Feeling out of place

I'm currently reading Keith Johnstone's book on Impro, and my friend Dougald pointed me towards this interview with him. He's written so many interesting things about creativity and spontaneity which chime greatly with my ideas on doing things badly. It's often our desire to be 'right' that self-censors all the crazy things that float into our heads and makes us deliberately dull and predictable. (Incidentally, in the book he also talks about how this process is as much about keeping up the 'pretence' of sanity by hiding all the crazy, unpredictable elements of our minds for fear of being excluded from the group - which with my Mindapples hat on I find particularly interesting.)

One quote I particularly liked was this:

"If you make a mistake in public and stay happy, they like you."

In a great deal of performance work, and therefore in many situations where we feel under pressure or required to 'perform', the worst thing we can do if we fail is to worry about it. It makes people feel uncomfortable. We condition the social space around us by our behaviour, and if we feel bad, we make others feel bad. But if we feel good (unless we've done something really bad), people will forgive us our failings. It's lovely to see people with a "total lack of self-punishment", they lighten our modd and brighten our days. In certain situations, our attitude matters more than our actions.

This might seem a minor point, but it connects to something bigger that I've noticed over the past couple of years. In the past I used to worry that I had no right to be in certain meetings or situations, because I didn't have the right kind of experience, skill or character - in effect, because I didn't fit in. But then, a friend of mine told me about a meeting of his local NHS Trust, in which a patient-representative announced that, due to his schizophrenia, in some meetings he might make no sense, or scream at them, or say something totally ridiculous - and they all had to accept it, because his perspective needed to be represented.

This was a whole new approach that I hadn't seen before. If you sense that you don't 'fit in' somewhere, the immediate reaction is to feel out of place and uncomfortable, but it can actually mean you bring a unique and valuable perspective that gives you great power and influence. If we feel ashamed of our difference because we 'shouldn't be here', then we will transmit that attitude to our neighbours and, before you know it, we are excluded from the conversation.

But if you can walk into somewhere you feel out of place and turn that into a positive, then the scope of what you can accomplish becomes vast. One of my business heroes, Tim Smit of the Eden Project, says yes to inappropriate invitations because "you can learn loads from being in the wrong place". So now when I'm in a situation where I have to perform, and I feel like I don't fit in, I think: "I don't fit in here - which is exactly why I can contribute something unique." And once I started saying that, the world got a little bit larger.

I suspect most of the worst and stupidest decisions in history have been taken in rooms where normal people weren't welcome. I'm passionate about breaking down this need for permission for us to contribute our individual perspectives. If there is a political purpose to my work, it is to put more people in the wrong places - to open up all those closed conversations to include all the relevant perspectives, to give people access to things which on paper they would be excluded from, and to help people speak from their hearts without feeling they have to "act the part". Let's all contribute our unique 'wrongness' to the world, and then maybe we will make better decisions and design a more inclusive, sociable society.

Selling what you believe in

At School of Everything lately we've been preoccupied with how to sell what we're building to teachers and learners.

Some of our more commercially-minded advisors have told us that "you can sell anything", and they're right. Why worry about how good the site is, we just need to get the word out, then we can make it better afterwards - right? But within the team we've actually been quite reluctant to go telling the world about our product until we're happy with it ourselves.

The reason for this isn't just perfectionism, or a fear of "doing it badly" - it's about relationships. Sure, you can sell anything - but if your focus is on creating an ongoing relationship with the person you're selling to, the rules about that change. You don't sell something unless you're confident the buyer will still be happy with that transaction when you next see them. Or, to express it in another way, the commercial relationships you create should translate into sustainable social relationships too.

In some product development methodologies, they talk about the first and second "moments of truth" in a product-consumer relationship. The first is the moment when you realise the role the product could play in your life ("I'd look great in those jeans..."); the second is when it actually starts to play a role in your life ("Wow, you look great in those jeans..."). All too often sales is used to force the former and disguise the latter - leading to the "Why the hell did I buy these horrible purple jeans?" factor. (Come on, we've all done it...)

If you see product development as about creating a relationship between a product and its consumers, it's very easy to "sell anything" and forget about your community. But if you see your product as a tool to create a relationship between you and your customers, then the rules change. You have to create something more worthwhile, more long-lasting.

By designing for positive relationships, we are forced to design better and sell with integrity. The point of School of Everything is to create and serve a sustainable community, and if we really stick to that, we can only sell what we believe in. To do anything else wouldn't just miss the point - it would be bad for business too.

The ABCD of Careers

My friend Dougald recently told me about "Asset Based Community Development", which put very simply means starting with the assets in a community already and assessing how it can provide for its own needs, rather than starting with what's missing and making the local community dependent on central assistance.

I really like this concept. I like local emphasis, and I like the faith in people that lies at the heart of it. And I've also realised that I've been doing my own personal version of the same philosophy for myself.

Dougald is also, in his spare time, an anti-careers advisor, and we speak from time to time about our own career paths in all their peculiar twisty-turny glory. And I've come to the conclusion that I've actually been doing Asset Based Career Development. Here's my first stab at a 3-step guide:

Rule 1:
Go with the flow. Career planning is hugely overrated: sometimes life has a way of guiding you into the right place at the right time. The trick is to do lots of different things and pay attention to what you find the most fun, the easiest to do, to what gives you energy. Soon you'll find that there are some things you can do almost effortlessly, there's just a natural "flow" to them. If people won't pay you for doing them, do them in your spare time and monetise it later. And don't do stuff you hate because it will "get you somewhere later" - only suckers do that. If you don't enjoy the process of the work you do, you're either in the wrong business or you're being exploited. Career planning is hugely overrated - just do lots of stuff and follow what works for you.

Rule 2:
"If you want an interesting life, find the thing that's growing fastest in your community and join it." When I left university, my dad told me that quote, paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw I think. So I went to work in the internet. I often wondered why the hell I was working in technology when I had a history degree and didn't really like computers, but after a few years I realised I liked learning new things, working with intelligent people, designing from scratch, overseeing projects from start to finish, and producing something of value to other people at the end. And with the internet swiftly becoming ubiquitous, suddenly I had lots and lots of options. I couldn't have found this out if I'd had a plan. In fact, how could I have had a plan for my career ten years ago? My current job didn't even exist back then.

Rule 3:
Follow the people, not the money. When I was younger I wanted to be a barrister. Then I met barristers. I wanted to be a filmmaker. Then I met filmmakers. Meanwhile, in my personal life, I did stuff I enjoyed with people I liked spending time with. I met activists and social innovators, educationalists, researchers, radicals and open source hackers. And I had a lovely time hanging out with them and having interesting conversations. Eventually, my friends and I started School of Everything, and I've become a "social technologist" working in "innovation", "changing the world". Which is lots more fun than being a management consultant, and actually turns out to be pretty well-paid too.

I'll be refining this methodology over time - Dougald, Tessy, Anthony, anyone out there have anything to add? But for now, from a more sociable angle, here's my current mantra that I think should be posted on the wall of every careers office in the land:

The most important factor when choosing a career is whether you like the people you work with.

Don't pursue some abstract career plan. Do the things you enjoy, with the people you enjoy, and then work out how to pay for it later. To live life the other way round is just plain silly.

Blogtagged, apparently

Tessy has invited me to reveal six random things about myself, so here goes:

1. When I was very young, I wanted to be a tap dancer. Just like Fred Astaire.
2. I have, at one time in my life, had my hand in a cheetah's mouth. No, really.
   
3. Whilst looking for my friends, I once wandered through security lines at a Leicester Square premiere and accidentally met Paul McCartney, who was very confused by my presence there.
4. I grew a beard in 2002, at the Japan World Cup, because (a) I could, and (b) most of the Japanese couldn't.
5. I'm a West Ham fan, because Trevor Brooking is my mum's cousin.
   
6. I have conducted a 30-strong Christmas choir in Trafalgar Square, in front of around a hundred people. Unprompted. Whilst drunk.
   

So there you go. I'd like to invite Dougald, Anthony, Paul, Mary and School of Everything to do the same, if they'd like to. (And nice one David, loving the hair...)

Crafting New Problems

I was fortunate enough to hear Richard Sennett talking about 'craft' recently, and his ideas struck a real chord with me. His basic thesis is that today we teach people how to solve problems mechanically ("operational skills"), but we don't teach them how to identify new problems, set their own standards for achievement and be creative about deciding what needs doing next ("craft skills"). And the result of this, he believes, is a massive de-skilling of society.

Looking back at the Enlightenment (a topic of great interest to me at the moment after my work with the RSA), Sennett identifies two different strands of Enlightenment thought. The "Northern European" strand, draws on Rousseau and Kant to assert the primacy of the mind over the physical world, the angel part of us to 'transcend' into pure reason and nobility. The second strand is embodied by the RSA and the pragmatists, who valued action in the world alongside intellectual endeavour - a life of the hands as well as the head. It is his belief that we have privileged the former at the expense of the latter, and turned ourselves into machines in the process.

Rousseau, for example, argued for the "ideal parent", rational and complete - but his opponent Madame d'Epiney said that this "parent machine" ensures that nothing is ever good enough. Today, we assess our children in schools for their ability to find the right answer; we ask "who is the best at closure?" We measure them against an absolute right, rather than what is good enough for them. It is an abstraction that robs them of their humanity, their sociability. Finding the "right" answer denies individual expression, turns us into robots. Training us to solve problems actually leaves us "de-skilled".

According to Sennett, the key principle of "craft" is that it doesn't seek to find the right answer. Instead, it values the process of finding and solving problems, and therefore the ongoing joy of finding new things to explore. Craft values humanity because it values doing a job well for its own sake. Skilled people value "interesting wrong answers", new hypotheses. In other words, there is value in doing something badly because it helps us learn and improve.

It feels contradictory for a blog about "doing things badly" to espouse craftsmanship, when the word implies so much about quality and doing a job well. But could it actually be that our obsession with finding the one right answer in fact deprives us of our ability to learn and improve? If we set ourselves up against abstracted and inhuman standards, we position ourselves - in Ruskin's words - between "the twin crevices of achievement and despair." It is only by pursuing our crafts for their own sake, repeating actions without concern for failure, that we will get better than before.

As Sennett says, "we need a story of how people get better, rather than an image." Right answers close subjects down. Doing something badly is the start of a conversation.

The Age of Failure

There's a lot of buzz in the social media community about Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody. (One sentence summary: collective action just got a lot easier.)

One line in his recent talk at the RSA particularly caught my attention:

"One of the things the internet does is it lowers the cost of failure, rather than the likelihood of failure. It enables us to fail more and learn more."

The 21st Century has been variously called the internet era, the computer age, the learning century, the information age, the innovation economy, even the new enlightenment. But I think this is the age of failure. It's when we learn to insulate ourselves from the consequences of failure sufficiently that the world becomes our playground.

And then, we can start breaking new ground, creating new ways of doing things, diversifying, experimenting, playing. Because we can fail as many times as we like in solving a problem, and we only need to get it right once.

So, if you want to change the world, make it easier for people to fail. Help us all to change the world badly. Because if we're all having a go, eventually some bright spark will crack it.

Good uses for e-learning, part 1

Current debates about technology and education tend to focus on how to replace face-to-face teaching with technological solutions, so a lot of my work lately has been about getting people away from screens and talking face to face. But I've just had my first experience of successful online learning, so I thought by way of balance I should share that too.

I've been learning The Entertainer for the past couple of weeks - a personal mission of mine since the age of seven, since my piano teacher refused to teach it to me because it was "too difficult". (I quit the piano some weeks later and didn't play again until I was well into my twenties.)

I don't read sheet music, so I explored YouTube and discovered Shawn Cheek's how-to videos. And, surprisingly, after watching, playing a bit, watching again, practising and so on, it's helped me learn very quickly. If he was teaching me face to face it would have taken too long (and cost me a fortune), but this way I can watch him play it as many times as I want and learn at my own pace. For a change, learning online has worked better than having the pressure of a teacher sat next to me.

So, that's my first taste of when e-learning can be better than face-to-face: when I need someone to show me how to do something over and over again until I get it. I still need a teacher to look at what I'm doing and give me feedback though, so personal connection is still really important. But still, it explains the huge popularity how-to videos on the net these days.

One thing is odd though: now Shawn keeps 'friending' me on Facebook. It feels really weird. I've never met him or even spoken to him, but he's helped me learn. So what's our relationship now? I really don't know.

If e-learning works (for some things), then my next question is how does it affect, enrich, or replace our social relationships? And how can we take this into account when we build an education system for the coming century? Or design how social technology dovetails into our lives.

A humanist ideology

Those of you who read my other blog will know I've been talking a lot about Freeschools lately.

Education is as natural a human process as laughter, and yet we've constructed an education system which is the equivalent of having thousands of highly-trained state comedians, but no-one else is allowed to tell jokes. I'm promoting the simple idea that learning is a social thing, and that everyone has something valuable they could teach the people around them. You can read about how these ideas work in practice at the School of Everything.

I've tended to see these ideas as so obvious that they fall outside "politics" entirely. But when I was speaking at a conference last week, someone asked me if I had any political motivations for doing this. It rather stopped me in my tracks: I couldn't quite say "sociablism" because I didn't really have time to explain it, so I said something like "I'm an entrepreneur, not a politician: I'm interested in what works and not abstract ideologies".

I think almost everything is political: studying social and cultural history made me realise that power, principle and vested interests dominate all our human interactions, from the playground to the office party. So why put a capital 'P' on it and pretend it's somehow different when it happens in Parliament?

Which is true. But it's also a neat way to sidestep the question. So since then I've been pondering the politics behind Freeschools, the ideas in this blog, and also the principles behind "web 2.0". And I've got it boiled down to this, so far...

Almost every repressive regime has relied on disempowering people, so I believe conversely that empowering people to do what they want will actually set us free. I believe that people are interesting and surprising, and that amateurism, play, exploration and socialising must be valued in our society because they bring us closer to our humanity. And I believe that if you give people the opportunity to connect with their humanity, it is our natural inclination to work together and protect the weak, and it's the stories we've constructed in our cultures which make us act differently from that.

Ideology is all very well though, but what matters is that with the tools now available online, it's actually possible to put these ideas into practice and see what happens. And the interesting thing is, they work.

I didn't really think of any of this as political until this week. But in fact there are many political ideologies, past and present, that would oppose me on every count. So I guess I'm Political after all. Don't ask me which party I should join though. The closest match I can find so far is the Renaissance Humanists, and they're not so active these days.

Politics is broken. Something else is growing in its place.

Ubuuntu

Not been a great deal of blogging happening in February, it's been a strange time for me. But someone sent me this quotation from Desmond Tutu today that I felt I should share with you, in these cold February days.

"In our country we talk of something called Ubuuntu. When I want to praise you, the highest praise that I can give you is to say, you have Ubuuntu - this person has what it takes to be a human being. This is a person who recognizes that he exists only because others exist: a person is a person through other persons. When we say you have ubuuntu, we mean you are gentle, you are compassionate, you are hospitable, you want to share, and you care about the welfare of others. This is because my humanity is caught up with your humanity."

Human beings are sociable creatures. We are conditioned for relationship, and our activities both require and nurture relationships with each other. We exist only because others exist, and the way we live our lives, design our institutions, run our governments and interact with our environment, should reflect this. We are defined as individuals within our social context, and the things we create should be too.

I can think of many people I know who have "ubuuntu". But I can think of few governments, few companies, few bureaucracies of which I could say the same. And that must change.

Bad pianists of the world, unite!

A quick hat-tip to self-confessed "substandard pianist" James Sherwood, for this line in an old blog post:

I can play the piano not very well. I have played the piano not very well since I was seven, and I have now reached a degree of competence in the field of playing the piano not very well.

I couldn't have put it better myself. James, I salute you!