  And as it turns out, there is a lot we can do to help us get through this.  

It all boils down to this:  Get Small. Reduce your load on the systems.

The civil supports that make up civilization are already under stress - firefighters, health systems, power grids, water systems, and more are all carrying an increasing load.  Our duty to those systems is to reduce the amount that we are contributing to that stress.  And, largely, we have already begun doing it.

How? By increasing our resilience and independence.  If the systems need to handle a bigger load, we can help be reducing our demands on those systems.  Different people in different situations will be able to do this in different ways and in different amounts, but we can all do something.  Here are some ideas:

Health:

• Take first aid training:  can you treat a sprained ankle?  check a wound for infection?  Tell the difference between a fever from a flu and something more serious?  If not, a course in first aid will help you to better deal with minor issues at home and to know when something is serious enough to go to the clinic.  By reducing the number of clinic visits made "just in case", we can reduce the load on the system as a whole, and increase the chance of those resources being there when someone really needs them.
• Stock a good first aid kit:  If you have gauze and burn cream at home - and you know how to use them - you won't need to see a doctor for a minor burn. Minor injuries can be effectively and safely treated without needing to go to a clinic if you have the materials to do so.
• Dress appropriately:  Weather extremes are becoming more common.  Dressing to protect yourself from extreme heat, cold, and wet go a long way to keeping you healthy.
• If you need it, use it:  Just because you aren't going to a clinic to treat an uninfected cut doesn't mean you aren't drawing anything from the health system.  Get your meds.  Get treated when it's necessary.  Go for surgeries necessary for quality of life.  Mindfulness of waste does not mean foregoing important medical treatments.

Water:

• Get a rain barrel:  If you use water outside for any reason (plants, car washing, lawn, window cleaning, etc.) having a source of water that isn't drinking water allows the water systems to continue to function longer when under stress.
• Conserve wasted water:  We've all heard that you shouldn't waste water by letting it run, but sometimes you have to (in the sink or shower while getting the water hot, for example).  If you keep a bucket nearby, you can save that water, and dump it into the rain barrel.  That way, even if there is no rain, you can keep putting water into the barrel.
• Grey water:  If you're ambitious, conserving grey water expands the above options.  This is perhaps too much for most people and for most living spaces, but it's an option

Power:

• Efficiency:  Power efficiency has come a long way in the past few decades.  As much as possible, use efficient systems to reduce your load on the power grid.
• Independence:  I don't think it is necessary to go "off grid," but more and more things can function without needing to be plugged in to power at all. Solar lights, solar chargers, etc. not only save you money, but they also mean that the grid isn't quite so stressed at peak times.

Food:

• Growing: Growing all of your own food isn't usually practical, but you can often make a difference if you look carefully at what you like to eat and make the most of what you can grow - spices go a long way, for example.
• Buy local:  If you are in a position to buy local, do so.  It reduces strain on all sorts of supply systems, not to mention keeping money in the community.

Community:

• Build community networks: Take some time to introduce yourself to those living close to you:  Even if it's just smiling and nodding, it makes a difference.  There may be times when mutual support will be important, and that is much easier if you've already established relationships.
• Be generous:  Do you have extra?  Offer it around.  Again, even if no one takes you up on it, it establishes a precedent that will make things easier if/when it is needed.  It also changes things if you need something later:  barter is easier than asking for charity.

Summary

We are in for some tough times.  Where I live will probably have a milder set of problems vs other places, at least at first, but everywhere will feel it.  Take reasonable precautions and do what you can, and we'll get through it.  Things will be lost - places, practices, luxuries - but we will get through.  It isn't the end of the world.  Just the end of an era.  This new era will force us to live smaller, smarter, and closer to each other.  There will be benefits as well as losses.  Let's just take a deep breath - and get to work. 

She-Ra: How heroes have changed

As I young boy in the 1980s I watched a lot of He Man.  When She Ra came along a few years later, my sister watched that.  And because it was on right after He Man, so did I. In the end, I came to prefer She Ra to He Man, although I couldn’t tell you why at the time.

Fast forward to a year ago, and Netflix began showing the original She Ra.  I rewatched it out of nostalgia, and enjoyed it as an adult. I came to realize that many of the characteristics I idolize as an adult were present in She Ra.  She wasn’t my hero, but she definitely embodies what a hero was to me as a child.

And then Netflix released the first season of it’s remake “She Ra and the Princesses of Power”.  I resolved to see how She Ra was presented so many years later. What I found was an enjoyable show, but She Ra was no longer the hero that she once was.  She was a new hero, and I realized that, as the original had spoken to my heroic ideals, this new show would speak to the heroic ideals of today’s children, and the differences could tell us a lot about how the values and expectations of children has changed over the years.

Teen hero:  Less Experience, Same Expectations

The first thing we notice about the characters of the new She Ra is that they are quite a bit younger than the original.  1980s Adora is about 25 years old, and is an experienced Horde Force Captain at the beginning of the series. She is, without question, an adult, and a capable one, despite being a villain.  The new Adora, on the other hand, is maybe 16 or 17 years old, and starts the series off as a Horde Cadet, who has not yet seen action in the Horde military.

What does this say about how heroes have changed in 30 years?  In the 1980s, children idolized a strong adult who takes responsibility and leadership roles for moral reasons.  Now, the same responsibility and leadership are being thrust upon a much younger hero. Our new She Ra is much less experienced, and much less confident, but she steps up and takes on the role nonetheless.  It would seem the modern role model can’t afford to wait for adulthood, but must take the responsibilities in front of her, even if she is not confident or experienced.

We Cannot Stand Alone:  No More Lone Hero

In the classic She Ra, the “Great Rebellion” was so only in name before She Ra joined.  It was a sad, silly band of misfits who were not a threat to the Horde. In fact, despite calling them rebels, the Horde treated them as, at most, a nuisance not worth fighting.  She Ra changed all of that, but only because she was a threat to the Horde. The Great Rebellion gained a bit of confidence, but in the end, were not much without She Ra to win the day.

In our new “Princess Alliance” we have a whole team of talented and dangerous young women.  So much so that She Ra is not often really the lynchpin of a lot of the fights. Adora provides leadership, certainly, but it is the princesses that provide the magic punch.  Adora’s primary contribution is in convincing them to band together against the Horde, instead of fighting separately. So gone is the lone hero, replaced by a group of equally capable heroes who provide complementary powers.  Even heroes, it seems, can no longer go it alone.

Fight the Horde:  Etheria at War Instead of Conquered

When we first saw Etheria in the 1980s, it was a totalitarian police state, crushed under the Iron boot of the Horde.  Horde troopers were feared, civilians were rounded up and enslaved. Bow’s minor actions against a trio of guards leads to the enslavement of the entire town, and the rebellion was a couple of tents in the woods.

Contrast this with the new Etheria.  The Horde is a serious threat, but it has not yet conquered Etheria.  It is advancing on the domains of the princesses, but the princesses still hold out, and there is a lot of “normalcy” in their lives despite the war.  The is a princess prom, for example, which Horde members openly attend. Our heroes also have a spa day at an invisible castle, although their assumed safety is shattered in both cases.  

This is probably the most interesting change between the two shows.  She Ra is no longer a great hero fighting an unstoppable Horde of villains who openly oppress their people.  Instead she is a reluctant leader, having suddenly understood the threat the Horde (who raised her to think that it was good and benevolent) poses to the world.  So too, the princesses gradually wake to the threat, as they come to understand that this fight will not be fought for them by the adults, but must be fought by them.  Each of the princesses goes through a coming of age, as they each face the destruction of the lives they had intended to live. This is not the story of a rebellion against obvious evil, but is instead a call to arms against a veiled but growing threat.

Counting the Cost - Being She-Ra has Consequences

The original She Ra kicked butt and looked fabulous, while spouting wit and never chipping a nail.  Honestly, even Adora rarely had to deal with consequences for her choice to defect to the rebellion.  Our newest hero, however, is not so lucky.

Adora in Princesses of Power is faced with consequences immediately, and each choice she makes has real consequences for both her and her friends.  Her relationship with Ketra is the first to fall, but soon she leaves her adoptive Mother (which is a cost, abusive relationship or not) and stands with the Princesses.  Then as she begins to fight, she finds that many victories have a cost, and by the end of Season 1, that cost is very high. It seems that the heroes of the 21st century are not above the consequences of their actions.

Magic is not an Explanation

She Ra in the 1980s was much more technology driven than its parent show, He Man.  The Horde had lasers, tanks, planes, and all sorts of hi tech gadgets, while the Rebellion relied on Magic.  It was fine that spells were cast, swords transformed to rope or shield, and other impossible feats were simply magic in action.

Nowadays, it seems that Magic is not an acceptable explanation in itself.  The new She Ra delves deeply into the hows and whys of the magic used by the princesses, and the source is revealed to be simply ancient and advanced technology.  Perhaps the target audience of the new show no longer believes in magic, but regardless of the reason, it seems the heroes of today must understand the source of the power they wield.

Conclusion

The She Ra of today is a very different young lady than her counterpart of ages past, and her differences highlight the changes in our own ideals.  Our childrens’ heroes can no longer be invulnerable adults, fighting black and white battles alone, using powers they do not understand and suffering no consequences.  Instead, their heroes are strong peers who rally friends and allies to work together against a threat that they see clearer than those around them, and who must understand the power they wield and accept the consequences of their actions.  Ironically, the younger Adora is a more mature hero than her namesake, and she calls on our children to be ready to grow up faster than they might want to. As our world has changed, so has the ideal of heroism, and although maybe fewer children will now want to be like She Ra when they grow up, perhaps more of them will have to be.

Overskepticism: An Alergic Reaction to the Information Age

In the aftermath of the Polar Vortex that struck the United States this week, several stories have been circulating describing how some people did not believe that the snow that had fallen in their own towns was real. While some level of paranoia has been a constant presence on the web since its inception (and was preceded by paper newsletters), it struck me as odd that whole groups of people could be so skeptical of the world around them that they begin to doubt the evidence of their own senses.  But after some thought, I came to the conclusion that skepticism is an integral part of living in our information-saturated age.  It should come as no surprise that some people have taken it to extremes.

Let's face it: the majority of the information that is presented to you via the web, on television, or anywhere else is wrong, misleading, biased, or some combination of the three.  The legal and moral diligence that once surrounded published media has eroded in the face of both the ease in which content can be published, and the competition that the enormous quantity of content has produced, and it is now up to us, the readers, to evaluate, corroborate, and fact-check almost everything we read, watch or listen to.  We make a choice -- on a case-by-case basis -- to believe or reject the media that we are exposed to. Some do this consciously and diligently, and others do it unconsciously, but we all do it.

In the face of this, it isn't really that far of a stretch to simply reject ALL media as a lie of some kind or other.  It certainly makes a kind of sense, and some people would rather be knowingly ignorant than unknowingly mis-informed.

Unfortunately for those people, though, our brains don't work that way.  We have always looked for patterns in what we see, and in the absence of input, our imaginations make monsters in the dark.  With the only accepted truth being "Everyone is lying", it becomes all too easy to connect the dots in sinister patterns.  From there, it's a short step to disbelieving the weather report even in the face of three feet of snow in your driveway.

As human beings, we crave information.  We want to know what's happening.  We want the world to make sense.  To stay honest, we cannot take the philosophy of choosing what we most agree with, regardless of its truth.  Nor can we reject everything as false, since that way lies madness.  Instead, we must choose to accept the information that we think, based on corroboration and fact checking, is MOST correct, regardless of our agreement with it.  An open mind and a healthy amount of skepticism is a good thing, but like everything, moderation is the key.

Senior Management: A Surival Guide for Junior Employees

In this era of specialized skillsets, it is more and more likely that a very junior employee will find himself working with senior management directly, perhaps on a technology project, or as a subject matter expert. These experiences are often terrifying for the employee who is fully aware that putting the wrong foot forward (or even worse putting your foot in your mouth) can have a lasting negative effect on his career prospects.

Although Senior Managers are often understanding and forgiving in these situations, it is still better to make a good impression than to have to rely on the forgiveness of those who sign your paycheque.  If you find yourself in this situation, here are some tips:

1.  Understand. Don't Know

It is tempting to try to project confidence and knowledge when talking to senior management.  After all, confident employees are competent employees, right?  But being overconfident can strike people as arrogance, and being confident and wrong is awkward and embarassing.  Even the task you've been assigned can look very different from the perspective of different department heads, so always leave room to be corrected.

For example, if you introduce yourself and say "I'm here to assist with the planning meeting." you're taking a risk.  You don't necessarily know all the context and subtext of your assignment, so you may not be as welcome to everyone involved as you could hope.  Shouldering your way into a situation, bold as brass, where you are not really wanted by everyone is a great way to rub people the wrong way right out of the gate.

If, instead, you say "I understand from Bob (your manager) that I'll be attending your planning meeting and assisting?" you leave the ball in their court.  You've still confidently relayed that you've received, understood, and acted upon your instructions, but you've left open the possibility for revision. You've also sought the confirmation and context you may have been missing.  A response like "Yes, I'll be talking to Bob after the meeting, but for now, take a seat" reveals that an enthusiastic take-charge attitude might not be the best approach after all without getting burned to a crisp in the process.

Using "I understand" as a phrase shows that you are aware that you may not know everything about the situation, which is almost always the case when dealing with senior management as a junior employee.

2. Your Time is Worthless.  Their Time is Priceless

If you find yourself fixing the CEO's printer on your third week, it is extremely tempting to do the job and get out.  And it is often the right thing to do, given how busy CEOs are.  However, be careful not to imply that it is you who is busy as you back out of her office just shy of the sound barrier.  If you are in a large organization, it can be true that one minute of the CEOs time is actually worth more than your entire day, from the company's perspective, so be sure to take your time to ensure that the CEO doesn't need anything else from you before making your exit.

Phrases like "is there any other way I can assist you today?" are good, but specifics are even better.  If, for example, you notice that the CEO's printer is a little low on paper, an offer to refill it while you're here will not only stand you in good stead, it may also save you a later terrifying trip to the head office.

If the CEO declines, though, don't insist.  By declining, she may be telling you that she needs to be doing something, and you don't want to waste any of her time.

3.  Practice your Smile

Senior managers like to joke around, just like everyone, but as a very junior outsider, you're rarely going to get all of the jokes.  Like any small group, in-jokes are common, and these in-jokes may be at the expense of people you work with.  But, you also don't want to be the cold fish of the group, so you need to react to humor in a way that is acceptable to the managers but won't damage your relationships within the rest of the company.

The solution?  Smile.  Smiling when everyone else is laughing shows that you appreciate the humour, but doesn't put you out on a limb if it turns out that they were laughing at your supervisor.  The smile, though, needs to look good.  It can't be pained, or timid, or half hearted.  It needs to appear genuine.  As flight stewards, hotel clerks, and beauty pagent contestants have found, that smile takes practice.  Take the time, in front of a mirror, to practice a relaxed, engaging grin.  The great thing about smiles is the practiced grin becomes your natural smile, so you can feel both natural and safe when the CIO cracks a joke.

4.  When you Screw Up, Take it on the Chin and Move on.

Despite everything, you'll eventually mess up in the presence of senior management.  You are a junior employee, and experience is gained by making mistakes and learning from them.  When this happens, be upfront about it, take what advice, if any, you're given, and put it behind you.  Concentrate on doing your best and on what you learned, and not what your mistake cost you, and you'll be well on your way to taking that "junior" off of your title.

The Costs of Innovation: Why Thinking Outside the Box Needs to be kept in a Box

Innovation is the business buzzword of the moment.  To hear the business bloggerverse say it, every company in the world must embrace innovation.  Innovation is what created giants like Apple and Google, and what created the meteoric rise of anything touched by Elon Musk, and every company wants to be like that, or at least have a balance sheet like that, right?

And, of course, they have a point.  The right innovative product, well-conceived and well-produced, delivered at the right moment, can have an incalculable effect on a business.  It can catapult a business far ahead of its competition, or break into new business areas where there is no competition. 

So promoting innovation across your business is good, right?

Well, not really.

Firstly, businesses must understand that innovation is, at its core, new ways of doing things.  Maybe they are better ways, maybe not.  The only way to find out for sure is to try them.  Embrace risk, reward failure, and keep trying until you succeed, to paraphrase the innovation Gurus. 

But, if everyone is trying something new, who is getting the work done?

The cost of innovation is efficiency, pure and simple.  To promote innovation across the board is to throw out the lean, low-variation, efficient processes you've spent a lot of time and effort achieving. Not only will everyone be doing something new, everyone will be doing something different from everyone else.  Not only is it a costly way of doing business, it doesn't position you well to capitalize on a really good innovative solution. Chances are, you won't even notice it.

The solution?  Put your out-of-the-box thinking in a box.  Build structure around innovation to keep it from adversely affecting your efficiency, and to use objective metrics to evaluate its worth.

Firstly, don't try to innovate everything at once.  Someone has to pay the bills during the inescapable drop in productivity that adopting a new process or product will produce.  By limiting innovation to individual teams or business groups, the rest of the company will be able to produce a predictable amount of revenue, which allows you to gauge how long you can afford to innovate.

Secondly, within your box, go wild with innovation.  This is what the Guru's are talking about: get total buy-in, look at all the ideas, solicit incremental improvements and quantum leaps.  Map out new processes, try out new technologies, and embrace failure as the stepping stones to success.  Try everything and commit to nothing.

But while you're trying everything, measure everything.  Imagine stern-faced lab-coated technicians with clipboards peering into your box, watching and recording everything. Use technology scouts, process analysis, and trial- and pilot-projects to plan and map the effects of innovation without the cost of full adoption.  Having hard numbers will also help sell your innovation:  it sounds far better to say "This innovation led to 23% increased capability after a six-week adoption period with a maximum efficiency loss of 20%", than does to say "This innovation will revolutionize sales."

When you finally do implement your revolutionary process or product, don't forget about it.  Any new process or product will be raw, and will benefit from refinement.  This is the difference between "a new way of doing things" and "a slick new way of doing things"  Refining an innovative approach will give you something that is both innovative and efficient.

At the end of the day, innovation is a risky, costly proposition, and there are no guarantees that any innovation will actually be an improvement to the current way of doing things.  The potential rewards are great, though, and the chances of reaping are much higher if those costs and risks are managed and contained.  And, if you do create the Next Great Thing, all you'll have to do is put a bow on it.

Business Process Management: One part Archeology, One Part Detective work.

We've all been there:  first day on a new job, and the veteran is there to show you the ropes.  If you're lucky, the veteran is an experienced and motivated teacher, and you can feel free to ask any question you like.  How does this part work?  Where do these go?  What is this thing?  Who is responsible for approval?  Ask those, and you'll get a solid, helpful answer that will help you do the job the way the veteran does, which is what you really want out of any job, right?

Just don't ask him "Why?"

Not because the veteran doesn't want to go into why, most likely.  No most likely, he simply doesn't know.  Doesn't know why the processes he's been doing for years are structured the way they are.  Most likely the person who taught him didn't know, and you probably won't either.

For those of us in the role of business process management, this lack of knowledge is a key stumbling block when we begin to map out a process for refinement.  Without context, it can be very difficult to assess the value of a particular step in a process, which makes changing or removing that step a risk.

For example, in a data entry process, there is a step that requires someone to copy a value from a system, paste it in a particular spreadsheet, and save the spreadsheet.  During the interviews, it becomes obvious that no one knows why this step occurs, what the spreadsheet is for, or when the step was added to the process.

It seems like an obvious quick-win:  Stop the step, and save several minutes of wasted time. But is it wasted?  Certainly it isn't adding value to the group doing the data entry, but then it obviously was never intended to.  So, who (or, if you are in an organization with automated data systems, what) is using the data collected in that spreadsheet?  And why?

It certainly could be a complete waste of time.  That spreadsheet is perhaps sitting completely unused and is of no use to anyone.  But then again, it could be populating an important forecasting tool, or a strategic report, or the CEO's dashboard.  It doesn't make sense to recommend the elimination of a step until you understand its purpose.  Let the Wild Goose Chase commence.

In any organization that has been around long enough to have had a high percentage of the original members move on, there are going to be mystery processes.  These are things that people do because they've always done them, and no one is really certain why.  The role of business process management can often be one part Indiana Jones, and one part Sam Spade:  piecing together clues left behind by employees long gone, or inferring meaning through questioning innocent bystanders who "really-have-no-idea-why-it's-done-like-this-but-it's-a-pain-so-if-it-isn't-important-it-would-be-great-if-we-could-stop".

Sometimes, there is a pearl at the bottom of that deep dive.  Sometimes you rediscover a lost truth and can provide a "why" to the veterans and newbies alike for them to pass on to future employees, and for a more permanent record in a document or wiki. That "why" can tell you if the step is a waste or not, and you can act on it appropriately.

Sometimes, though, you just hit bottom and come up empty-handed. In that case, the choice is simple, if not easy:  Leave it as it always was, perpetuating a step that, as far as you can determine, has no value; or stop the step, and hope that if it does break something, it's at least obvious.  Generally it's worth taking the risk, especially if you've done your homework and are confident nothing critical will be affected. Still, there is always a risk of finding yourself in a different detective role: the one where an old case has come back to haunt him.