It's time for the second round of what came to be known as "the convo". The last one led to all sorts of larger conversations and community efforts, but ground needs re-plowing. Seeds need replanting. This time around, I thought we'd target a more narrow topic than last time: What are the characteristics of successful online communities?

Most of us are involved in multiple communities whose primary medium of social exchange is online -- whether that be a Twitter group, a discussion board, email list, or whatever. When positive, these communities can turn into massively productive sources of energy and transformation. Some online communities thrive while others never get off the ground. Some prosper vibrantly for a short time and then wither and die for some reason. More interestingly, some communities (all healthy ones) appear to reach beyond the online sphere and into "real-world" connection and influence.

Are there characteristics shared by successful online communities? What are they? Are any of them necessary qualities? Are any of them sufficient qualities? Can any of them be fostered or nurtured constructively, intentionally? Can they be DESIGNED?

And, perhaps more importantly, what is the purpose or output of these communities? How is economic value generated? In a sense, where does the marketplace begin and end -- to put it bluntly, under what terms can we authentically go after money and seek economic reward in this community without (as RT so delicately put it) being douchebags?

Sign up on the wiki -- we're planning to hold this on the morning of the 23rd, location TBD. Stay tuned and hang out in the comments!

Photo credit: Ivan Avramov.

Labels: Thinking

Ada Lovelace Day is being established, and I think it's a lovely holiday to observe. I wrote a brief post on the FreshBooks blog for it, as hundreds if not thousands of people read that blog, and I think perhaps three people read this one, so it seemed the right choice.

But Ada and I go back a ways.

See, Ada Lovelace is not only the First Lady of Computing (if you didn't know that, then you probably didn't know about Ada Lovelace day in the first place, so that's TWO things you've learned today. No, no, just doing my job, here), she's also the only legitimate daughter of the infamous Lord Byron, the original rock star. Byron pretty much invented the whole idea of celebrity — of being famous primarily for being famous.

Of course, Byron is a great writer, one of the best for my money, and his great work, Don Juan, is a masterpiece of rhyme and meter, but to be honest, in the early 1800's, when EVERYONE in Europe knew who he was, and ladies were fainting when he walked into salons, most of the people who knew him probably hadn't read much of his poetry. He was famous for being LORD BYRON.

Now I'm an open and ardent admirer of Byron's. So much so that when I went off to Japan, I took with me Steph's going-away-but-soon-to-be-reunited present: Byron's letters (well, a good few hundred of them, anyway), in a massive volume that offered them as a sort of autobiography. Many of them are hilariously delightful, as much for what he DOESN'T say as for what he does. So I've invested in my Byronophilia. I'm no expert, but I get by. I do get a charge out of software developers sending me his verses — FreshBooks has a clause in its software developer job posting saying that anyone who includes a verse of ottava rima with their application will get it reviewed by me personally. Entirely true, by the way, and since Byron is easily the dominant practitioner of the form in English, I get several verses of his poetry every week.

Usually the same verses, but what can you do? It's still funny stuff.

So ANYWAY, poor Ada grew up in her infamous father's shadow, though she never met him as an adult. But she certainly lived up to his celebrity fame — not with any real celebrity of her own, but with full-on accomplishment. 165 years ago Ada Lovelace wrote the very first computer program in history. She's the Queen of the Nerds. Mother Geek. The Ur-BOFH.

And yet, until 1953, she'd been pretty much entirely forgotten. The sad fate of celebrity kids, I guess — all anyone wants to know about you is what you know about dear old Dad, and since Ada had nothing to say about her notorious sire, I guess she vanished from history.

Until somebody published her translation of an Italian article on Charles Babbage's mad scheme to build an Analytical Engine, and it turned out that in her notes (which are considerably longer than the article itself) she wrote out the instructions of how one would set up the non-existent Engine so as to calculate the set of Bernoulli numbers. She also wrote some fantastically perceptive comments on what Babbage's invention really meant:

In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.

Obviously, these are the days before Twitter.

But she's seeing that the software/hardware divide (which in 1843 was pretty much human brains on one side, and the rest of the universe on the other) was closing. She was looking down a very very long road and seeing, dimly perhaps, but still, seeing where it led.

We may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

Keeping pace with our theoretical knowledge — I find this a fascinating way to look at the Information Revolution. We are nearing the point at which one person needs only to imagine something for it to be brought into being. The big problems nowadays in software seem to be largely design problems — which are problems with refining the idea, rather than manufacturing its "material and mechanical representative".

The imagination at work here is fearsome. In another part of the article she imagined that such devices could be programmed to create music! In 1843! No wonder Babbage called her the "Enchantress of Numbers". She was even able to foresee the immense value present in software development:

We have undoubtedly to lay out a certain capital of analytical labour in one particular line; but this is in order that the engine may bring us in a much larger return in another line.

I've been in the software business for over a decade now, and this is a pretty good summation of exactly what this nutty business is all about. Reading Ada's writing, I find it easy to imagine that she would see the necessary progression from the punch cards and rotating drums of Babbage's mad machine to agile methodologies, web frameworks and object-oriented design. She was 28 years old when she wrote that article, and dead less than ten years later, largely unheralded and forgotten until a hundred years later when her article was republished.

How strange that, given my long-standing infatuation with Lord Byron, I find myself spending years in the field created and defined by his daughter. My thanks to the Finding Ada project for bringing all this to my awareness. I think it's quite appropriate to have a day celebrating the birth of the Information Revolution. All we need now are some Hallmark cards.

Labels: Thinking

So spring has come,
Oh Jesus,
not again.
The cold has sunk too deep; too frozen now
the furrows of my heart; for any plow
would splinter here;
this chill-swept, dark terrain.
No, not for me;
this year, let me abstain.
Let wither further, wither all, allow
cold, stiff corrosion to gnaw at every vow.
Numb every oath, let nothing pure remain.
The only purity
is purity of ice,
for spring's encroachment on the land
brings but a new,
capricious tyranny.
Each year this joke gets harder to withstand:
that leaves sprout new, that swallows come on wing,
that mourners laugh, that winter
melts to
spring.

I still think this is the best thing I've ever written. Originally published in the Filling station calendar way back in, uh, '96 or so, I think. There is one defective line metrically (though I think it's a defensible variation) in the poem: a year's subscription FOR FREE to anyone who can point it out.

Photo by He and Fi.

Labels: Thinking

Expanding my horizons and
Expanding my parameters,
Expanding the rhymes of
Sucker MC amateurs

There's things I need to do more of, things I hope to do less of. Habits I need to acquire, habits I need to break. My life has been a steady (if not always directed) process of transformation, and yet so many of the things I do every day are things I have done since I was child. Habits learned long ago and trusted now despite all evidence to suggest they are neither healthy nor helpful.

I guess that's one of the things I like about swordfighting. It is entirely about learning new habits and letting go of old ones, and offers the hope that if we can change our habits in this odd little sphere, perhaps there's the possibility of changing them in other, wider spheres. The lesson of Katori practice, however, is that the process of changing one's habits is slow, frustrating and resistant to logic. You can't argue yourself out of your habits. You can't just decide to take on new ones. You have to PRACTICE.

Well, I do, anyway. And practice and practice and practice and then practice some more, realize I've been practicing the wrong thing and have to change all the stuff I've learned up till now anyway, practice, practice practice, watch myself and discover I'm STILL doing that dumb thing with my foot that Sensei pointed out on like my SECOND class, practice, practice, practice...

Art works the same way. I write and I write, and I hope to god I'm getting better, but I'm not sure I am. I came across a story I'd written back in, oh, probably Grade Three or so. It read pretty much the same as how I write today. Same turns of phrase, same sentence structure, same obsessions I have now. Same rip-offs of the same writers I'm still ripping off today. Writing is a habit. Practice, practice, practice.

It turns out management is likewise a habit-based discipline. Becoming a better manager is all about acquiring the right sorts of habits so that you end up having the right conversations at the right time, and I AM pretty sure I'm a better manager than I used to be.

What about leading, though? Is being a leader a question of the right habits? I THINK so. I think being an effective leader (and there are as many ways to do that as there are to be a great manager, writer or swordsman, I'd say) is about acquiring the habits of taking action. Seeing a gap and dreaming of what might fill it. Putting aside that fear of doing the WRONG thing and replacing it with the fear of doing NOTHING.

I need to expand my horizons. Indeed, my parameters. It seems like I'm always doing that, but I guess I am, so I guess it should seem so. Otherwise I guess I just remain a sucker MC amateur. Practice, practice, practice.

Photo: colinjcampbell

Labels: Thinking

On the left there is a picture from the now-legendary HoHoTO party. It's been on TV, it's been in the papers and all around the blogosphere and back again. A group of near-strangers came together and poured their energy into creating a charitable party. Nobody was in charge. Nobody gave orders. Nobody did anything they didn't want to do. And in a matter of days we raised $25,000.

$25,000.

What you're seeing there on the left is the DJ setup on stage (yes, the DJ is dressed as a Santa elf -- and yes, nobody did anything they didn't want to do -- you can figure out what that means), hundreds of people boogieing their faces off, and up on the wall an enormous screen displays live incoming Twitter messages tagged "#hohoto". Folks are making DJ requests via Twitter, and if you go to Flickr right now and search on "hohoto" you will see hundreds of photos people have posted of the beautiful craziness that ensued.

This is pretty awesome. I blogged before about how the future is looking pretty silly, and I think this is another part of the ongoing sillization of human society. And this is a GOOD thing.

Because while there's boogieing and Twittering and elf-dress-up-as-ing, there's also people having hard times, and current economic conditions aren't making that any better. But when people can come together in joy and silliness, and contribute to helping lessen those hard times, I say the world is getting better. I mean, we don't have flying cars yet, it's true -- but maybe there's more important work we ought to be doing besides flying around in cars. Because as cool as that would be, I'd rather there were less hungry people in the world than more flying cars.

HoHoTO was a tremendous success. It proves (if further proof were needed) that self-organizing groups can accomplish great things. I'm not sure it's a model for social change, but hopefully it will help to serve as an inspiration. The Toronto Twittersphere is all abuzz with ideas and movements and the notion of change and growth, and I truly believe that we're just opening the door to what's possible as the internets begin to realise the next stage of their potential. Somebody in there (might have been remarkk) mentioned the idea of "cells" like Resistance groups organized themselves in: each one self-sufficient and no more than distantly connected to the others, but sharing enough ideals and practices that they can work together to effect enormous change.

We don't need grand schemes anymore. We need tiny ones, but ones that infect others and replicate themselves. And silliness, as YouTube shows us, is pretty damn infectious. And as HoHoTO has shown us, it can deliver actual value to society.

Not sure I need to dress as an elf, however.

Labels: Thinking

The very nice folks at Sustainability Camp 2008 have asked if I would be able to speak at their event on Sunday.

Well, to be honest, they asked my boss. And he said, "No." And they said, "Oh, pooh. We're maybe short a space." And then he said, "Hey Corey, what are you doing Sunday afternoon?"

But after SO MUCH FUN talking at ProductCamp just a few short weeks ago (and I should really write a piece on that, there's a good idea), and of course considering that there are few things in this universe I love more than the sound of my own voice (the sound of Julie Andrews' voice, for instance), it was pretty much a done deal.

So it's not yet 100% clear if I'll be speaking there or not, but my topic if I am will be Sustainability in Communities. I'm fascinated by the problem of building self-sustaining communities -- sustaining from a SOCIAL rather than an economic point of view. How do you create a community that will last? What makes long-lasting self-organizing groups different from those that collapse?

Lots of possibilities there, I think. New-style companies like Ricardo Semler runs (or that Chris and I are talking about), online hobby-based communities, and grass-roots political organizations.

Any thoughts from out and beyond? Any experiences with communities that persisted beyond expectations?

Labels: Thinking

1. Disbelief

"Who wrote this!?"

2. Anger

"I'm not cleaning this up!"

3. Bargaining

"Okay, we'll fix up this module if you promise we'll just rewrite everything else."

4. Depression

"This is never going to get any better."

5. Acceptance

"I'll just create a wrapper..."

Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas, there.

Labels: Thinking

So along with a couple of other FreshBookers I'll be attending next month's ProductCamp here in Toronto Nov 2. I've proposed a session on the Big List so we'll see if folks are excited in hearing about that. If they are I'll make sure to post notes and so on here. For those who don't know, "the Big List" is kind of a cool system we've built at FreshBooks to manage our product management.

This is my first BarCamp event so I'm pretty excited!

If you're attending, let me know and let's try and cross paths.

FreshBooks is also sponsoring the after-Camp reception and we've got a fun challenge for product managers to show off their skills -- make sure you stop by and get your entry form.

Labels: Thinking

You've probably seen this already, or something like it, but it's important enough to keep passing around:

Anyone But Harper

That is all.

Labels: Thinking

At a table during last week's Business of Software conference, I met a fellow whose name escapes me now. Hardly a new occurrence for me, but I do recall the topic we were discussing.

His company does big data migrations for big government agencies. So for example if you're in charge of running the standardized health insurance across Ohio, you need data from every hospital in the state. And of course, each of these hospitals has been storing their data in some insane scheme that was cobbled together by the Pascal programmer who wrote the original record-keeping software back in 1975. It probably wasn't insane, actually. It probably made perfect sense. At the time.

The real problem isn't that this particular Pascal programmer was insane. The problem is that there was more than one Pascal programmer in Ohio in 1975 (I'm guessing, here, but give me a pass on that one). And so the solution that Pascal Programmer A chose for Hospital I was different (perhaps very different, perhaps a little different, doesn't matter) than the solution that Pascal Programmer B chose for Hospital II. Even if the SAME PATIENT was recorded in both hospitals, the data would look subtly different. Pascal Programmer A recorded First_Name and Last_Name as separate columns in a Patient_Data table, while Programmer B made sure NameF and NameL were stored as columns in a Personal_Info table. That's a trivial problem to solve, of course, if you're only worrying about these two databases. It gets more substantial if you're dealing with thousands of databases.

And not all problems in this space are trivial. The same data (or same types of data) can be stored in literally an infinite number of ways, and given the oft-frustrating creativity and ingenuity of people, you can bet that there will be as many variations as there were people involved in the varying.

So this gentleman I met obviously has his work cut out for him, and from what I could tell appears to be doing a roaring business handling this sort of thing. Because if you do want this sort of work done, there's really no solution other than to get a bunch of people to go through all your varied databases and manually map one set of data to the other, then perform whatever complicated trickery is required to do whatever conversion you've decided to implement so that at the end of the whole process, you have ONE dataset that includes everything all the originating databases contained.

And I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be amazing if somebody figured out how to automate this process? If all the data in the world could just be connected to all the other data in the world? You'd never have to transfer information around, you wouldn't have to keep track of things in various places and forget to update it here after you've updated it there. It would be a transformative thing for the world, if every piece of information we had could talk to every other piece."

I used to think the big problem right now was latency. That the next big innovation was going to appear as some way to accelerate our ability to transfer information from one place to the next. But data normalization on a global scale is BIGGER.

I don't know how it can be done. Just thinking about it, it seems like the most tedious manual process of trivial decision-making imaginable, and yet, how can you derive a process that can look through the masses of databases around the world and understand how they connect to each other? But once you'd done it, well, that would be a world-sized oyster facing you, right there.

I wish I were smarter.

And that's hardly a new occurrence for me, either.

Photo: "network spheres" by gerard79.

Labels: Thinking

Khai Pad Kraphao is pretty much the best lunch around the FreshBooks offices. Though I do admit I pick out the chilies -- once I took what I thought was going to be a tasty bite of crisp green bean and found I'd chomped into an entire green chili.

I like the taste, but that was a little much. Not to gross anyone out, but I could tell exactly where that chili was in my digestive tract for the rest of the day. Oog.

But Rich and I were talking over our Thai food today, and in particular talking about the ideas of that crazy Brasilian, Ricardo Semler, and in particular particular, the notion of "public" salaries, and we decided that one of the things we liked best about that idea was how it enforced what we called "upwards accountability".

See, if everyone in the company knows when you give someone else in the company a raise, you'd better have good reasons for that raise or else you're going to have trouble answering their questions. Which forces you to actually THINK about how and why you give out raises, and to have a policy that's defensible in place. It makes you accountable to your employees, and it seemed to us, as aromas of basil, chili, and lemongrass came curling up from our plates, that such accountability is actually a good thing.

Because that accountability forces you to be active and organized, and to maintain your focus on the things that, as a leader, you should actually be focusing on. Defining your POLICY on raises is a more powerful action, a more important action, than deciding exactly how much one individual raise ought to be.

Of course, it's harder. Much easier to focus in on a narrower scope, a single relationship, than to try and design an organization. And yet, organizational design is, in my mind, the real job of a leader.

So policies that encourage or even enforce "upwards accountability" are the sorts of policies that a leader ought to seek out and pursue. We identified public salaries as such a policy. And I think public performance reviews are probably another.

I wonder if there are others?

That's the gas cap of an Aston Martin up there. Photo by Jeffrey van Bijleveld

Labels: Thinking

I noticed that I've started building up a certain body of thought on management. It's entirely ripped off from other, much smarter (though possibly not quite as intensely good-looking) people, but isn't that part of the beauty of the Internet? The ability to shamelessly rip others off while aggrandizing ourselves. Yes, sir. Anyway, here's a quick round-up of some of the more management-y posts I've made over the past couple of years:

Approach 3: The Path to Hiring Great Talent

The best strategy for finding awesome people is to spend your time making yourself more and more awesome.

Couch Time

They took the couch away, of course, and projects started falling over. Way it goes.

The Zero-Tolerance Inbox

Not doing any work is key to getting lots done. Be lazy!

The 501 Method

See, the receipts in the pocket isn't the clever bit. The CLEVER bit is that when I get home, I take everything in my pockets out of my pockets, and pile it up.

Ding Ding Ding

Every single document that isn't used is organizational noise.

Everything I Needed to Know About Management I Learned From Satan

You stop arguing when you see someone so ready to commit. Logic isn't what motivates and excites teams. Commitment in the face of risk is what gets that ball rolling.

The Secret of the Whiteboard

It's interesting to note how some technologies are so fundamental that they're almost impervious to design improvement.

Art != Guitar

All of us need new information presented to us in the context of what we already understand, or else we just keep forcing the conversation back into our context.

A Purpose Worthy of Commitment

What's drawn me to management, I realise now, is my lifelong conviction that honesty, courage, humility and compassion really ARE the best ways to get things done and to make the world a better place.

Labels: Thinking

A big part of my role right now at FreshBooks is hiring software developers. We’re trying to grow this team, to be able to meet the challenges of our expanding business, and that means hiring hiring hiring.

I’ve talked before about the importance of finding great people. But I wanted to talk here about a potential strategy for doing so. I call it “Approach Three”.

Steve Yegge has an interesting take on the problem, and identifies two basic approaches to finding superhero-level developers:

Approach 1: Get Lucky

Approach 2: Ask Everyone in the Whole World

He recommends #1, reasonably enough. I agree that it’s far more likely to yield positive results. Desperate attempts to network are doomed to backfire since anyone can see through that sort of self-centered socializing.

I think there’s a third approach.

Approach 3: Be Awesome

Great people can recognize not-great people really well — that’s one of the skills you need to acquire if you want to be truly great at anything. If you want to be an awesome tennis player, you need to learn how to evaluate other tennis players so that you don’t spend your time playing against crappy players who can’t teach you anything.

So you need to be awesome. The best strategy for finding awesome people is to spend your time making yourself more and more awesome. The great thing about Approach 3 is that even if you don’t find anyone at all, you’re more awesome than you were. Which makes it even easier to attract even AWESOMER people.

Getting Awesome

Start with recognizing that software developers are not factory workers — software isn’t something you assemble, it’s something you design. The energy that generates it is creative, not mechanical.

Here at FreshBooks we’re focusing on a few key things to increase the awesomeness of our team. We’re making sure our developers get chances to work on stuff they think is important. We’re making it easier and faster to deploy safely and reliably. We’re now managing business priorities separate from day-to-day task management. We’re making sure our developers get to spend the majority of their time solving problems in code, rather than sitting in meetings or filling out forms. Or waiting.

It’s working out. Increasingly we get resumes from people who say, “I’ve heard fantastic things about your company — it sounds like the sort of place where I want to work.”

And there’s a very clear correlation between people who say that and people who seem pretty awesome.

Down the road, what we need to do is to focus externally as well — not just being more awesome, but finding better ways to broadcast that awesomeness. But that can’t take away from our basic need to be awesome. Without that, our broadcasting is just phony PR, and the truly awesome ones will see right through it.

In other news, FreshBooks is hiring. If you’re awesome, click here.

Sunir kicked ass editing this. The original post is over at the FreshBooks blog.

Labels: Thinking

We're discussing options for growing our office at FreshBooks, and somebody jokingly said, "Couches for everyone!" -- which got me thinking about the Queen.

See, the Queen came to Vancouver a bunch of years ago, and her route took her past our office at NGRAIN. I don't know where she was coming from or going to, but in any event, somehow everyone knew that the Queen would be going by that afternoon. (if you don't know, I'm kind of a fan of the Queen)

And conveniently, my couch was right next to the window overlooking the street. So everyone gathered at my couch and watched a Rolls with blacked-out windows drive by, flanked by motorcycle cops.

It wasn't really MY couch. Originally it had been somewhere else. In a meeting room, I think, where nobody ever sat on it, which troubled me, because it looked like such a comfortable couch. So I think it was Ivan and perhaps Derek and I who one day just picked it up and moved it to the window beside my desk. We brought a potted plant along as well, and so suddenly beside my desk was this nice little nook where someone could plop down and take a break.

Which turned out to be a great information-sharing device. I was managing half-a-dozen projects for NGRAIN at that time, and so I'd have stakeholders and developers and QA folks come round once or twice a day just to flop on my couch and hide from the crazy levels of work everyone was dealing with. And they'd tell me how their day was going, and very often just happen to mention that they were roadblocked on something, or that a date was not realistic, or that they were done a bunch of stuff ahead of time and really didn't have anything to do.

That couch made me about TEN times more effective a project manager than I would have been if I'd had to walk around and ASK everyone how they were doing. Possibly eleven. It was so easy to find out what was going on because folks would just come round and tell me. I didn't have to insist on weekly reports, or complicated time tracking systems, or anything fancy at all. I just needed a comfy couch.

They took the couch away, of course, and projects started falling over. Way it goes. Nowadays they probably pay a couple hundred dollars a month for some project management software, and congratulate themselves on spending so wisely. "Look! I can sort all tickets by estimate time divided by actual time, superimposed on a calendar and translated to the new Gantt 2.3 format!"

Rubbish.

The lesson I learned from the couch was that if you structure your HUMAN environment so that information naturally flows to where it needs to get, AND you make sure that you're open and available for that information, you don't need a bunch of complicated tracking systems. It's less expensive and it makes for a far more pleasant environment.

We're social creatures (demented and sad, but social). The real art of project management is about understanding our social needs and inclinations, and working with those to help a team work together.

The Queen drove by (at least, I assume the Queen was in the blacked-out Rolls; for all I know she took the Skytrain) and the entire project team sat around arguing over whether or not the British royalty had any worth in today's world. No milestones got knocked off that day, and we didn't track that half hour against any project tasks. But as the team went back to work, I remember being pleased that we'd all come together as the social beings we are, and taken some time that didn't need to be accounted for just to share our worlds with each other. Sitting on a couch arguing politics may not seem like something that improves project effectiveness, but a shared world is really what it's all about. Once a team has built that shared view, anything is possible.

It's not my job to tell people what to do. It's not my job to get them inspired and "motivated". My job is actually very simple: to observe how people are communicating and to help alleviate any breakdowns in that communication, so that a shared world can emerge. One of the best tools I ever found for that was a beat-up old couch.

Photo: Kia Abell

Labels: Thinking

Nearly two years ago I started thinking about how to restructure my life so that my work, my passions, and my soul could begin to converge. That process has led me on some unexpected journeys, and introduced me to folks I am now honoured to count among my society, and these days, it feels more and more like I've managed to honestly integrate all the things in my life that matter to me.

A lot of things are helping me with this, not least still Peter Senge's wonderful book, The Fifth Discipline, which is what sparked the original idea of all this in me.

And now I've maybe moved on to a new stage. I've joined FreshBooks as their new Software Development Manager (or as my new business cards say, "Chief Cat Herder"). This is a fantastic company that is based on the kinds of foundations I tried so hard to establish at previous places, only to discover that I can't do it myself.

You can't fake a collaborative environment based on the idea of a learning organization. You can't pretend to hand power over to your employees. It's really one of those all-or-nothing things. Either your employees are trusted to handle their responsibilities, or they aren't. Either you care about bringing value to your customers, or you don't.

I've been at FreshBooks for nearly a month now, and they walk the walk. Everyone here is utterly concerned with making sure our customers are insanely happy. And that translates into making sure our co-workers are insanely happy.

So I'm pretty much insanely happy right now.

And more than that! I mean, it gets better.

I can't reveal all the details yet, but there's a few like-minded collaborators, mostly folks I've picked up in my many travels, who are putting the final touches on a whole new thing. A thing unlike anything you've seen. Pretty much.

The DINO-PIRATES are by no means forgotten, nor have they been left to fend for themselves. We've been working on them all along, and darn soon now, we're going to have some SERIOUS revealage to undertake. These fantastic illustrations are just a backdrop to what's going to put a lot of folks into a great big "Holy Crap!" bit of shock and awe.

It's starting to feel like 2008 is gaining a little traction, and as I surmised, it's turning out to be a year entirely unlike any other. I have no idea where it's going, and I don't feel even a little bit in control. But I'm finding the illusion of control is dropping easily from my eyes, and in its place I find the ability to savour the turns and twists that my life is undergoing more satisfying, and more enjoyable, than any sense of my own power.

I tell my co-workers this all the time: "I'm making this up as I go." It worked for Indy alright, why shouldn't it work for me?

I've been reading some of the essays of Montaigne (French guy, 1500's), and came across this passage in the last of them, "Of Experience":

Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all. To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

I was engaged in a discussion on a message board I sometimes frequent that got into why folks did or didn't choose to follow particular religions. I didn't post this idea, but it occurred to me in reviewing that discussion, that something I have sought in the study of swordsmanship is a practice that can help me to learn how to, in Montaigne's words, "live appropriately".

For some reason I have faith that if I simply focus on living appropriately, and do not spurn the opportunities that come my way, that things will turn out. That I will be able to "accomplish" things and to do what is required wherever I find myself. This faith has grown stronger all my life, and one thing I've learned in all the upheaval and trauma my life has gone through in the past few months is that often the best thing for me to do is simply to relax.

These are beginnings. In a sense, things are always beginning.

Labels: Thinking

"Sword and foot!" is one of those phrases I associate with my time at Sugino Dojo; I can clearly recall Sugino Sensei roaring that at me again and again: "Sword and foot! Sword and foot!"

He was reminding me of a basic tenet of Katori Shinto Ryu: that the sword must act in concert with the body. When the sword starts moving, the foot starts moving. When the sword stops, the foot stops. Sword and foot.

This principle is evident in the most basic fundamental of Katori Shinto Ryu, the straight head cut called maku-uchi men. As the sword rises up, the front foot draws back until, when the sword reaches it apex over our heads, the front foot reaches the rear foot and we are standing with our feet together. And so as the strike comes down; the sword begins its descent and the front foot slides forward, so that at the moment the sword completes its movement, the foot has returned to its original spot and we are once again standing at the ready.

It sometimes seems like an impossibly difficult thing to manage, to cause an external object to move in perfect timing with our own body. I joke that I have never performed maku-uchi correctly, but it's not exactly a joke. Getting the sword and the foot to move in perfect synchronization challenges my awareness and my coordination.

Hence Sensei's constant admonishment: "Sword and foot!"

But learning to work in concert with the world around me has been a fundamental lesson, and it seems that the better I get at making that sword move in time with myself, the better I get and doing the same with other, more abstract features of the world.

It's not just a case of imposing my will on the world around me. That can get me to MOVE the sword, but in order to operate synchronously with it, I need to move myself in accordance with the laws of physics that govern the movement of a piece of steel. I need to enter into a more complex relationship with the sword, one that accepts and embraces its needs as well as my own.

I find the lesson over and over again in my life. Repeatedly I learn to forgo simply directing, or commanding, and to embrace connecting and joining.

Interdependence, not independence.

Especially when dealing with things considerably more complex and unpredictable than swords. Like, say, software developers. I find it very difficult to get software developers to do exactly what I want them to do. Which is probably a good thing, since I'm particularly ill-suited to telling them what to do, not really being much of a software developer myself. Doing my job properly (and by the way, I have a new job; more later) involves very little directing and a great deal of harmonizing. Connecting.

It's kind of hard to describe. Sort of like maku-uchi. I can show you how it's done (sort of), and I practice it a lot, but descriptions never really manage to get the idea across. Likewise managing teams. It's all sort of mysterious and beyond the ability of rationality to encompass. These are things that cannot (and perhaps should not) be put into words, but that can only be embodied in practice.

"Tao" character from Zen Sekai

Labels: Swordfighting, Thinking

Along the lines of The 501 Method is another simple technique I use to keep myself organize. This one actually does have a name: it's the Zero-Tolerance Inbox.

The basic idea is really part of the fundamental principles of Getting Things Done, but I find GTD a little "heavy" for my daily use. I just try to focus on a couple of very basic techniques and implement them with as much discipline as I can muster.

The Zero-Tolerance Inbox is primary among these.

By Zero-Tolerance I mean that I allow nothing to remain in my inbox. I am not happy unless my inbox is empty, and I do whatever I can responsibly do to get everything that arrives in my inbox out of my inbox as quickly as possible.

Most emails that arrive are signals of some sort -- telling me that an action has been completed. For the most part, these emails can be immediately deleted. Once I know the action has been completed, there's usually no call for me to be involved anymore, so I scan these emails, look for anything out of place, and delete. Simple.

Some emails are requests for action. These have to be either done immediately or moved to whatever the action management system is.

(I sure like the idea of an Action Management System. It sounds like something that organizes car chases or something. Anyway.)

Most software shops have an issue management system, or a bug tracking system, or whatever. Emails asking me to get something like that done (bug reports, requests for data, angry denunciations of our interface design) need to get put into that system and tracked there. Again, simple and quick to do.

For my personal life, I have a very simple To-Do list using 37 Signals' awesome Backpack tool. So if I get an email from someone that describes a thing I decide I need to do, I add an item to my to-do list and delete the email.

Some emails are requests for information. These are often the most effort, but often the truth is that somebody else is better-informed than I (actually, that's pretty much ALWAYS the truth), and so I can dispatch the request to them and again, delete. Sometimes the better-informed person is not quite so available and in these cases I actually have to do some work. You'll note all the previous examples mostly allow me to avoid doing any work whatsoever. Not doing any work is key to getting lots done. Be lazy!

That covers probably 99% of the emails I receive. The remaining 1% are weird things like "I was thinking we should reorganize the company so that we can start selling soft-serve ice cream from the QA department. What do you think about that?"

Or, in other words, emails from the executives. For the most part, these can be safely ignored.

The key, like that of the 501 Method, is to avoid making things easy for yourself in the short term. Embrace the short-term pain of dealing with each and every item the moment it arrives. The Zero-Tolerance Inbox is a way of refusing to allow work to pile up just because you don't know what to do with it. If you don't know, this method forces you to find out. Enjoy it. Make a game out of it.

I mean, not Grand Theft Auto or anything. More like pinochle.

Photo: Dan Mulligan

Labels: Thinking

Reading Mr. Tony Judt's lovely elegy for history in the New York Review of Books, I was struck by this phrase: "Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data.".

Particularly the use of the word "near".

Is the amount of data to which we have access to best described as "near-infinite"? Or is "infinite" itself a better descriptor?

There are now well over 2 million articles on Wikipedia. There are 24,000 texts on Project Gutenberg. Little Canada published 20,000 new books last year; the United Kingdom published over 200,000.

Even assuming a great deal of overlap, there's a phenomenal amount of data being created on a daily basis in our world. If data is being created faster than anyone can ingest it, doesn't that mean that there actually is an infinite amount of data available to us?

What does that mean? What does it mean to say that nobody can grasp human knowledge? Or even keep up? How do we keep track of where we are if none of us can take in enough of the new data to maintain a "50,000-foot view" of the human race's progress?

I think it partly means abandoning the idea of progress in the first place. How can anything so unsupervisable be referred to as "progress"?

Mr. Judt's axes are sharpening in a different direction; he is taking on the idea that torture could ever be acceptable in a republic devoted to freedom. But I think part of what makes Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib possible is the "infinity of data" that he tosses off -- in a world where we accept that we can never acquire ALL the information, aren't we in danger of being unable to ever trust that we have all the RELEVANT information?

And without all the relevant information, how does each one of us find our way? Step by step, through the fog, always uncertain of our path? It's strange to think that an infinity of data requires us to shrink our horizons, to minimize our worlds. But maybe stepping smaller and lighter isn't such a bad thing.

Bridge photo: Utpal Deka

Labels: Thinking

I'm not an organized person by nature. I have a terrible memory.

(really, I'm not kidding. My memory (or rather, the gaping hole in my brain where other people have a memory) is legendary. I've forgotten things you people wouldn't believe. I forgot that I'd planned a department-wide trip to a local gallery. I forgot my family's vacation to Hawaii -- it was only when my Mom came in to find out why I wasn't packing that anybody realised I didn't even know we were going on holiday. That day. As in, the rest of the family was IN THE CAR, waiting for me.)

So in order to make it through an ordinary work day, I have to take some extraordinary measures, otherwise everything I'm supposed to get done falls apart. For example, I have to write EVERYTHING down. Anything that Corey doesn't write down doesn't get stored. As those who know me say, "Corey doesn't use his brain for storing things. Besides dinosaurs."

It's true. My brain does feature a remarkable collection of dinosaur-related data. But career opportunities in the dinosaur field are few and far between. And pay like crap.

So anyway, this morning I was in Le Gourmand, picking up my sandwich, when it occurred to me that one of my principal organizing systems was a little idiosyncratic, and might, at least, provide some light entertainment for my three readers (hi JAmes).

And maybe even be useful, if (like me) you occasionally suffer from memory lapses, and (like me) don't find new toys particularly helpful.

My organization system doesn't require web applications, moleskin notebooks, iPhones or even sticky notes.

I call it The 501 Method. Well, that's a lie. I don't call it anything. But the primary tool required IS a pair of Levi 501 jeans, and The 501 Method sounds kind of catchy.

Actually, any article of clothing with a pocket will do -- though it's best if it's an article you wash regularly. The key here is inconveniencing yourself a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit. A little inconvenience is how I keep myself organized.

Basically, I put stuff in my pockets.

I know that doesn't sound too remarkable, and perhaps it isn't, but bear with me.

See, I HATE having my pockets all full of stuff. And key to this whole process is doing things I hate. So I don't organize this stuff. I don't put it in a neat little wallet or something so it won't get munched up. That would reduce the inconvenience, which is counter-productive for The 501 Method.

The stuff, in particular, is pieces of paper. Receipts, or to-do items, or whatever I need to track. Mostly receipts. Whenever I buy something, I ask for the receipt, and I put it in my pocket.

"Okay," I can hear you saying, "You put receipts in your pockets. Fantastic. Great. Earth-shattering."

But see, the receipts in the pocket isn't the clever bit. The CLEVER bit is that when I get home, I take everything in my pockets out of my pockets, and pile it up in front of my iMac.

The iMac isn't really critical to The 501 Method. I know, neither are the 501s, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

So far, the critical bits are:

1. Pocket (for putting things in)
2. Things (for putting in and taking out of pockets)

So you don't really need the iMac so much just yet. What you do need is a place where the receipts will get in the way. Where you can't just keep piling them up day after day.

Remember, inconvenience is what this The 501 Method all about.

So we've gone from stuffing things in our pockets to piling things up in front of an iMac. Onwards.

What happens now is that eventually I get so frustrated with the pile of receipts in front of my iMac that I take action. For myself, I record expenses in a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet is kind of like the iMac -- interesting, perhaps as a personal detail (hey, Corey knows what a spreadsheet is), but not a key part of the process.

No, our critical bits list for The 501 Method has increased by one:

1. Pocket (for putting things in)
2. Things (for putting in and taking out of pockets)
3. Place (for putting things)

You'll note that the pocket and the place are similar. In fact, we've already wrapped this process and are back at the beginning, so really, the whole process only involves steps 1 and 2.

1. Have a pocket
2. Put things in it.

It's all about inconveniencing yourself so that you end up having to deal with things. Really, I've just inculcated in myself a certain tolerance towards inconvenience, and a caution whenever I find myself doing something that makes things more convenient for myself. Because typically convenience ends up not so convenient. The 501 Method is about embracing inconvenience.

So I'm skeptical of anyone who tries to convince me that a new tool or a new process will make things more convenient for me. The capacity to get things done doesn't necessarily involve things being convenient.

I know The 501 Method is never going to catch on. It's not complicated enough. It doesn't have enough steps. It would be hard to write a book, launch a lecture series or even a PowerPoint presentation about it. Heck, I can't even turn it into a line of clothing without getting sued by venerable Levi Strauss' great-grand-nephews.

Which would be profoundly inconvenient.

Labels: Thinking

One of the things virtually every software office will tell you, usually with a sheepish sort of "Yeah, we know" kind of expression, is that their documentation sucks.

Everyone knows updated docs are critical. Everyone knows outdated docs are deadly.

And yet, I've never walked into a place where people didn't tell me their documentation sucked.

Why this happens is pretty well understood -- everyone's busy and there's always tasks to do that either

A) are more critical to company health; or B) are easier. Usually, it's B.

Because let's face it, updating documentation feels like being the art critic, compared to the artist who's out there fixing bugs or launching new campaigns. In the words of H.L. Mencken, it's like being the bell ringing frantically at the crossing as the train roars past. All the action is really up with the train. Who wants to be the crossing signal?

But the organization isn't just the train, it's the whole map: the tracks, the highways, the farms inbetween, all that. And (bear with me as this metaphor starts to creak under the strain) in that respect, the crossing signals are critical elements in making sure the trains, cars, pedestrians and what not don't run headlong into each other.

I was standing at Spadina and Richmond, the other day, waiting to cross, and watching oncoming traffic, and the light changed and I just stepped out in front of thousands of pounds of fast-moving steel. It occurred to me that I didn't have to make any sort of contact with the drivers of each and every vehicle coming my way in order to be sure that they would stop -- the crossing signal took care of that for me.

It seems like much of our technology can be understood as mechanisms for enabling communication between large groups of strangers. A crossing signal is really a way for me to send a message to a few hundred drivers, saying, "Okay, I'm crossing the street now. Please stop." Because I don't have to create a relationship with each and every driver on the road, I can get to work even though there's thousands of people trying to travel down the same roads I am. If I had to negotiate each and every social interaction as I travelled, it would take me hours to get to work.

Crossing signals simplify social interactions.

So does corporate and process documentation. And, understanding these organizational tools as crossing signals maybe helps to explain why keeping them up to date is so important.

And why, fundamentally, doing so is the boss' job. Not that it's the boss' job to decide on everyone else's process and tell them what to do, but it is up to the boss (note that we're using the term "boss" here pretty loosely. You decide if that's you or not) to make sure that the signals are up to date, that they are actually helping to manage the flow of traffic -- not just flashing pointlessly while everyone moving through the intersection ignores them.

A lot of things can make documents useless: inaccurate information is only one. Besides being out of date, plenty of corporate docs are just boring, if not actually painful. An organization where communication skills are not valued ends up with reams of documents that can't be understood or that just don't connect with readers and get them on board. And every single document that isn't used is organizational noise -- imagine if the city were full of crossing signals, multiple signals at each intersection, some of which were accurate and some of which weren't. In order to get anywhere you'd have to have someone show you which signals to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. This is exactly the situation in most offices -- you get led by the hand through a maze of outdated documents and told which ones matter and which ones don't. The latter list is almost always larger. Much larger.

Tools can help, but whether they use Word or Wikis or whatever, the real answer for most offices is investment in communication skills and the time needed to develop and most importantly maintain documents. This is why (and perhaps I'm biased on this point, what with an English degree and all, but still) solid writing skills are essential for a company to thrive. Along with a boss who understands the value of reliable crossing signals.

Ding ding ding....

Typewriting photo: Roberto Clix. Crossing Signal photos: Michal Zacharzewski

Labels: Thinking