Interactive Knowhow

It’s only 9am but already Tom Coates is having a stressful day. He relocated to San Francisco from the UK six months ago and this weekend his entire family are coming to visit. Last night, his parents flew in from London. In a few hours, he has to pick up his younger brother from the airport. In between he has a few hours to tidy the apartment. And then he has to find the time to speak to me.

I only know all of this because I’ve been reading Tom’s Twitter updates. During our Skype chat, Tom’s politeness personified, and there’s no mention of all this other stuff. Maybe because he’s already vented his stress via Twitter. Still it’s quite weird, seeing a 360 degree picture of someone you’ve never met.

Tom’s not only busy at home; he’s also incredibly busy at Yahoo, where for the last 18 months he’s been developing start-up projects as part of the Brickhouse – Yahoo’s “skunkworks”. He’s currently head of product on Fire Eagle.

Needless to say, he still finds time to blog, and to think about “being progressive and doing something new”, which is his remit at the Brickhouse.

I thought you might like to know that, right now, Tom is particularly interested in three things:

1. Social software – communication and collaboration
2. Decentralisation (my paraphrase - sorry, I need to read the transcript)
3. The web of data

“There are larger trends at work in this industry but you can get confused by the froth at the top,” says Tom. “The social software big shift, intellectually is, I think, kind of exhausted. We’re seeing it everywhere – at scale in Facebook, creeping into business…

“The web of data is newer, more exciting. [But] all of these things predated Web 2.0. Tim [O'Reilly] used Web 2.0 to describe trends he was already seeing. You give things labels so you can handle them.

“Four or five years ago, what was really exciting was the things we saw as personal being taken public. These things become big entities in themselves. Look at Flickr - it’s now a repository of 2.9 billion photos.”

Exactly. We never know where these things are going to lead, do we? And that’s what makes it all so *exciting*.

Why are we obsessed with business longevity?

Okay, so mobile phone giant Ericsson started out as a timber merchant and advertising multinational WPP as a maker of shopping baskets – but they’re the exceptions in a climate where only the minority can succeed in reinventing themselves.

Organisational psychologist David Jennings says even the most innovative companies are beginning to question the reuse, repair mantra – maybe it’s time to simply recycle?

“I’ve a friend working at Shell and he says there’s a growing belief there that maybe it’s okay for a company to have a shelf-life? When the oil runs out, then maybe it’s time to close up shop. And Shell can become a sort of rich compost for the companies of the future.”

“Look at the burst of activity around Cambridge Business Park [in the UK]. A lot of the start-ups and small businesses were able to draw on a highly skilled pool of labour when a large employer - I can’t remember for sure, but it might have been Thorn — had made people redundant.

“The same thing could be said of San Francisco’s Bay Area. In its early days in the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was able to put the silicon into Silicon Valley in part because they could feed off the ‘compost’ of lay-offs from the military, aerospace and radio industries that had previously occupied the area.”

Indeed, why aspire to be a Madonna when you have the temperament of a Britney? The important thing is to recognise what, exactly, you’re best at, and why.

It’s a non-committal sort of day (overcast, chilly) and I’ve got a fuzzy, non-committal sort of head (not enough sleep, one too many glass of red).

Here I am, later than desired, dragging my feet through the urban roadwork frenzy that now marks the entrance to London’s West End. (Shaftesbury Avenue, Oxford Street – they’re all being dug up, relentlessly, all summer. Believe me, it’s bad – even taxi drivers are refusing to go there.)

So why bother? Because Lloyd Davis’ Tuttle Club or, just simply, Tuttle, is always worth the effort. It’s a pleasant, cosy place (a room above the Coach & Horses, Greek Street), they serve freshly brewed coffee and a proper (sticky) Danish - and the people are okay.

In fact, everyone and everyone who goes to Tuttle is interesting in their own right, so when all these lively, interesting people get together, then something super-interesting should potentially occur, right?

There are the regulars – James Whatley of SpinVox who sits in the corner tapping away at his laptop, but will happily offer up instant mobile phone surgery to anyone who needs it.

There’s photographer Christian Payne who, in typical web 2.0 fashion, now makes more money out of social media wizardry than he probably ever can taking brilliant pictures.

There’s singer Lobelia and her partner (in life and work), Steve, who come all the way up here on the 159 bus from Herne Hill, and then all the way down again, just for the vibe.

And there’s Lloyd himself, generally avoiding the limelight, smiling sheepishly, and asking for the occasional fiver here and there.

Apparently the C&H opens up especially early just for Tuttle, but this place reached notoriety many years ago as Francis Bacon’s prefered watering hole so it’s no surprise at 11am to see a handful of warn-looking punters holding the bar up.

You need to nod politely at the punters, say hello to the staff, and step neatly past them through the bar and up the narrow stairs behind. Lloyd thinks this is an effectively low barrier to entry – Tuttle is open to everyone, but then you do, of course, have to hear about it in the first place.

Every week there’s a sprinkling of newcomers (who Lloyd does his best to welcome and make feel at home). This week there’s Laura Whitehead (Popokatea), who’s come all the way from Devon, Arseniy who works for a Moscow-based PR firm, Mala who’s flown in from Bangalore and Sofia who’s studying in London but comes from Caracas (hmmm, Tuttle’s gotta do something about that carbon footprint).

While the regulars generally laugh and make fun of the book concept ( ‘hello 2.0’, ‘Jemima 2.0’ etc), the international bunch are much more earnest, wanting to interview me, use the idea in research, find case studies etc.

In typical London fashion, the regulars find it impossible to take anything seriously. When asked what he thinks I mean by ‘leadership 2.0’, CTO Allix Harrison-D’Arcy says:

“SHOUTING!”

But leadership 2.0 is all ‘lower case’, surely?

“No, it’s like standing in a classroom with a stick in your hand and mortarboard on your head and yelling at people to ‘GET ON WITH IT!”

Next time I go to Tuttle, gonna stick with the visitors.

Maybe we have hit an era of constructive deconstructivism, where ‘0’ is celebrated as a something? With all those digital ones and zeros around, maybe it’s no surprise.

A time of ‘everything you know is wrong’, where we all need The Haitian to come and do a little ‘reprogramming’.

With organisations like Steve Moore’s Policy Un-plugged and Cliff Prior’s Un-limited, and Brian Winston preaching about Unknown Unknowns, is it time to launch Un-KnowHow?

Professor Brian Winston (above) could be the walking, talking embodiment of Taoist enlightenment. Smiley and affable, he likes to apply his mantra, “So what?”, to just about any modern day concern.

His take is that we all worry too much, especially about all this new technology marlarky.

A former documentary producer and script-writer, Professor Winston now spends his days in what one can only imagine to be a more relaxed manner, theorising and lecturing in the hallowed halls of the University of Lincoln.

So far, so Zen.

It’s the opening keynote of Media Futures 2008 and Professor Winston is entreating us (an invited audience mostly made up of technological determinists) not to over-estimate the impact of technology.

Some soundbites:

“The sense of ever-increasing speed of change is almost entirely illusionary.”

“The Queen still sits in her palace, the Pope in his. And Jihadis want to bring us all back to the 13th century.”

“We don’t understand the social context affecting us. This social context is the greatest forgotten known of all.”

“We adopt things that fit our pre-existing patterns of behaviour. Unless there is some sort of intervening social necessity (eg, to be entertained), the technology will wither.”

“Be hard nosed. Greet every possibility with the withering interjection, “so what?”. So what-ism’s time has come!”

In many ways, Professor Winston is right. We ARE victims of hyberbole. However much things seem to change during our short lifetimes, in the long term, nothing alters dramatically; all change is incremental.

It’s good for us to be reminded of this (there’s a great programme on BBC Radio 4, The Long View, which does just that, taking today’s issues and holding them up against a similar time, often hundreds of years ago).

The Professor’s long-termist stance is refreshing: for example, when asked if he would deny the impact of digital downloads on the music industry, he responds that this is simply causing a revival in the value of live performance (ie: if you take the long-term view, the industry built around the recording, copying and re-distrubution of music was in itself something of a blip).

A later session at today’s conference will address what the media is for. Well, one key function of the media is as a business - and whipping up public hysteria at every given opportunity is a necessary side-effect of this business (I’m not saying this is right or wrong – it’s just a fact – until someone develops a better way of selling papers/ winning in the overnights/ securing eyeballs).

And therein lies the rub. As Professor Winston would no doubt agree, we are brutish beings – barely evolved from the prehistoric Neanderthals who ‘blogged’ about hunting on the walls of their caves (thanks to Nick Durrant of Plot for that analogy). And we still depend on every day excitement to brighten our otherwise humdrum existences.

Professor Winston is preaching a detached, enlightened view of the world that can possibly only be achieved after a full life, an illustrious journalistic career and one or two Emmy Awards. How do you reconcile this with basic human nature and the nasty, brutish shortness of our lives?

The hard fact is that the majority of us still yearn for instant gratification.