In a basic growth model, some finite resource is consumed at a rate such that the resource is eventually depleted. When that happens the growth that was dependent on that resource stops and the system begins to collapse. If it happens that the resource is renewable eventually the rate of consumption matches the rate of renewal and the system enters into a state of equilibrium (no growth). This is illustrated by the black line in Figure 1. In this second scenario if the rate of consumption exceeds the rate of renewal the system will again collapse.

In the Solow model of growth (neoclassical growth model) a new element is introduced: the effect of technology or innovation on the growth curve. Without innovation, in systems where technology stays fixed, growth will eventually stop. The introduction of innovative solutions to resource problems, however, has the effect of raising the upper bound to growth limits. This is illustrated by the red line in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Innovation Boost
(click to enlarge)

A prevailing assumption with innovation is that it is necessarily synonymous with invention. To be innovative is to create something that has not previously existed. This is an erroneous assumption. History is filled with accounts of dominant societies furthering their success by adopting innovative discoveries made by smaller societies. The adoption of Arabic numerals by countries that had previously used Roman numerals is a striking example of a dominant society integrating an innovation from a smaller society.

The challenge for an organization, then, isn’t so much how to be innovative, rather, how to better recognize and adopt innovations discovered elsewhere. More succinctly, how to better seek out and distinguish innovative solutions aligned with the organization’s strategy from those that simply rate high on the coolness scale.

This is interesting: Getting Crafty: Why Coders Should Try Quilting and Origami

I’ve never done any quilting (I’ve a sister who’s excellent at that), but I’ve done origami since forever. In fact, origami was a way to explain to other people what I did for a living. I’d start with a 6” x 6” piece of paper that was white on one side and black on the other (digital!). Then I’d fold a boat, or a frog, or a crane. That’s what software developers work with – they begin with ones and zeros, bits and bytes. From there, they can build anything.

Not sure the explanation always worked, but at least it was entertaining and instilled a small measure of appreciation for what I and other software developers did for a living. Certainly better than describing the challenges of buffer overflow issues or SQL injection attack counter measures. That approach gets one uninvited from parties.

There is an interesting conversation thread on Slashdot asking “What practices impede developers’ productivity?” The conversation is in response to an excellent post by Steve McConnell from 2008 addressing productivity variations among software developers and teams and the origin of “10x” – that is, the observation noted in the wild of “10-fold differences in productivity and quality between different programmers with the same levels of experience and also between different teams working within the same industries.”

The Slashdot conversation has two main themes, one focuses fundamentally on communication: “good” meetings, “bad” meetings, the time of day meetings are held, status reports by email – good, status reports by email – bad, interruptions for status reports, perceptions of productivity among non-technical coworkers and managers, unclear development goals, unclear development assignments, unclear deliverables, too much documentation, to little documentation, poor requirements.

A second theme in the conversation is reflected in what systems dynamics calls “shifting the burden”: individuals or departments that do not need to shoulder the financial burden of holding repetitively unproductive meetings involving developers, arrogant developers who believe they are beholding to none, the failure to run high quality meetings, code fast and leave thorough testing for QA, reliance on tools to track and enhance productivity (and then blaming them when they fail), and, again, poor requirements.

These are all legitimate problems. And considered as a whole, they defy strategic interventions to resolve. The better resolutions are more tactical in nature and rely on the quality of leadership experience in the management ranks. How good are they at 1) assessing the various levels of skill among their developers and 2) combining those skills to achieve a particular outcome? There is a strong tendency, particularly among managers with little or no development experience, to consider developers as a single complete package. That is, every developer should be able to write new code, maintain existing code (theirs and others), debug any code, test, and document. And as a consequence, developers should be interchangeable.

This is rarely the case. I can recall an instance where a developer, I’ll call him Dan, was transferred into a group for which I was the technical lead. The principle product for this group had reached maturity and as a consequence was beginning to become the dumping ground for developers who were not performing well on projects requiring new code solutions. Dan was one of these. He could barely write new code that ran consistently and reliably on his own development box. But what I discovered is that he had a tenacity and technical acuity for debugging existing code.

Dan excelled at this and thrived when this became the sole area of his involvement in the project. His confidence and respect among his peers grew as he developed a reputation for being able to ferret out particularly nasty bugs. Then management moved him back into code development where he began to slide backward. I don’t know what happened to him after that.

Most developers I’ve known have had the experience of working with a 10x developer, someone with a level of technical expertise and productivity that is undeniable, a complete package. I certainly have. I’ve also had the pleasure of managing several. Yet how many 10x specialists have gone underutilized because management was unable to correctly assess their skills and assign them tasks that match their skills?

Most of the communication issues and shifting the burden behaviors identified in the Slashdot conversation are symptomatic of management’s unrealistic expectations of relative skill levels among developers and the inability to assess and leverage the skills that exist within their teams.

Each year brings to the business world a new swarm of buzzwords. Many are last year’s buzzwords, humming the same tune at a different pitch, fighting to find new life in the buzzword-eat-buzzword business world. Others are new arrivals from beyond the information horizon. I caught one of the new ones in my net earlier this year: “Gamification,”

The most succinct definition of gamification comes from research lead by Deterding et. al.¹

“Gamification” is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.

Sounds pretty straightforward, simple even. So why is gamification buzzing in everyone’s business ear?

To begin with, it’s the result of the millenials growing up with games and extending their early experiences into the adult world. According to a 2008 Pew Research Center survey, “Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games.”² With this level of participation achieved by 2008, it isn’t a stretch to consider the participation in games by the same age group for the prior 5 or more years to be a similarly high occurrence. The “gamification” experience, then, would include many, if not most, the rising young professionals in a wide variety of industries. Indeed, as Deloitte reports, “The average game player today is 37 years old, and 42% of game players are women.”³

That this would be the case isn’t unusual. It happens with every generation. I remember commenting to a friend in the early ’00 about how all the ugly, boxy, chunky car styles prevalent on the car dealer lots were the consequence of a generation raised on Transformer cartoons ascending to automotive engineering positions.

Secondly, the technology has evolved such that designing and introducing game elements into business environments is a much more straightforward process. Toolkits, development libraries, API’s, and design practices have become more robust and standardized. Gamification design principles are being applied to a variety of contexts in part because it is much easier to do so now than it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

However, the ascendent application of gamification in business should not presuppose an intrinsic value. There is plenty of room to question its value. In fact, several professional game designers, such as Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain, foresee the word “gamification” eventually disappearing from the lexicon of business. Rather, gamification “will become part of the toolkit of many different types of design. In a similar way ‘AI’ went away. We don’t think of Amazon as an AI system, though it does have what used to be called artificial intelligence in it with its collaborative filtering mechanism.”⁴ In other words, the word will pass, the buzz will die. What will be left is a trail of design techniques that will have folded into a larger set of existing techniques for enhancing user experiences.

Perhaps most importantly, in the context of business and professional development, there is little evidence to support the idea that gamification achieves anything deeper than entertainment and basic operant conditioning of simple behavioral changes. While the strategic application of gamification design principles can engage a learner and engender motivation, thereby enhancing an individual’s learning experience, their ability to drive deep learning by themselves is probably not possible. It’s a case of short-term factors producing short-term benefits. When the task is to acquire a deeper and broader understanding of a particular subject, a more immersive approach, such as it possible with simulations, is more effective.

Therein lies the challenge for those of us interested in preparing the rising generation of professionals with the skills needed to become the next generation of business leaders. To this end, even the most robust application of gamification principles will fail. The thinking skills needed to create competent leaders can’t be learned on the level of gaming. Amassing the greatest number of leadership points, the largest collection of “leadership” badges, and the longest run on a leader board have about as much in common with quality leadership as collecting cookbooks has with becoming a master chef.

It is highly probable the skillful application of game elements can enhance the effects of a simulation. If they are over or misapplied, however, they risk becoming the latest manifestation of the “dancing bologna” so prevalent in the early days of the world wide web. To this end, the insights from Werbach and Hunter offer guidance:

To figure out where gamification might fit your needs, consider the following four core questions: Motivation: Where would you derive value from encouraging behavior? Meaningful Choices: Are your target activities sufficiently interesting? Structure: Can the desired behaviors be modeled through a set of algorithms? Potential Conflicts: Can the game avoid conflicts with existing motivational structures?⁵

References

¹ Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining ‘Gamification’, MindTrek’11, September 28-30, 2011, Tampere, Finland.

²“Teens, Video Games and Civics”, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Pew Research Center Publication, September 16, 2008, Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/953/

³“Tech Trends 2012″, Deloitte, Retrieved from http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Services/consulting/technology-consulting/technology-2012/index.htm

⁴Lecture 8.5 – Amy Joe Kim interview with Kevin Werbach, Gamification course offered by The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania through Coursera.org.

⁵Werbach, K; Hunter, D. (2012). For the win: How game thinking can revolutionize your business (Kindle Locations 556-563). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

From the genius of David Burge comes an enhancement to my modest proposal for gently deflating the higher education bubble:

In the name of Consumer Protection, recent college graduates should have the ability to return the diploma and not make any reference to receiving education from the college in exchange for a 100% refund of college tuition. This may be extended with a graduated (ha, get it?) reduction for the last four years, with a red line at January 20, 2008.

Genius.

See the badges shine!
Points! The leaderboard I climb!
Empty achievement.

The Lack of Insight Edition

In 1949, John Gurden received the following biology report card from his professor at Eton College:

“His other work has been equally bad, and several times he has been in trouble, because he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way.”

He was 15, and ranked last in his class of 250. What ever happened to John Gurdon?

He was this year’s co-recipient of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. In the end, Dr. Gurdon’s 1949 report card reflects the inadequacies of the teacher, not the student. In this case, the student succeeded in spite of, not as a result of, the teachers efforts. One is left to wonder, how often this happens and how many students remain lost, never finding their way.

Exit question: How will you teach today?

A colleague of mine is of the opinion that “we won’t have truly evolved as a species until we stop doing things simply because we can. Perhaps it is more like we won’t know we have truly evolved as a species until we stop doing things because we can.” I counter with the opinion that we evolve precisely because we do things with no apparent reason other than we can. Discovery is the result of curiosity mixing with exploration and action. This is at the heart of what drives science. As Steve Holmes observes:

Usefulness comes not from pursuing it, but from patiently gathering enough of a reservoir of material so that one has the quirky bit of knowledge…that turns out to be the key to unlocking the problem which someone offers.

The history of scientific advance is filled with examples of individuals exploring the unknown not with the goal of utility, but to quench a driving curiosity and desire to know. The mere satisfaction of this desire is the only justification they need. Yes, bad people do bad things with good knowledge. But as Abraham Flexner observes,

The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.

In The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dörner makes the following observation:

In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from clear whether “good intentions plus stupidity” or “evil intentions plus intelligence” have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means. (emphasis added, Kindle location 133)

That sounds about right. To this I would add that incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the consequences of imposing their good intentions on others.

The distinguishing feature of a competent good intentioned individual and an incompetent good intentioned individual is the ability to predict and understand the consequences of their actions. Not just the immediate consequences, but the long term consequences as well. The really competent good intentioned individuals will also have a grasp of the systemic effects of acting on their intentions. The result is such individuals are deliberate in their actions and less likely to act or react emotionally to circumstances.

The Logitech webcam software installer doesn’t seem to know what to offer.

(Click for larger image.)

QA and testing. Still important.