The Sublime Freedom of Failure

In a strange rush of the the last twenty-four hours I have heard about or read about three sublime, elegant, beautiful failures. The honest admission of coming-up-short. And the great thing is that people are owning it and determined that you or anybody else doesn't repeat the same mistake(s).

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral. - Rosalind Russell

In my industry, as well as in this town (Washington DC) failure is not a virtue. This is the reason why I was pleasantly surprised to find a serious conversation taking place about the role of failure. We know that our fear of failing, or perhaps more accurately, letting others know that we have failed, comes from a very personal, emotional place. In failure we are stripped to our elementary school selves where disappointment, rejection and alienation had equal rule with excitement, wonder and joy. Failure is elemental to our emotional state, but can be pretty darn problematic for our professional lives as well. Just ask Elliot Schrage...

However, the three examples that I will cite below potentially signal a new opportunity to embrace the wretched, wrong-headed and sometimes just plain delusional. We should embrace it and celebrate it because at the center of failure is hope and an intention to act. Gandhi said that "man will not be judged by his acts, but his intentions" and that is exactly the reason we should reward those that Act. They are braver than the rest of us.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self. - William James

I think that this is especially true of large, disaggregated industries or systems. There is a political norm that in these loose group of actors success is the coin of the realm. Actually quite literally as people fight for scarce resources. You succeed (or at least get others to perceive you succeed) you get the money to go on perceiving to succeed. If you are a (repeated) failure your are supposed to be weeded out by the evolutionary process. Done. A reject. A mistake.

However, things are a bit more complicated in these big systems. There is also a counter-trend that is just as logical: herd mentality means that while there may be leaders the rest of us just tend to cluster around mediocrity. One way to describe it is that we are all minor successes, or more cynically all minor failures. The only way to truly fail is fail big. And the rest of the system just gets enough to survive another day.

How are we going to break out of a system of minor successes/failures? Or more importantly how are we going to stop failing redundantly? (If we are going to fail, let's at least be a bit of creative!) In these big systems redundant failing; hitting the same potholes is what wastes resources and promotes uneven successes. We always blame a lack of communication of successes, but I am beginning to believe it might be a lack of communication about failures that is the true culprit.

I think that technologists have something to offer on this subject. Failure is an expected in the life to a programmer. And in fact it is their way of life. Whole systems of work flow are dedicated to the exposure of failure repeatedly in order to identify, isolate and fix. (And if they are really good they document it.) Then they do the failure detection process again, and again, and again. Everything from agile development to quality assurance processes are focused on expecting, managing and even glorifying in human failure.

The failure that I first wrote about above is really programmatic failure, meaning failing of implementation of human processes, rather than technical ones. I think the trick is how public purpose media starts to construct "iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional entities." In other words how do we borrow from the technologists the systems to detect and document the programmatic failures?

We don't celebrate failure and we should. Here are three who do and suggest a way forward:

The Painful Acknowledgment of Coming Up Short (Organizational Failure)

Leaving KETC: It Was Just One of Those Things (Personal Failure) - I also have to give huge props to John Profitt to write this blog post. He is amazing...someone hire him now.

FailFaire.org (Organizing Beneficial Responses to Failure)

Let us resolve to illuminate - respectfully, truthfully, candidly - our failures and celebrate those that have the courage to go for it. Anybody want to organize a fail faire for public media? Call me and let's see if we can go big; failure, success or something in between.

My Metaphysical Crisis of Foo

I just had the pleasure of attending Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp East (twitter: #fooeast) over the weekend at Microsoft’s New England Research & Development (NERD) campus. The event-meeting-happening-whatever was a really fascinating mixing chamber of people who are doer-thinkers. The venue and the atmosphere promoted a beneficial suspension-of-belief that one could associate revolutionary cancer management with open source software with real-world social conditioning. It is a gathering that buoys the notion of the connected, socially-aware uber-technologist in ascendancy.

My sense is that at the core of every Foo Camp participant is a strong belief that innovative management of systems can generate beneficial human solutions. Social behavior becomes a function of system inputs. More feedback, more information, better design = better social behavior. The goal of many at Foo Camp is constructing better analytical frameworks to drive social solutions. As a former (future?) community development person I must admit that I naturally suspect this line of thinking. However, as a proto-technologist I understand its power to build new options for policymakers and community developers.

I don’t say this with any trace of disparaging the concept; technologist doer-thinkers have much to offer to help solve the problems that have bedeviled policy-makers and social scientists alike. However, in many ways I was surprised – again, not pleasantly or negatively – that there was not as much focus on what the consumer needs or wants. I probably would guess that derives from the deep tech nature of many of the participants. There were people who design consumer-side solutions, but even then they were ‘immigrants’ from the tech side.

For me personally, this was refreshing, as well as challenging. Rather than re-imagining the 2.0 of government, education or health care, I thought about solutions to community-identified systems failure. Rather than large-scale, I went small-scale, iterative, accretion of solution as change. This presented a new set of problems for me.

It has led to a bit of a post-Foo metaphysical crisis…Am I doing what really matters? Is my work amounting to managing somebody else's process, or fulfilling my own passionate mission? Or, flippantly, am I a cog in a beneficial machine or just a cog?

Before I get to that, here is a quick two-hour postmortem list of the ‘surface value’ of attending Foo:

• Ideas & being connected to ideas…the general fuzzy warmth that you get in your second week of graduate school, but this experience is with people who actually act;
• Having your eyes opened…to what you don’t know, what you should know and the desire to know more.
• The allure of new relationships…perhaps the most obvious, but also the most beneficial/nefarious at the same time. Beneficial, because I know more smart people who can get me out of intellectual jams, but nefarious because you could easily see yourself slipping into the comfort of a closed loop chumminess of interesting ideas.

There is one other surface value and I would characterize as the triviality of the ‘side project.’ (I suspect that this is probably more about me than about Foo Camp.) I walked away from the experience filled with a range of little projects that would be interesting to me, maybe beneficial (or maybe not, hence the nature of vanity), but generally would be done to please myself. They amount to hobby, but here are the ones that I would want to do:

• Based on a session led by Tom Coates re-read William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and update his observations by attaching cheap sensors to everything movable and trying to infer a social graph from use patterns.
• After a talk with Matthew Bernius graph changes to the editorial policies at specific news outlets against the introduction of new technologies.
• Also from my talk with Matthew, but also influenced by the thoughts of Patrick Meier, use Clay Shirkey’s “algorithmic authority” (which I will have to actually read…), create an interactive tool to help journalists (and users) visualize objectivity.
• Put on a one-day discussion on the proper use of data visualization as central driver and construct, rather than an ancillary product, in both journalism and creative narrative.
• Construct a project to test the applicability of user interface and website accessibility design to reforming urban environments.

While these projects would be fun and potentially interesting they really don’t drive a central purpose to one’s life, the mission that one is on to improve the world. Attending Foo did something to surface a very old question I referred to above; namely am I making a difference or just solving problems?

There is great allure in the solving of problems. They are immediate, they are definable and you generally can get a sense if you can shout out victory or groan in defeat. However, without some motivating narrative that aims those solutions to the heart of a bigger mission, they often become an end to themselves. This is all a bit banal, but the solution of problems may pay your mortgage, but at some point you figure they don’t matter very much without a meaning or north star.

Many logical and rational things tie you to a career of just solving the immediate. While we can insert the words family, age, society, culture; they all boil down to how willing you are to accept risk. And this is perhaps one of the more insidious things about Foo; in that space and time risk simply does not exist. The imagined future is possible and in many ways seems totally probable.

The personal challenge for me is how to sustain the values that brought me to this point in my career. The fundamental goal that drives me is utilizing media and technology to solve human-scale problems. Without speaking about public broadcasting or specific organizations, Foo has continued to demonstrate that real change is really happening. How can I be a part of it? How can I incorporate that change in the work that I do? Do I have anything to offer that work?

There is a saying that has been haunting me lately: “happiness is only achieved when your ability is only limited by the extent of your knowledge.” Foo Camp expanded and extended my knowledge.

Now what?

Public Media's Innovation Agenda: A View from CES - Part 1

How much content? A recent study, How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers estimated that in 2008 “Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. While measuring usage by hours of consumption is traditional, as a technologist, I am much more interested in data. And the HMI report accommodates; consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes…” (a zettabyte is a million million gigabytes.) The vast majority of that data occupied just two categories; television (accounted for by HD broadcast) and gaming. If the folks at CES have any say over it that number will continue to rise…and in 3D!!

Consumer Media Ecosystem Trends: A View from CES 2010

At CES they understood these numbers and are turning out products that they believe will increase the value of information. The majority of the show was dedicated to visual consumption of information, transcending all other usage. If audio was cited, it was largely to enhance visual viewing or gaming. Storytelling is the name of the game. In 2010 the manufacturers and content distributors are there to capture your eyeballs with compelling (perhaps flashy is a better word) content on their platforms they are happy to make that viewing consistent across television (broadband), mobile, eReaders and computers; whatever platform you desire. The big themes at CES that captured my attention include:

Form Factor Evolution – as information and content becomes ubiquitous manufacturers are trying to fit the device into our hands, pockets, and into every nook and cranny of our house. (Amongst the HD this and 3D that, I was most amazed by the super-thin LG TVs, about the thickness of a quarter.) This can be no better seen in the eBook Reader space as they multiply from Kindle-like to be larger, almost slate-like factors, to small and unobtrusive. This evolution, however, was seen across the floor to TVs, mobile phones, laptops and PCs.

Portability of Content Across Devices – for me this was the biggest story of CES, that content and manufacturers were teaming up like never before to build albeit proprietary platforms for portability of content. (Hah! Say that three times fast!) This can be seen with Motorola in their development of DVRs, smart phones, media players, etc. However, our friends at Microsoft have taken it up a notch…the best deployment that I have seen yet. Utilizing the Windows 7, Silverlight and other backend platforms they have built a seamless integration of TV, mobile and PC environments (or at least purported to be seamless…we will see.) If what they assert is real you can socially watch content via the Xbox, stop it, pick it back up on your Windows ME phone or Zune player and keep going right along and then over to your PC and back to your TV. It was very, very slick.

New Interactions with Content – Microsoft has teamed up with HP to provide the first roll-out of Graphic.ly, which was one of the coolest implementations of reading material I have seen yet. It may even make me read comic books. On big touch flat screen a comic book cover lays out in crisp definition. Flip of the finger opens up the comic book and allows for panel-by-panel reading, intelligent search (find every panel with Wolverine on it) and multi-part annotation by page, panel, character or book. Then amble over to the Dynamation booth and put on their ‘gaming glove’ and start flicking web pages or games…or better yet when Project Natal for Xbox launches forget the glove and get your whole body into the experience. Graphic layers over mobile cameras will be getting smarter at recognizing where you are and what you are looking at and geolocation, tagging and geo-file dropping is almost passé at CES.

Strategic Interactive Convergence – as mentioned above content producers and distributors are starting to team with manufacturers. While on one side that is resulting in some impressive utilization of processing power, bandwidth and content it is also locking consumers into proprietary and unique experiences. There is a definite lack of interest in building open standards in this space and on the floor there was marked demonstration of marked silos of content, through IPTV widgets, subscription services, and clear choices of hardware. Strangely enough, the only hope for breaking out of the silos was Microsoft’s ambitious cross-platform goals. Out of the frying pan and into the fire though on that score considering that Microsoft, though trying, is not what we would call an ‘open shop’.