Author: Howard Lieberman

Lets face it when endusers are made to feel stupid because of using new products or apps it is not their fault. Endusers are not stupid they are human. On the other hand when a product is designed that reduces the self esteem of the enduser this is not the endusers fault!  We have been learning over the last thirty years to greatly simplify and even eliminate in some cases documentation.  Some companies do this to save money and others do it because they value people’s time and state of mind.  Evolved designs do not need much documentation to operate. Case in point – the automobile. Many people happily operate their cars without ever looking at the manual at all.  Manuals come in cars in an attempt to make complex systems safer, more usable and as on ramp to advanced features and maintenance specifications.

The flattening of the world internationalizes product usage, increasing the importance of simplifying or eliminating operating directions. The fastest and easiest way to learn, is to ask questions. Some of our devices now permit this in forms which bring smiles to some and frowns to others.  Fortunately, the degree to which out products adapt to us instead of us adapting to them is increasing.  However there are very many situations inexcusably where the customer is made to feel stupid.

This can be radically reduced by making out interaction with machines more like our interactions with people in one very powerful way. By making interactions both hands free and eyes free, through the better use and integration of sound.  This will not be accomplished by simply replacing the keyboard, mouse and trackpad with a microphone, and continuing to use the same operating systems.  Sound centric communication is potentially the largest killer app of all time if executed excellently because it will increase instead of decreasing the self esteem of all of its users.  When adults encourage children to learn to speak they do not do it by making  them feel like something is wrong with them. They encourage any attempts at all as much as possible.

We can design systems in the same way. Imagine your computer saying this to in response to you saying “print”.

 So you want to print something? 

 You have been working on five different files int eh last twenty minutes which one do you want me to print?

 By the way there are three different printers you use regularly I know about. The one in your house, in your office next to your desk and the shared high volume color one.

 Which one do you want me to print to?

 Do you want me to format it in your usual manner – two sided with page numbers?

 

And as you use it more it asks less questions and can summarize – “printing two sides to the color laser at the end of the hall, is that okay”.  This completely eliminates the need for menus, windows, or possibly even being in the same room as your devices.   Kind of like having a staff member.  Breakthrough operating systems development has somewhat stalled. I for one am ready for a hands free, eyes free, menus free, windows free mode of operation.

This does not have to be instead of but in addition to. Why do you think we still have radios? Because we do not want to stop what we are doing to do something as trivial as checking the weather or printing a document.  Now I hear some of you saying wait we have devices in our house listening to help us buy stuff isn’t that the same thing? Well yes they are on the path and at the same time they are also listening to you, in order to capture information making it easier to get things done in the future. Presently they are more about consuming than producing.  Lets bring this technology to leverage ourselves in creating and producing.

In prior lives, as the primary sound guy at Apple after being the primary computer guy at Bose I have been part of this dance for a long time.

As our world continues to accelerate, generating increasingly more information and knowledge, it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine exactly what to teach the next generation to best prepare them for the future. Increasing complexity and interdependence is added to this somewhat overwhelming situation, where the half-life of what we know continually shrinks. To exemplify this, earlier in my professional development, science training seemed to be more persistent than engineering training. As an electro-acoustician and digital signal processor, it seemed the laws and practices of acoustics, a primary branch of physics required far less reading to stay current, than the more rapidly exploding field of electrical engineering which digital signal processing was part of.  The notion that knowledge could have a half-life, directly impacts the ratio of learning to creating. It was taking more energy to keep up in engineering, than it did in science, leaving less energy to be creating tomorrow than learning about the past. Perhaps this was because science tends to ask Why, while engineering tends to ask How.

Why, a more conceptually abstract notion than How, relies more upon principles than recipes. As most facts are manifestations of underlying principles, it is more economical to retain concepts than facts, although it can be more difficult to learn concepts. Perhaps this is why there are many less physics majors than engineering majors in schools. Or perhaps it is because engineers are more employable than scientists.

Humans have always had a lot to cope with and keep track of. This lead to generating and compiling the wisdom literature seekers have been returning to for thousands of years. Most of the expanding crop of self-help books are recycled wisdom literature. It is easier to read about what to do, than about the way things are. Is life more difficult now than thousands of years ago? This is doubtful, but life is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of today, raising the issue of how to best educate ourselves and next generations. If we have to get better at getting better, than the only hope for each of us is to learn how to learn.

Many currently relevant facts, tools, apps, recipes and algorithms will no longer apply in five or fifty years. Therefore, the notion we can fill up a person’s mind with what is needed so they can stop learning is no longer true, if it ever was. In order to navigate the increasing complex world, we live in, we have to be constantly learning, for the world is constantly changing. And it is not changing slowly, it is changing quickly further increasing the criticality of learning to learn, fast and well.

The evolution from agricultural, to industrial to Information Age has enabled a shift of mental models, where confidence and abundance can replace fear and scarcity. The world’s population has more than tripled in my life so far. Clearly we cannot solve our problems simply by taking things away from each other, but only by creating more resource, a skill which humans have a demonstrated a terrific proclivity for. The only way this is going to happen, is by each individual contributing more value to the world, not by each individual consuming more. Those who are the better learners, will become the better earners.

If we want a world with less fear, we had better spend a little more time learning to learn – than learning to consume. There is no other way we will find our way to a more equitably distributed abundance. We already have created and continue to create plenty of abundance. Technology and the tech sector have been deriving the world economy for decades. Agricultural societies required the majority of their populations to focus on creating food and shelter, and harvesting energy. In the information age under 10% of the population provides all of the food, shelter and energy we need. There is not scarcity, there is a distribution problem. Greed and hoarding are artifacts of a different age. In an information society it is the sharing of information that creates value. Information has very little value in isolation.

In short, fixing out world is quite straight forward – shift from the insecurity and fear of a scarcity model which causes hoarding, to the ebullience of distributed shared abundance. There is only one way to create more, and that is through innovation, applied insight. If fear continues to cause people to resist new ideas like sharing and abundance, we may have a great dieback when much of humanity perishes.

The way innovation and new ideas can be embraced, is through a better educated population, who learns how to learn and does it pretty soon. There is no question humans can solve all of their problems in the same way they always have, and that is through innovation. But just because a person has potential does not mean they will flourish. Talent is not enough to save us. Hard work is not enough to save us. Clarity of intention is not enough to save us. Integrating human’s proclivity to adapt, create and innovate with hard work, clear intentions, clarity of purpose, and learning how to learn, to make our efforts are more effective can solve every single problem we are facing.

Time to stop trying to cram our heads full of soon to be obsolete facts. Time to stop cramming our closets full of soon to be obsolete possessions. Time to learn to learn, so we can focus on solving problems by letting go of what we do not need whether it be obsolete mental models, pieces of information or stuff.

Humanity has the goods – we are natural powerful innovators who can create anything and everything we need. Time to change the obsolete attitudes and mental models holding us back.

LEARN TO LEARN to become Better at Getting Better.

Okay everyone, everywhere in every company, every country and every type of practice has the same overwhelming issue to deal with. Your world is bigger than you are. That means there will never be enough time, energy and other required resources to deal with all of the things you would like to deal with. This is true for the most powerful people in the world and it is also true for the most down on their luck. And since we are making our world both more complicated and larger every day at an accelerating rate, the problem is not going to go away, ever, unless we inadvertently destroy a large portion of the world and make it much simpler as in a great dieback.

Now for the good news! Choose Your Model! Since you and everyone else is clearly dealing with some sub dimensional reality, as opposed to the entirety what is happening, you and everyone else, are operating within some set of boundaries that you can cope with, or some subdimensional model of reality. Just how conscious each of us are of the models we are living within varies from person to person, and is time varying within each person.

We are all self organizing and hence self modeling to some degree. Incarcerated people have some choices about how they spend their time and what ideas or beliefs they invest their energy and effort into. At the other end of the spectrum some are choosing which cruise to which country to book a berth on. Some people have probably even occupied both of these stations in life.

Humanity is now reaching a decision point where we will have to become more conscious of the subdimesional model we embrace or possibly lose the ability to choose at all, because we have become powerful enough that a misstep may be unrecoverable from.

This is a good time for seekers to re-read the wisdom literature, which is after all about how to be in the world. It is also a good time for people who have not become seekers to begin to seek some answers while there is time to do so. There is no question that we are capable of constructing conscious models that can help us to survive. We have done it for thousands of years and created an entire body of works collectively known as the wisdom literature which has withstood the test of time by continuing to help people cope with situations.

Try to remember these subdimensional frameworks are all models created by us, which means we can choose to modify, accept or discard any ideas we meet. And yes there will always be consequences to the decisions and choices we make.

But the important thing to remember is we do have, and always have had choice, and that models are not reality but subset projections of it. We live in our choices, not in reality. So try to choose wisely and do not be afraid to discard or alter models that are not working for you. This is sometimes called reframing or re-contextualizing. In the most extreme cases it can be called revolution, which I do not recommend as voluntarily creating that much of a discontinuity can be even more dangerous than the alternative, to have inclusive co-created models. Without collaboration we are not going to make it much further as a species who enjoys the freedoms to grow, change and evolve.

The very simplest choice we can make, is between fear and confidence, sometimes called scarcity and abundance. Do you want to be in a shrinking declining world or a growing evolving one? It is really each person’s choice and that choice will determine which subset of infinity you embrace.

Howard’s SVII super short Innovation definition. Innovation = Applied Insight. Have you noticed how difficult it is decline with grace? What you say, you have never experienced decline? Never been in a new project, activity or startup not in the under 1% that never became a unicorn? Most of us have experienced some sort of decline in love, business, health or just keeping our computers, cars and phones working. And most of us have also experienced various types of ascent into new relationships, jobs or learning curves. Plenty of mistakes are made by every creative person all of the time, but they seem to hurt more when declining then when ascending. Decline causes a sense of scarcity, sometimes evolving into fear. Scarcity is rational to those living on a fixed or declining income. Just as abundance is rational when things are going great.

The best way to get to abundance is to invent some new turf to play in. A market, a company, a technology, a relationship or a new skill set. Another word for this is innovation. You (or others nearby) have an insight which can be applied and adopted. Insight is where abundance comes from. When people are feeling afraid, they are unlikely to take chances unless and until they are so afraid, that they have to.

Economies can crash based on fear (the scarcity model) or skyrocket based on optimism (the abundance model). Same is true of civilizations, romance and every other thing of value. The tangible is always modulated by the intangible, so we had better get our intangibles straight. The long term answer to making the world work is abundance not scarcity, and widespread abundance is not going to be achieved by taking what someone else has, away from them. Long term this simply leads to revolution or oppression but not abundance. Fear is not the way to thrive. It maybe a way to survive but at what cost and in what state. There are many who would rather not be alive than to live always being afraid and they do take big chances. The alternative is abundance which is within every persons reach. Abundance begins as an intangible, before it can evolve into a tangible. Yes there are plenty of examples of people doing well at others expense but this is not a long term solution to help billions of people to make it. It is more on the path to a great species die back, not on the path to a sustainable future for humanity.

There is only one long term future model which can survive and it is abundance. The good news is innovation is the primary mechanism by which abundance occurs. Which means there is always a potential solution. The even better news is humans have evolved to be genetically terrific at adaptation, creativity or innovation, whatever term you choose, they all support abundance. We are the very best species at creating or destroying tomorrow. Scarcity vs. abundance is a simple belief choice which gives rise to an intention. The intention to decline or to ascend.

A brief note for those who want to go back the good old days. They were not so good for most of humanity only for an elite subset of humanity. It is very tempting to view the past as a romantic idyllic time but once a thought has been thought, it can not be unthought without a lobotomy. Taking aways mankind’s tools simply will transform us into a pre-monkey state. We can not put the genie back in the bottle without a great dieback. We can destroy civilization leaving a few percent of the world’s population to survive a doomsday scenario and this could result in going back to the good old days, but eventually humans will think the already thought thoughts, and we will find ourselves back to the same place where we are right now.

Technology is not the enemy, a human nature based on fear and greed is. Stainless steel can be made into a scalpel, a scimitar or a guitar string. When people live in a fearful scarcity mentality they simply decline. Some feel like they are running out of time, money or vitality. Over a hundred year life, sure we are running out of everything. Although worrying about it is a waste of time. Trying to take someone else’s time, money or vitality ultimately does not work. Greed is just one form of fear derived form scarcity. A secure person does not need more than they can use. Hoarding is a scarcity behavior, as is taking things way from others.

Inventors, innovators and creators all know that if they want to have big dreams they need to be leveraged by and also serve stakeholders via a quid pro quo. You have to give others something to make it worth their while to participate. Then the sky is the limit to how large dreams can go, which is also called collaboration.

It is already past the time to face and embrace the fact that Western civilization has entered the information age, which means most manufacturing jobs are not coming back. All those drivers about to become unemployed certainly are intelligent enough to turn skills they already have into new ones. Becoming an information worker does not require genius. You just have to want to learn new skills and accept change.