Over at the Jem Report, Jem Matzan had some great questions for me about how my studies of innovation relate to the open source model of software development. Here’s a taste:
Do you think that being able to see and modify a program’s source code is a good method of innovation?
SB: Sure. Understanding how things work is the fastest way to learn and gives people who come later reusable, proven methods for doing things. But at the same time, it provides sets of assumptions that are more efficient to follow than to reconsider or reinvent. So depending on what level of innovation we’re talking about (a feature? a product? a line of products? a paradigm?) access to source code has different levels of value. And there’s also the value of mystery — sometimes a locked box forces people to be more creative since they have to invent their own approach. Being angry at that locked box and wanting to figure it out can drive people to innovate who’d be bored if they had permission to take it apart and see the source (as the legions of hackers and reverse-engineers out there can attest).
Every author I know gets asked the same question: How do you write a book?
It’s a simple question, but it causes problems. On the one hand, it’s nice to have people interested in something I do. If I told people I fixed toasters for a living, I doubt I’d get many inquires. People are curious about writing and that’s cool and flattering. Rock on.
But on the other hand, the hand involving people who ask because they have an inkling to do it themselves, is that writing books is a topic so old and so well trod by so many famous people that anyone who asks hoping to discover secret advice is hard to take seriously.
Here’s the short honest truth: 20% of the people who ask me are hoping to hear this – Anyone can write a book. They want permission. The truth is you don’t need any. There is no license required. No test to take. Your book idea is worth writing if you think it is. Writing, as opposed to publishing, requires almost no financial or physical resources. A pen, paper and effort are all that has been required for hundreds of years. If Voltaire, Marquis de Sade and Marina Nemat could write in prison, then you can do it in suburbia, at lunch, at work, or after your kids go to sleep. You will always find excuses if you want them and most people do. Why? Writing is work. No matter how smart you are or how great your idea is, you will have to put in the time and no one else can do it for you.
It helps to kill the magic: a book is just a bunch of writing. Anyone can write a book. It might be bad or be incomprehensible, but so what: it’s still a book and many published authors haven’t done any better.
Nothing is stopping you right now from collecting all of your elementary school book reports, a years worth of emails you wrote, or drunken napkin scribbles, binding them together at Kinkos for $20, slapping a title on the cover, and qualifying as an author. Want to write a good book? Ok, but get in line since most pro authors are still trying to figure that out too.
Writing a good book, compared to a bad one, involves one thing. More work. No one wants to hear this, but if you take two books off any shelf, I’ll bet my pants the author of the better book worked harder than the author of the other one. Call it effort, study, practice, or whatever you like. Sure there are tricks here and there, but really writing is a kind of work. I like this though: it means anyone who puts in enough time can actually write well. Some of our best writing comes from ordinary people from all walks of life.
Getting published. 30% of the time the real thing people are asking is how do you find a publisher. As if there wasn’t a phone book or, say, an Internet-thingy where you can look this stuff up (start with Jane Friedman’s website). Writers-market is literally begging to help writers find publishers. Many publishers, being positive on the whole idea of communication, put information on how to submit material on their website. And so do agents. The grand comedy of this is how few writers follow the instructions. That’s what pisses off all the editors: few writers do their homework.
The sticking point for most people who want to be authors is, again, the work. They want to hear a secret that skips over the work part. Publishers are rightfully picky and they get pitched a zillion books a day. It takes effort to learn the ropes, send out smart queries, and do the research required to both craft the idea for a book, and then to propose it effectively. So while writing is a rejection prone occupation, even for the rock-stars, finding a publisher is not a mystery. In fact the whole game is self-selective: people who aren’t willing to do the work of getting published are unlikely to be capable of the work required to finish a decent manuscript.
But that said – it’s easier today to self-publish than ever. People look down on self-publishing, but I don’t see why. When people buy books it’s not like they care who published them (“Oh, I don’t read Random House books, sorry”): they only care who recommended or reviewed the book. But again, our tragically unpopular companion, work, is required to self-publish so many prefer to keep asking writers how they got published instead of just doing it themselves. You can read what I learned from self-publishing the first time here (although the technology and options have improved since then).
Being famous and wealthy: Now this is the kicker. About 50% of the time the real thing people want to know is how to become a famous millionaire rock-star author person. As if a) I qualified, b) I could explain how it happened, or c) I’d be willing to tell.
First, this assumes writing is a good way to get rich. I’m not sure how this lie started but writing, like most creative pursuits, has always been a less than lucrative lifestyle. Even if a book sells well, the $$$ to hour ratio will be well below your average corporate job, without the health benefits, sick days, nor the months where you can coast by without your boss noticing. These days people write books after they’re famous, not before. A book can help you gain professional credibility, but then it’s more of a marketing project than a writing project, isn’t it?
And if the only books you read are bestsellers, well, you have a myopic view of the publishing world. Over 100k books are published in the US annually, and few sell more than a few thousand copies. What causes books to sell may have little to do with how good a book is, as we’ve all been mystified by the abysmal bestsellers and surprised by amazing books few seem to know about. Either way, to justify the effort you’ll need reasons other than cash.
Discouraged yet? Here is the upside: I love writing books. I love reading books. Books have profound powers and they’ve changed my life so many times. Maybe the bittersweet challenge of chasing words into sentences suits you. If you want to do this you have my support. GO YOU. Sincerely. I am behind you. But thinking about writing isn’t writing. Talking about it isn’t either. Commit to 10 hours of effort (basically a weekend or two). Write an outline or even just a few pages of a chapter. Take a course that focuses on actual writing and getting feedback. If it feels hard but rewarding, keep going. If it doesn’t, well I think you know.
O’reilly’s ignite event, a fun gathering of geekish entertainment, is on again – same venue (Capital Hill’s CHAC), but an entirely new round of 5 minute talks.
I always have fun at these things and highly recommend them – have a few drinks, watch people scramble to do a presentation in 300 seconds, and meet the local tech community all at the same time. The talks this time include:
Make Art Not Content, Scotto Moore
Hacking Chocolate, Shawn Murphy
Small medicine: Nanotechnology and biology, Deepak Singh
Run the Government: A Primer for Online Citizens, Sarah Schacht
No, not skin: Epidemiology for the layman, Maegan Ashworth
How to buy a new car, Rob Gruhl
Thanks to my hosts at Google, Chad Thornton, Ken Norton and Robin Jeffries. And of course the tech folks who video taped, edited and posted these things.
I don’t write about it often but I’m a huge film fan. For awhile now I’ve known about the works at Overcast Media, but they’ve been in stealth mode, under the radar.
Finally, with this coverage by the Seattle Times, I’m free to tell you: If you’ve ever wanted to create your own DVD commentary, or make commentaries for TV shows or other media, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.
Roger Ebert and others have talked about this idea for years, and finally it looks like someone is making it happen.
(Disclosure: Richard Stoakley, Overcast Media’s CEO, is an old friend. He had the office across the hall from mine at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team, circa 1997)
I’m no brainstorming zealot – there are many ways idea generation techniques out there and they all have their place. However now and then brainstorming, as a concept, gets attacked, which is almost as ridiculous as a war on terror. Recently Marc Andresen had a short post called Brainstorming is a bad idea that deserves a response.
Rarely discussed factors that impact the value of brainstorming:
What problem are you trying to solve?. If the goal is raw numbers of ideas you might be better off with other methods, which Andresen points out (via a quote from the excellent book The Medici Effect). However if you want people to share in the creative process, get buzzed by riffing off each others ideas, having them all in a room together is very useful. Brainstorming, as an occasional group activity has benefits beyond the ideas themselves. Some techniques are better for generating ideas early on in a project, and others are better for finding ideas for specific problems late in a project.
Who is running the brainstorming session?. The facilitator who runs the room can make or kill any brainstorming session. It’s up to them to manage the room, keep things fun and fast, to make sure ideas are written down, and to prevent ratholes from happening, or blowhards taking over the room. It’s a role most people don’t perform well and the skill rarely has anything to do with seniority.
Who is in the room? Even with a great facilitator, if the people in the room hate each other, are morons, are afraid to be creative, or simply have horrible chemistry, the session is bound to fail. In many situations it’s best to keep brainstorming meetings small – large groups have more complicated dynamics that groups of 4 or 5.
Is anyone informed on the actual method?. The term brainstorming is often used as the sloppy label for any number of half-baked idea generation techniques. The actual term comes from Alex Osborn‘s 1953 book Applied Imagination. The technique, as he defined it, compensates for many of the complaints most people have about the ad-hoc group creativity attempts they’ve experienced.
I’ve yet to see a single study that controlled for, or even mentioned these factors – which is entirely unfair to evaluating brainstorming, or any creative thinking technique. If I’ve missed some research you know of, please leave a comment.
Further reading:
How to run a brainstorming meeting. I’ve run a crazy number of brainstorming meetings in my life and made every mistake there is. This essay is my tip sheet for running them right.
The Myths of Innovation. My book goes in depth on various misnomers about creative thinking, innovation and the history of invention, including how epiphanies happen and the role of techniques like brainstorming.
COM597 Syllabus from University of Washington. This is the syllabus for the UW course I taught on creativity and ideas, and it shows one approach to exploring the many methods of creative thinking.
Applied Imagination, By Alex Osborn. I discuss this book in detail in The Myths of Innovation and highly recommend it to anyone who runs or participates in brainstorming sessions.
(Thanks to Gernot Ross for the tip)
The book is still getting some great buzz, and I’m on the road much of the next few months talking about the book. Here are some upcoming gigs:
July 25, OSCON, Portland, OR
August 10, Amazon.com, Seattle
August 14, Whitepages.com, Seattle
August 24, Expedia.com, Seattle
Sept 21, Management Week, SpiderProject Inc, Kiev, Ukraine
Sept 25-29, Web Directions South, Sydney, Australia
Oct 21-23, Adaptive Path’s MX-East, Philadelphia, PA
Nov 5-8, User Interface 12, Cambridge MA
If you’re in Seattle and you have a possible venue for me to speak at, let me know.
We’re brainstorming ideas for how to improve the book, but agreed to start with you folks. How can we improve the book? Here are a few ideas, but feel free to add your own.
If you have longer suggestions/gripes or want to help with the 2nd edition, leave a comment.
Hi there. If you’ve noticed I’ve been running all over the place doing talks, interviews, and magic tricks to promote the new book. Well my plans for this summer are as follows: stay home!
Wanted: Venues for a lecture on the Myths of Innovation When: This summer / early fall Why: I’m a great speaker, it’s a great book and it’s good for you! Where: Seattle, eastside, wherever you are
If you work somewhere that has an invited speaker series, or some other way of drawing a crowd, let me know. I can’t promise I’ll speak everywhere, but I’ll give it my best shot.
FOO Camp saw the power combo of two different social software technologies: Crowdvine, a linked-in type system for pre & post conference connection making, and pathable (which I first saw at Bizjam) for guiding people in finding folks to meet.
Here’s a short review:
It works and its fun. Bravo! The premise is simple: weeks before the event log in, list some tags, and ping people you might know attending the event. It’s easy to find people who share your interests (via tags), read their bios, and ping them if you so desire. There’s a comment system so you can leave notes which was surprisingly active, and public: going to the home page for the site shows all activity, from blog posts made by an individual, to comments sent or received. Anyone can jump in on the threads which was interesting (and I wondered if it’d work for a 500 or 1000 person conference).
At a minimum crowdvine helped me match faces to names before the event which is a big deal for networking or meeting specific people. And it was voluntary – had I been annoyed or less social, I didn’t have to participate at all.
Pathable provided the event badges, fueled by their social matching system – based on tags and other magic they grouped individuals by interest (represented by the color of each badge and the color of the crowdvine profile, see photo above) and created the surprisingly popular matches/opposites lists for every person.
Much like at bizjam, the badges got people talking. It made introducing people to each other much easier as being someone’s opposite or match was an easy way to start a conversation.
Gripes:
Only problems were mild integration issues. There was a wiki for FOO that didn’t integrate with anything else, a photo wall, with tagish Q&A, at FOO that had different photos for people than crowdvine, little things like that that I’m not sure need to be fixed. Someone needs to do a user experience analysis on how many different places and systems ask for personal/social info and check that any redundancies are useful or fun in some way.
After the event I noticed it was possible for me to track what sessions I’d been to in Crowdvine, but wasn’t sure why it was worth the time – perhaps to follow up with people I’d met but didn’t grab their contact info? Not sure.
Summary:
Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.
Watching fireworks last night, I wondered about the distance between modern July 4th celebrations and what we’re actually celebrating (more ranting on holidays here). In my lifetime I don’t remember any hint of recounting what happened or why at any July 4th event – it’s just a BBQ, beers and fireworks – that’s the entire substance of the day as far as I can recall. Which is great fun, for sure, but shallow in light of what happened and why.
I asked folks around me when the last time they read the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. No one could remember. Few knew they’re so short – 1300 and 7600 words long respectively (about 15 pages) and can be read easily in 15 minutes.
I woke up this morning and read them both. They’re easy reads and I wish somehow reading these things would be part of the July 4th tradition. Can you rally a nation in 1300 words, or define a government in 8000? Now that’s writing.
No matter what my expectations are for O’Reilly’s annual FOO camp, an intense social/geek/intellectual weekend run by my publisher, O’Reilly Media, they’re always surpassed in amazing ways. Unlike any other conference type event, I leave with a head full of ideas to chase and renewed passion for hunting them down.
I waited a week to write something up to see what stood out after things had time to settle. This year my thoughts were about what other events might learn from the success of FOO – here’s my short list (including some hard to avoid for narrative clarity name-droppings):
Informality breeds conversation. There are some amazing and famous people running around at FOO. Founder of this, inventor of that – people I’d normally avoid in ego-fear or fanboy embarrassment. But having everyone camp outdoors with no “invited speakers” or “keynotes” neutralizes pretensions. Egos are left at home and everyone is willing to share, chat, laugh and listen. FOO is full of bullshit neutralizers and that enables fantastic experiences.
Level playing fields are more fun. I did a talk on my book the Myths of Innovation and noticed Ray Ozzie and other notables in the audience. Now at any normal conference I’d be (happily) in the seats, listening to them. But because anyone can do a session the dynamic is entirely non-hierarchical and self-motivated. New conversations happen. Experiments ensue. Comical mistakes are made. This is the spirit of unconferences: you never know who will show up, or what will happen, but the bet is if you get out of people’s way they’ll sort it out themselves. People go where they aren’t supposed to and discover things. It forces opinions and new conversations to rise which is what most organizers claim their conferences are for.
Soft skills rule. I went to two sessions on amazing topics, with awesome, world class level people in the room, but surprise! They sucked anyway. Why? The self-selected session organizers failed to work the room – they let rat-hole debates go on forever, chatterboxes hold the floor too long, or held the group captive with their extended rambles. The lesson: despite all the geniuses in a room, once you’re a group, it’s communication, more than intellectual talent, that make things work. FOO averages much higher quality sessions than most conferences, but Unconferences and regular conferences hinge on rewarding people with facilitation and public speaking skills. But sadly it’s still not cool to reward soft skills. I think every unconference should offer optional, but recommended, training on running good sessions. Regular conferences are just as bad: I don’t know of one that offers training, or mentoring, for speakers.
Memorable moments:
Erin McKean’s session on making up words. Not sure my editors would have endorsed her enthusiasm for me, and everyone, making up words, but I loved it.
How to eat like a caveman. Eric Wilhelm, of Squid Labs fame, co-ran this unexpectedly memorable session on hunter/gatherer diets, and the problems with modern food. This was the perfect mixture of lecture, Q&A, recommendations, stories and theory.
On Sara Peyton‘s prompting, handing Google founder Larry Paige a copy of the Myths of Innovation, and asking, entirely sarcastically, if he knew anything about innovation. His response, with a smile “Innovation? What’s that?”.
It was a thrill to be there again and I hope to be invited back.
You can read the conversation as it develops here and also submit your own questions and comments by e-mailing inkwell at well.com – just mention my last name in the subject line.
Hey folks – apologies if you’ve had problems accessing the site. The last blog post on asshole driven development was a hit. I’ve had more traffic on that then anything I’ve written in history.
If you want more commentary and painfully funny methodologies there are additional comment threads on the three major drivers of traffic: Digg & O’Reilly Radar, And Reddit.
There are still about 120 comments in the queue (out of almost 400 total) – if yours doesn’t get posted, please don’t call me an asshole 🙂 Many of them were redundant, bizarre or beyond my level of comprehension. They’ll all get read, but at 100+ comments I’ve got to filter some stuff out.
Not sure which of you got the run going, but thanks to all who passed my writing around.
In short: The Allies needed a way to destroy Nazi dams and no ordinance of the time was sufficient for the purpose. Barnes developed a way to drop a bomb, on water, several hundred yards from the dam, and have the bomb, weighing several tons, bounce (that’s right) it’s way on the surface until it reached the dam wall.
It’s an amazing story of technology, inspiration, frustration, politics, persistence and eventual success.
