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Tag Archives: IBM

Not-Separateness

24 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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beauty, Design, ecology, GreenNewDeal, HCI, IBM, peace, TNOO, UI, usability, UX

Not-Separateness

It seems odd to specify a property of natural order in terms of what it is not. On the other hand, I cannot come up with a positive alternative that doesn’t bring other connotations with it. I think it’s related to “unified” or “integral” or “belonging” or “inter-related” but none of those seem quite so on the mark as does “Not-Separateness.” 

Christopher Alexander’s degree from MIT was in architecture. Part of the reason he may have chosen this particular term is in reaction to some examples of architecture in which the architect seems to be in the business of constructing a building whose primary purpose is to make them famous regardless of what that building does to the neighborhood or the occupants. 

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Imagine Mr. Bigg designs a house that is a perfect black cube set on on vertex. In effect, this design says to me: “I am BIG. I am Mr. Bigg! I am a genius! You would have never been brilliant enough to design a house that is a cube on its vertex! You would have wasted your time and done something mundane like placed the cube on the ground on one of its faces. Anyone could think of that! But I put it on a vertex!” Indeed, we may easily imagine that he says words to this effect when his interview is reported on in the (mythical) architectural journal, Things that look different! 

“Mr. Bigg, you made the Bigg House out of black steel and black glass. Some critics have argued that this doesn’t fit with the existing neighborhood of stone cottages with thatched roofs.”

“Of course, little minds will always criticize Bigg ideas.” 

“Yes, yes. It also means that the construction costs of the house were quite high. And, the estimated costs of heating and cooling are much higher as well.”

“Nothing that a worthwhile (i.e., wealthy) client can’t afford.” 

“Some have also argued that it is inconvenient for the occupants who have to walk up and down at a steep angle and that furniture such as dressers, tables, chairs, and beds do not accommodate well to the tilted walls.” 

“Let me ask you aquestion. Would you have ever thought of putting a cube on its corner? No. I didn’t think so!” 

Of course, this is exaggeration. But not much. 

We would hope that User Experience designers take into account the users, their tasks, their contexts, and the way in which their designs interact with other related artifacts, people and processes. We would hope that applications and artifacts and services are all designed with the property of “Not-Separateness.” 

In the early 1980’s, I worked in the IBM Office of the Chief Scientist. My main assignment was to get IBM to pay more attention to the usability of its products. As part of that process, I visited quite a few IBM development labs around the world and spoke to many development teams. On many of these visits, I was accompanied by the Chief Scientist, a brilliant physicist, who “got” usability. 

On one occasion, we watched a new printing technology. Instead of printing out black printing on a white sheet of paper sized 8.5” x 11” or A4, this printout was of no standard size. The printing was black on a shiny silver sheet that curled severely. The Chief Scientist asked the head of the development team how they envisioned this being used. 

Chief Scientist: “Once someone printed this out, what would they do with it?”

Answer: “Oh, anything they liked.” 

Chief Scientist: “I mean, would people tape this into a notebook or paste it? Or would you imagine notebooks that would bind such paper?” 

Answer: “It’s not up to me to decide how people would use it. Doesn’t it look cool?” 

Another type of answer we heard more than once to the question, “How would this be used?” 

— “Oh, it’s a (replacement/upgrade) for this other IBM product.” 


“But who would use it and for what?” 


“It has three main components. Would you like a description of the components?” 

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Of course, there is a place for “playing around” with technology and thereby discovering things which someone else may find a use for. But in design and development of a product or service, having a clear notion of context of use and the users and tasks is fundamental. Of course, other users may appropriate a product or service for purposes beyond those envisioned by the original designers. That’s cool. 

What’s not cool is designing a device that is to be used in the bright outdoor sunlight and then testing the display in a typical office environment. Have you ever run across something like that? I have.

A more subtle lack of contextualization in design occurs when the design team fails to realize how many interruptions happen to the user while they are trying to accomplish a single task with the new application. If you “test” the application while the user is in a quiet “usability lab” and can give your tasks their undivided attention, then necessitating them to remember the invisible internal state of “Insert” versus “Edit” mode may not be a big deal at all. They will simply remember. But in their office environment, they may be interrupted by a phone call, a message, or their boss entering their office and asking a series of detailed questions. If they now go back to the task at hand, there is about a 50-50 chance that they will correctly guess whether they are in “Edit” mode or “Insert” mode. 

A design which shows the property of Not-Separateness is the natural result of a process which shows not-separateness. Here are a few common ways to help ensure the design process grows organically from the users and their goals & contexts. 

* Put people on the design team who are familiar with the users, and/or their tasks, and/or their contexts. 


* People on the design team observe people engaging in the relevant processes, whenever possible, not — or not only — in a “Usability Lab” but in the actual work environment. 

  • Jointly develop a product or service with the group who will use the product or service. 
  • Observe people actually using product P (or service S), version N so that version N+1 will be better attuned to the needs of the users. 
  • Gather and understand feedback from service calls and help desks and customer complaints in order to improve over time. 

There will be benefits to a company who takes such approaches beyond initial sales. If you’ve done any gardening, you will appreciate that the quality of the tomatoes you enjoy eating is related to the quality of the soil and the quality of the care you give the tomatoes. Similarly, a product or service that has the quality of Not-Separateness will not only be useful — users will fight to keep your product or service. It becomes integrated with the environment. To change the brand means that they will have to change the way they work; possibly even with whom they work. Not-Separateness is likely a path to what business people like to call a “Cash Cow.” 

If you’ve ever walked through a neighborhood after a hurricane, you’ve likely seen many uprooted trees. When you look at the roots of an uprooted tree, what do you see? Of course, you see roots. But what else? You see rocks and soil all around and embedded into the roots. They are Not-Separate. In a hurricane, there are typically not only high winds. There is also a lot of rain. The trees are hit with a double whammy. The wind pushes the tree but the rain weakens the solid soil in which the tree is embedded. It is the combination that makes it very difficult for the tree to “hold on” and keep from falling over. 

Living things, just like us, have a 4.5 billion year history of living. The living things adapt over time to their environment and they mold the environment to their needs. They are not separate. Flowers appeal to the insects who pollinate them. The insects who pollinate them are adapted to the characteristics of the flower. A horse adapts to their rider and the rider adapts to their horse. A product or service must have a design that serves the needs of its stakeholders. For a product or service to have maximum beauty, utility, and longevity, it must also have a way to adapt to the changing needs of the users and other stakeholders. At the same time, if the users and their organizations adapt to the product or service, then true Not-Separateness is achieved. 

If you want to skimp on designing your product or service, you can make it more separate, more divorced from its context, its users, and its tasks. Of course, if you do that, you also make much easier for your users to abandon your product and switch to a new one. 

Another way to think about this in terms of systems theory is where you draw the boundary. If you draw a sharp boundary around your product, you may find that, over time, your product becomes ever more peripheral to the community you’re trying to support and your product is ever more fungible with others in its class. On the other hand, if you draw the boundary around the product or service and the people and organizations who provide the product or service then, you are on the path of ever tighter interconnect. 

Not-Separateness is not only a quality of good design in terms of not overly separating the context and users from the product or service. It is also a good quality for the organization that produces products & services. Of course, some people today must manage a giant amorphous “organization” of tens of thousands of people so they set up divisions, and departments, and groups, and teams, and positions etc. There may indeed be a “UX Department” and a “Software Department” and a “Hardware Department.” That’s all fine. But it is counter-productive if the UX Department sees itself as separate from the rest of the company. To a great extent the success of the UX Department depends on the success of the Hardware and Software Departments. The Sales Department’s success will, of course, depend partly on the skills of the Sales Department. But it will also depend on the success of the UX Department, HW, SW and Services. 

Have you ever had a paper cut? It isn’t just the skin on a quarter inch of the inside of your ring finger that’s cut. You’re cut! It isn’t just that the finger feels pain. You feel pain! That causes you to take steps to ameliorate the pain and to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s why empathy in leadership is important. A leader must feel empathy for all, or the organization will disintegrate from lack of Not-Separateness. At some point, a raccoon may chew off its own arm in order to escape a trap. 

But it isn’t the first thing that occurs to them every time they experience a thorn in the paw! 

The raccoon doesn’t say to itself:  — “that paw is giving me pain! I’m going to chew it off! Then, it won’t hurt any more.”

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Evolution did not evolve a raccoon that acts that way. Self-mutilation exists but it is typically a last resort.

But not for corporations. It is the first thing they think of:

“Our (you name it) Department is not performing well. Let’s lay them off and outsource it.”

What does that say to every thinking employee in the entire corporation? It says:

“You know what? All this talk about teamwork and pulling together is a total bunch of bull$hit. You cannot trust management to do what’s best for everyone. You can only trust them to do what’s best for them.” 

Living forms in nature are living forms. Their parts have severe Not-Separateness with the other parts of that form. Often, as in well-functioning families or teams, that extends to all members of the group. 

Not-Separateness is essentially deep cooperation. I give to the larger community by becoming a part of it and doing my part in it. I lend strength to the community. In return, I gain strength from that community. It is not a zero sum game, of course. The community, if it is functional, is much stronger than the sum of the individuals in that community. 

This is so deeply embedded in 4.5 billion years of evolution that it does not surprise me that we recognize beauty as being even more beautiful if it is not separate. Not-Separate enhances beauty because, like all the other properties, it is essential to life. 

Eventually, if humanity is to survive, we will realize that Not-Separateness applies to all of us. We are not there yet. But that doesn’t mean we cannot appreciate and design Not Separateness in our products, in our services, and our lives. 

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The Declaration of Interdependence

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Imagine all the people

Ripples

Author Page on Amazon

Thomas, J.C. and Kellogg, W.A. (1989). Minimizing ecological gaps in interface design, IEEE Software, January 1989.

Thomas, J. C. (2012).   Patterns for emergent global intelligence.   In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer.

Thomas, J. C. (2001). An HCI Agenda for the Next Millennium: Emergent Global Intelligence. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam, and J. Vince (Eds.), Frontiers of human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. London: Springer-Verlag.

Thomas, J.C. (1985). Human factors in IBM. IBM Research Report. RC-11267.  Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation.

“The Psychology of Design”

08 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Tags

creativity, Design, HCI, human factors, IBM, leadership, research, UX

“The Psychology of Design” 

I worked at IBM, all told, about 28 years. During that time, management put more and more pressure on us to make our work “relevant” to the business. In fact, the pressure was always there, even from the beginning. Over the years, however, we were “encouraged” to shorten evermore the time gap between doing the research and having the results of that research impact the bottom line. This was not an IBM-only phenomenon. 

I was a researcher, not a politician, but it seemed to me that at the same time researchers in industrial labs were put under pressure to produce results that could be seen in terms of share price (and therefore payouts to executives in terms of stock options), academia was also experiencing more and more pressure to publish more studies more quickly — and to make sure “intellectual property” was protected to make sure the university could monetize your work. This was about the same time that, at least in America, increasing productivity and the wealth that sprung from that increased productivity stopped being shared with the workers.

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In the late 1970’s, the “Behavioral Sciences” group began to study the “psychology of design.” For the first few months, this was an extremely pleasurable & productive group, due mainly to  my colleagues. Over the next few blogs, I’ll focus on some specific techniques and methods that you may find useful in your own work. 

In this short story though, I want to focus instead on some broader issues relevant to “technology transfer”, “leadership” and “management.” Even if you are or aspire to be an expert in UX or HCI or design, I assure you that these broader issues will impact you, your work and your career. I wouldn’t suggest becoming obsessed with them, but being aware of their potential impact could help you in your own work and career. 

It is telling that, almost invariably, whenever I told someone inside IBM (or, for that matter, outside IBM) that I was studying the “psychology of design,” people responded by asking, “the design of what?” So, I would explain that we were interested in the generic processes of design and how to improve them. I would explain that we were interested in understanding, predicting, and controlling these processes to enable them to be more effective. I would explain that we could apply these findings to any kind of design: software design, hardware design, organizational design, and (see last post about IBM) communication design. I would explain that design was a quintessentially human activity. I would also explain that design was an incredibly leveraged activity to improve. 

Looking back on it, I still think all these things are true. I also see that I missed the “signal” people were giving me that, while I thought of design as something that could be studied as a process, that most people did not think of it that way. To them, it was never the “psychology of design,” but only the design of something. 

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that somewhat different skills are involved in designing a great advertising campaign, a great building, and a great application. I agree that different communities of practice treat various common issues differently. I still think it’s worth studying commonalities across domains. For one thing, we may find an excellent way of generating ideas, say, that the advertising community of practice uses that neither architects nor applications developers had ever tried. Or, vice versa.

My own academic background was in “Experimental Psychology.” We were forever doing experiments that we believed were about psychological processes that were thought to be invariant regardless of the domain. It was an axiom of our whole enterprise that studying memory for any one thing shed light on how we remember every other thing. Similar studies looked at decision making or problem solving or multi-tasking. We came to understand that there were some interesting exceptions to being able to separate content from process. For instance, it is much easier to multi-task a spatial task and a verbal task than it is to multi-task two independent spatial tasks or two independent verbal tasks. 

We used a spectrum of techniques to study “design” from laboratory studies of toy problems, to observing people doing real-world design problems while thinking aloud. After about 3-4 months of very productive work, we were told that we had to make our work relevant to software development. That should be the focus of our work. We were told that this command came from higher-ups in IBM. That might have been true, or perhaps partly true. 

It might also be relevant that someone in our management chain might have been the recipient of a grant from ONR which was specifically focused on software development. So far as I can tell, nothing had been done on that grant. So, our past, present, and future work could have been co-opted to be “results” done under the auspices of the ONR grant. 

In any case, regardless of the “reasons,” the group began to focus specifically on software design. In one study, we used IBM software experts as subjects. Each person was given information that was geared toward a specific transformation that occurred in software development. One person was presented with the description of a “situation” that included a number of “issues” and they were asked to write a requirements document. In real life, I would hope that this would be done in a dialogue (and, indeed, in other studies, we recorded such dialogues). Absent such dialogues, what we found was that different software experts — all from IBM research — and all given the same documentation about a set of problems generated vastly different problem statements and overall approaches. 

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In other parts of the study, other experts were variously given requirements documents and asked to do an overall, high level system design, or given a high level design and asked to design an algorithm, or given an algorithm and asked to code a section. There was always diversity but the initial showed the greatest diversity. The initial stage is also the one that can cause the most expensive errors. If you begin with a faulty set of requirements — a misreading about how to even go about the problem — then, the overall project is almost certain to incur schedule slip, cost overruns, or outright failure. 

While the vital importance of the initial stages of design is true in software development, I would argue that it is likely also true for advertising campaigns, building designs — and even true for the design of research programs. We designed our research agenda under the assumption that we had a long time; that we were studying design processes independently of specific communities of practice or the nature of the problems people were attempting to address. We assumed that there was no “hidden agenda.” Although we believed we would eventually need to show some relevance to IBM business, we had no idea, when we began, that only relevance to software design would be “counted.”



—————-

Some of our studies on the “Psychology of Design.” 

Carroll, J. and Thomas, J.C. (1982). Metaphor and the cognitive representation of computer systems. IEEE Transactions on Man, Systems, and Cybernetics., SMC-12 (2), pp. 107-116.

Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1981). Human factors in communication. IBM Systems Journal, 20 (2), pp. 237-263.

Thomas, J.C. (1980). The computer as an active communication medium. Invited paper, Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, June 1980. Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics., pp. 83-86.

Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C. and Miller, L. (1980). Cognitive processes in design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 12, pp. 119-140.

Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1980). Presentation and representation in design problem solving. British Journal of Psychology/,71 (1), pp. 143-155.

Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1979). A clinical-experimental analysis of design problem solving. Design Studies, 1 (2), pp. 84-92.

Thomas, J.C. (1978). A design-interpretation analysis of natural English. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 10, pp. 651-668.

Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1), pp. 5-11.

Miller, L.A. and Thomas, J.C. (1977). Behavioral issues in the use of interactive systems: Part I. General issues. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 9 (5), pp. 509-536.

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Blog posts about the importance of solving the “right” problem. 

The Doorbell’s Ringing. Can you get it?

https://petersironwood.com/2021/01/13/reframing-the-problem-paperwork-working-paper/

Problem Framing. Good Point. 

https://petersironwood.com/2021/01/16/i-say-hello-you-say-what-city-please/

Problem formulation: Who knows what. 

How to frame your own hamster wheel.

The slow seeming snapping turtle. 

Author Page on Amazon. 

Design – Interpretation Model of Communication

22 Tuesday Jun 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Tags

communication, deception, experiment, HCI, IBM, media, psychology, truth, UX

In my early days at IBM Research (1970’s), we were focused on trying to develop, test, or conceive of ways that a larger proportion of people would be able to use computers. One of the major ways of thinking about this was to use natural language communication as a model. After all, it was reasoned, people were able to communicate with each other using natural language. This meant that it was possible, at least in principle. Moreover, most people had considerable practice communicating using natural language. 

One popular way of looking at natural language (especially among engineers & computer scientists) was essentially an “Encoding – Decoding” model. I have something in my head that I wish to communicate to you. So, I “encode” my mental model, procedure, fact, etc. into language. I transmit that language to you. Then, you “decode” what I said into your internal language and — voila! — if all goes well, you construct something in your head that is much like what is in my head. Problem solved. 

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Of course, people who wrote about communication from this standpoint acknowledged that it didn’t always work. For instance, as speaker, I might do a bad job of “encoding” my knowledge. Or, I might do a good job of encoding, but the “transmission” was bad; e.g., static, gaps, noise, etc. might distort the signal. And, you might do a bad job of decoding. It’s an appealing model and helped engineers and computer scientists make advances in “communication theory” and helped make practical improvements in coding and so on.

As a general theory of how humans communicate, however, it’s vastly over-simplified. I argued that a better way of looking at human communication was as a design-interpretation process, not as an encoding-decoding process. One of the examples that pointed this out was a simple observation by Don Norman. Suppose someone comes up to you and asks, “Where is the Empire State Building?” You will normally give a quite different answer depending on whether they are in Rome, Long Island, or Manhattan. In Rome, you might say, “It’s in America.” Or, you might say, “It’s in New York City.” If you are on Long Island, you might well say, “It’s in Manhattan.” If you are already in Manhattan, you might say, “Fifth Avenue, between 33rd and 34th.” 

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Building on Don Norman’s original example, but based on your own experience, you can easily see that it isn’t only the geographical relationships that influence your answer. If you were originally from Boston, now on your own in Rome, struggling with Italian and homesick and someone came up to you and asked that question in American English with a Boston Accent, your response might be: “Are you joking? But how did you know I was an American. My name’s … “

On the other hand, if you’re a 13-year old boy in Manhattan — one with a mean streak — and someone asks you this question in broken English and they’re looking around like they are totally lost, you might say, “Oh, no problem. Just follow 8th Avenue, all the way north up to 133rd. It’s right there. You can’t miss it.” (Note to potential foreign visitors, most kids in Manhattan would not intentionally mislead you. But they point is, someone could. They are not engaging some automatic encoding process that takes their knowledge and translates into English. Absurd! 

You design every communication. I think that’s a much more useful way to conceive of communicating. Yes, of course, there are occasions when your “design” behavior is extremely rudimentary and seems almost automatic. It isn’t though. It just seems that way. Let’s go back to our question-asking example. Suppose you work at an information booth in New York City. People ask you this question day after day, year after year. You’re seemingly giving the answer without any attention whatsoever. Suppose someone asks you the question, but with a preface. “Look here, chap! I’ve got a gun! And if you give me the same stupid answer you’ve given me every time before, I’ll shoot your bloody brains out!” You are going to modify your answer. It only seemed as though it was automatic.

When you design your answer you take into account at least these things: some knowledge that you communication about, the current context (which itself has hundreds of potentially important variables), a model of the person you’re creating this communication for, a set of goals that you are trying to achieve (e.g., get them safely to their goal, mislead them, entertain them, entertain yourself, entertain the people around you, demonstrate your expertise, practice your diction, etc.). The process is inherently creative. In many circumstances (writing, playing, exploring, discovering, partying), you can choose how creative you want to make it. In other cases, circumstances constrain you more (though likely not so much as you think they do). 

Many readers think this is a classic example of a straw man argument. “No-one believes communication is a coding-decoding process.” 

Well, I beg to differ. I worked for relatively well-managed companies. I’ve talked to many other people who have worked in different well-managed companies. We’ve all seen or heard requests like this: “I need a paragraph (or a slide or a foil) on speech recognition. Thanks.” 

What??

Who’s the audience? Are they scientists, investors, customers, our management? How much do they already know? What are your goals? What other things are you going to talk about with them? The people who have left me such messages were all smart people. And, providing the necessary info only took a minute or two. But it critically improved the outcome. It’s not a straw man argument. 

Sit-com plots often hinge on the characters doing poorly at designing and/or interpreting communications. A show based on encoding-decoding? No. What could be funny — indeed what often is shown in comedy — are people failing to do good design and in the extreme case, that can arise by having an actual robot as a character or someone who behaves like one.

People also interpret what was said in terms of their goals, the context, what they believe about your goals and capacity, what they already know, and so on. And, even though this may seem obvious, millions of people believe what advertisers or politicians say without questioning their motives, double-checking with other sources, or even looking for internal inconsistencies in what is being touted as true. In other cases though, the same people will not believe anything the “other side” says no matter what. Just as one can do faulty design, one can also do faulty interpretation. 

In any case, I decided that it would be good to “show” in a controlled laboratory setting that the Encoding-Decoding model was woefully inadequate. So, I brought in “subjects” to work in pairs at a simple task about communicating Venn diagram relationships. The “designer” had a Venn diagram in front of them. “The “interpreter” was supposed to draw a Venn diagram. The “designer” was constrained to say something true and relevant. In addition to a “base” pay, the “interpreter” subjects would be given a bonus according to how many relationships matched those of the “designer.” The designer’s bonus depended on condition. In the “cooperation” condition, their payoff would also, like the interpreter’s, be determined by the agreement in the diagrams. In the “competition” condition, the designer’s bonus depended on how different the two diagrams were. 

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I ran about half the number of subjects I had planned to run when the experiment was ended by corporate lawyers. 

What? 

IBM had no unions at that time. And, they didn’t want any unions. One of their policies, which they believed, would help them prevent the formation of unions was that they never paid their workers for piece-work. Apparently, somehow, IBM CHQ had gotten wind of my experiment. People were being paid different amounts, based (partly) on their performance. They couldn’t have this! People might think were paying people for piece-work! 

It hardly needs to said, I suppose, that IBM definitely tried to pay for performance. This was true in sales, research, development, HR, management, and so on. No-one in IBM would argue that your pay shouldn’t be related to your performance. That was exactly — in one way of describing it — was going on here. By the way, these were not IBM employees and each subject only “worked” for about an hour.

Basically, regardless of how irrelevant this experimental set-up might have been to the genuine concern of unions not to pay people in an insanely aggressive and ever-changing piece-work scheme, the lawyers were concerned that it would be somehow misrepresented to workers or in the press and used as evidence that IBM should unionize. In a way, the lawyers were proving the point of the experiment in their own real-life behavior even as they insisted the experiment be shut down.



Lessons Learned: #1 Corporate lawyers are not only concerned about what you actually do or how you represent your work; they are also worried about how someone might misrepresent your work. 

Lessons Learned: #2 Even when constrained to say something true and relevant, ordinary people are quite capable of misleading someone else when it’s to their benefit and considered okay to do.

It is this second aspect of the experiment that I myself felt to be “edgy” at the time. Sure, people can mislead, but I was providing a context in which they were being encouraged to mislead. Was that ethical? Obviously, I thought it was at the time. On reflection, I still think it’s okay, but I’m glad that there are now review boards to look at “studies” and give a less biased opinion than the person who designed the study would do.

I view the overall context of doing the study as positive. As adults, these people all already knew how to mislead. I was letting them, and many other people, know that we know you know how to mislead and we’ll be on the lookout for it. 

What do other people think about studies wherein the experimenter encourages one person to deceive another? 

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References published literature that describes some of the research that was done around that time. 

Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C. and Miller, L. (1980). Cognitive processes in design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 12, pp. 119-140.

Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1980). Presentation and representation in design problem solving. British Journal of Psychology/,71 (1), pp. 143-155.

Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1979). A clinical-experimental analysis of design problem solving. Design Studies, 1 (2), pp. 84-92.

Thomas, J.C. (1978). A design-interpretation analysis of natural English. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 10, pp. 651-668.

Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1), pp. 5-11. 

———————

Other essays that touch on communication. 

Freedom of Speech is not a License to Kill

Ohayogozaimasu

The Sound of One Hand Clasping

Fool Me

Claude the Radioman

Know What? 

The Story of Story, Part 1

The Temperature Gauge

“Wizard of Oz”

18 Friday Jun 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

HCI, IBM, research, usability, UX, Wizard of Oz

(Some Lessons Learned from studies in Human-Computer Interaction/User Experience conducted at IBM Research in the mid-70’s.)

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Wizard of Oz 

One of the studies I conducted at IBM Research in the mid 1970’s was part of an effort to do “Automatic Programming” — a department under Pat Goldberg. The first level manager I worked with was Irving Wladawsky (later Irving Wladawsky-Berger). His group wanted to develop a system that would allow the owner/operator of a small business to type requirements into a computer in English (or something English-like) and have the system itself produce RPG code to run the business so described. 

The underlying motivation from an IBM business perspective was that many small businesses could well afford a computer to do inventory, fulfill orders, etc. but they couldn’t afford to hire programmers to create such a system from scratch. The small business owner in the mid-1970’s did not program! Yet, for the most part, they understood how their business worked. The notion was that a natural language understanding and generation program could dialogue with the user/owner and through that process, understand their “business rules.” No costly programmers needed!

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An interesting side note: at that time, we were told that IBM corporate forbade us to use the terms “Artificial Intelligence” or “Robotics” to describe our work because some PR firm had determined that these terms were too scary for the general public. So, IBM had research in “mechanical assembly” but not “robotics.” We had work in character recognition, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, automatic program generation, and compiler optimization. But no work in “Artificial Intelligence.” (Wink, wink, nod, nod). 

Labelism: Confusing a thing with the label for that thing.

Another interesting side note: I worked at IBM Research for a dozen years; started an AI lab at NYNEX where I worked another 13 years; came back to IBM Research and several years later found myself working on the same problem! We were still trying to make a system to allow small businesses to generate their code automatically. In my second iteration, rather than using natural language, we were trying to make the specification of business rules in a graph language that was intuitive enough for business owners. This was a different approach, but trying to address the same underlying desire: to bring computing to small business without incurring the heavy costs of programming and maintenance. 

Let’s return to iteration one — the natural language approach @ 1975. Well, one issue was that no-one had a natural language program that even approximated being able to do the job. So…how to study people’s interaction with a system that doesn’t exist? 

We used an approach that my colleague Jeff Kelly called the “Wizard of Oz” technique; viz., use a human being (in this case, me) to simulate how the system might work and record people’s behavior. In this way, we could discover many of the issues that such a natural language programming system would have to deal with. I had already had plenty of experience interacting with a computer; and I had acting experience. I could “play the part” of a computer fairly well as I typed in my questions and answers. 

(Description of “The Wizard of Oz” technique).

IBM Research in Yorktown had roughly a thousand people including not only scientists, programmers, and engineers but also a number of business people (who did not know how to program). I knew some of them from playing tennis and table tennis and we used those folks as initial subjects. What did I find? Good news and bad news. 

Dealing with natural language is tricky for many reasons. One of those reasons is that English, including the English that people normally use to describe their business, is filled with words that have multiple meanings; e.g., “file”, “run”, “program”, “object”, “table”, etc. But here is the good news: although it’s true that many English words have many meanings, when these business people described business procedures, almost all of the lexical ambiguity vanished! The program to understand business English would not have to distinguish between a business file and a nail file; it wouldn’t have to worry about distinguishing a run in baseball or a run in stockings from a run of the payroll program; it wouldn’t have to distinguish between the table in a relational data base and the table in your dining room. The domain would mainly constrain! That’s the good news.

The bad news was dialogue management. How can the machine recognize a misunderstanding and how can it correct it? To make matters worse, while business people were fairly consistent in the way they described how their business ran, they were not consistent in how they talked about the communication. If a human being senses that another one is misunderstanding, then, depending on context they might: raise their eyebrows, say “Huh?”, “Come again?”, “What?” “I think I lost you.” “WTF?” “Are you kidding?”, “We’re on different wavelengths,” “I don’t get it.” “But…wait.” 

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Sometimes, these are referred to as “meta-comments.” Here’s a simple example that took place in the study. 

One of the business people told me about various discounts. I had assumed (playing the part of the computer) that he was talking about discounts for items that were being discounted due to inventory management. I recorded all the various percentages and so on. Then, he said, “Now, we also give discounts for various items.” 

At that time, most natural language systems of that era simply ignored words like “now” and “also” in this context. Stepping out of my role as a “computer system” and thinking about from the perspective of a human conversational partner though, these words are crucial! What it signals is a change in topic. In the larger context of our conversation, it shows that everything that had just been said, which I thought had been about item discounts, was not about item discounts!

This is just one example, but there were many more. In my more recent experience interacting with various computer dialogue systems, being able to recognize the signals of miscommunication and being able to repair misunderstandings is still not very well-handled more than four decades later.

I’d be interested in any pointers you have to a system that you think deals with meta-communication in a natural and robust manner. I do not think that it is beyond the pale of possibility. The general categories of the ways that people misunderstand each other is not infinite. John Anderson developed excellent tutoring systems for LISP and geometry and those systems worked something like human tutors in that, the tutor inferred the mental model of an individual student and focused instruction on correcting any misconceptions. My intuition is that a generic system built with equal complexity could deal with most of the issues as well as the average human being deals with them; i.e., imperfectly. 

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Lessons Learned: #1 You can test aspects of a system even before it’s built or even completely defined. One method that has been used many times: “Wizard of Oz.” 

Lessons Learned #2: Language used by professionals to talk about their domain is much more constrained in terms of lexical ambiguity than is language when considered by all native speakers.

Lessons Learned #3: People in “our culture” (i.e., US business culture) do not have an agreed upon and consistent vocabulary for talking about communication nor a consistent process for dealing with them.

Lessons Learned #4: Speaking of communication errors, I don’t recall why, but it was about this time, that I realized that my notion about how research results would be transferred to other parts of IBM was a complete and utter fantasy. I hadn’t articulated it, but it was basically that I would do research, write the results up for publication in scientific journals for an academic audience and publish Research Reports which would be eagerly consumed by anyone who needed to know. I’m not proud of this. LOL. But that’s really kind of how I viewed it. And, then, after a few years, I realized that it really mainly came about through relationships. That was something that people had been showing me all my life, but which I don’t think anyone ever stated it explicitly enough.

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Author Page on Amazon

The Myths of the Veritas (an exploration of leadership & ethics in free, no ads fiction)

Index to a Pattern Language for Collaboration and Teamwork

Experiences in Human-Computer Interaction

Post on “The Story of Story” 

Query By Example

15 Tuesday Jun 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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expertise, HCI, IBM, QBE, research, usability, UX

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This is part of a series on experiences in my career in Human Computer Interaction and some lessons learned.

I joined IBM Research on the winter solstice of 1973. I had earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan and for the previous few years, I had managed a research project at Harvard Medical School on the “Psychology of Aging.” At the time, I was married and had three small children. I mention this because I was funded by so-called “soft money” which basically meant that my salary depended on a research grant. I helped write a renewal of the grant but the decision was “deferred”; that is, it was neither funded nor unfunded. Then, it was deferred again. This meant that if the grant were not funded, I would only have a few weeks to find a new job. That seemed far too short so I began to look other places for a job. 

Lessons Learned: #1 If you want continuity of personnel in your laboratory, make sure you have overlapping and multiple grants or other sources of income. 

In this case, the grant actually was ultimately approved, but by that time, I had already agreed to join IBM Research. That turned out to be fine, by the way. It was a wonderful place to work.

One of the reasons that I got the job at IBM was that I already knew something about computers. I had taken several computer science courses in grad school along with the needed psych courses. More importantly, our “Psychology of Aging” study was run by a PDP-8 and I had programmed the computer to run our suite of experiments and to do data analyses on the results. I had taken a week-long course at DEC in Maynard, Massachusetts on the assembly language, another week-long course on the machine language, and another week-long course actually tracing the circuitry with a probe and oscilloscope. I felt I “understood” the PDP-8 at a fairly deep level. 

At IBM, I did not have that familiar machine. Instead, I was connected to a mainframe via a dumb terminal. The first day at IBM, I got my userid and tried to log on to APL (A programming language I had not used before). I tried following the manual but I could not seem to get logged on. After hours of trying, I finally gave up and went down to the computer room and found someone willing to help. I showed him the logon instructions I was trying to follow and he immediately said, “Oh, yeah, that doesn’t work any more. We changed that months ago. Here’s how you need to do it now.” The manual I had may have looked new, but it was out of date. 

Lessons Learned: #2 Manuals can be wrong. These days, most are online. But they can still be wrong.

Lessons Learned: #3 Someone who knows how to do something can save you hours with a few minutes of their time. 

Of course, it’s more respectful, efficient, and a better learning experience if you can figure it out on your own. But sometimes you can’t. My stumbling block was not due to an error in logic, or a lack of in-depth knowledge. It was simply that the computer center administrators had changed something arbitrary so that the documentation I was given about how to log on for the first time was no longer accurate. 

In order to teach myself APL, I wrote a very small program to “predict” how long I was going to live “based on” some behaviors that I was interested in controlling. My main goal was to learn APL. My secondary goal was to motivate myself, for instance, to exercise more, lose weight, and not drink too much alcohol. I had no intention or pretensions of making this prediction “accurate.” If I had been doing a consulting gig for an insurance company setting life insurance rates, for example, I would have given far more attention to see precisely what the real data were and incorporated many more variables into the regression model. 

Here’s a link, 

https://www.death-clock.org

by the way, to a more accurate model than the one I used, but it’s still simple to use. Note that my goal was to motivate myself and so I intentionally exaggerated the impact of those behaviors I was trying to change. I had programmed it. I knew how “bogus” the calculation was — nonetheless — here’s the interesting thing though: 

Lessons Learned #4: Even an over-simple model that the user knows is over-simple can still motivate change. 

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At last we come to the actual project I worked on — the usability and learnability of Query By Example. One of my colleagues, Moshe Zloof, invented the language for relational data bases. He had designed the language but not yet implemented it. I did not immediately test the design; first, I sought to understand it. In seeking to understand it in depth, prior to testing it, the two of us had some sense-making discussions. Moshe improved the design; in particular, our discussions uncovered some ambiguities and inconsistencies that were not at all obvious when he simply gave talks about the design. This brings me to the next lesson learned which has proven true in nearly every study of early stage designs that I’ve been involved with over the course of five decades.

Lessons Learned #5: Don’t just accept a surface description of something; understand it as deeply as you can before designing a study.  

In this particular case, it was possible for me to understand it in some depth. Relational data bases and second order logic are things I was capable of understanding. If it had been an interface to running a nuclear reactor or using the artificial heart that Moshe had designed earlier in his career, that would have been a much more difficult task for me.

I wanted to understand, not just the “logic” of Query By Example, but also possible contexts of use. For instance, my manager & I visited Burlington, Vermont to talk with IBMer’s who actually used query languages to understand what was happening in chip production lines. At one point, a particular production line that had been producing nearly 100% perfect chips starting having a much higher error rate. Using their query facility, they were quickly able to diagnose the cause of the change which was a supplier of one of the raw materials using a different source. In turn, this meant a slightly different profile of trace impurities in the substrate. Of course, this is only one example, but to me, understanding something in depth means not only understanding its internal logic but also understanding real users, their real tasks, and their context of use. 

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I won’t go into all the details of the pencil & paper study or the results. High School students and then college students were taught the basics of the language and then given a simple relational data base and a set of questions stated in English which they had to translate into Query By Example. Briefly, the bottom line was that Query By Example was easy to learn and easy to use. However, there were still questions that people had difficulty with. In analyzing the data and doing some further experiments, the difficulties that people tended to have, stemmed not so much from Query By Example per se, but from what I much later came to call “labelism” — that is, confusing a label with the thing that label refers to. 

Here’s a simple example of the type of confusion we saw. In Query By Example (and other query languages) there is usually an OR operator and an AND operator. (These operators can be important for doing advanced queries with search engines as well). If you are interested in getting a list of pets you might adopt and you’re willing to adopt dogs or cats, you might ask for “cat OR dog.”  If you only want long-haired cats, you might ask for “cat” AND “long hair.” 

English, however, can be tricky.

If you and I (as opposed to you and a query language) are having a conversation, you might say, “I hear there are many pets that need to be adopted.” 

I say, “Yes, there are all kinds of pets. There are snakes, dogs, turtles, rabbits, cats…” 

You say, “Let me stop you right there. I’m only interested in adopting cats and dogs. Those are the only animals I’d want to adopt.” 

See what you said there? You exact words included: “…cats and dog.” If you put “Cats AND dogs” into a query against the data base of available pets, however, you will get the null set (that is, nothing) back. There are no animals who are both cats and dogs! (Though my part Main Coon cats do play fetch like dogs). 

When people were presented with an English statement that included the English word “and” — regardless of the actual syntax and context, some of them had difficulty using the OR operator. If instead, the query in English had set up like this: “Oh, I don’t want reptiles. I’d be happy with adopting a cat or a dog, however” then, they’d have no problem translating it into the OR operator in the query language. 

Lessons Learned: #6 Sometimes the difficulty people have in using a product, a service, or a prototype is not due to the interface details but with the structure of the task, their background, and their training.  

By analogy, you will not allow me to beat Nadal or Djokovic at tennis by giving me a better tennis racquet! (Although if you gave one of them a toothpick for a tennis racquet, I might have a shot).

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That sounds obvious and even absurd, but I promise you, some companies get so greedy that they want you to design a system that allows people who do not understand the task and have minimal background and training to nonetheless be able to perform that task. 

One example you may have run into is having “help desk” personnel who have no understanding of a product go through a script to help you “solve your problem.” Sometimes, it works. But many times it doesn’t. When it does not work, you might not be able to “fix” the system by making the interface to the scripts easier to use for the help desk folks. The problem is much deeper (in some cases). Yes, a really bad interface can make it difficult even for a really knowledgeable and capable person to do the job. But often, even a really great interface cannot always substitute for actual expertise.

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Essays on America: Labelism 

Other posts on problem formulation: 

The Doorbell’s Ringing

Reframing the Problem

I Say Hello

I Went in Seeking Clarity

Who Knows What?

Measure for Measure

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom. 

07 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

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Business, career, HCI, human factors, IBM, life, school, sports, UX

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom. 

Madison Keys, for those who don’t know, is an up-and-coming American tennis player. In this Friday’s Wimbledon match, Madison sprinted to an early 4-1 lead. She accomplished this through a combination of ace serves and torrid ground strokes. Then, in an attempt to consolidate, or protect her lead, or play the (in)famous “prevent defense” imported from losing football coaches, she managed to stop hitting through the ball – guiding it carefully instead — into the net or well long or just inches wide. 

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Please understand that Madison Keys is a wonderful tennis player. And, her “retreat” to being “careful” and playing the “prevent defense” is a common error that many professional and amateur players fall prey to. It should also be pointed out that what appears to be overly conservative play to me, as an outside observer, could easily be due to some other cause such as a slight injury or, even more likely, because her opponent adjusted to Madison’s game. Whether or not she lost because of using the “prevent defense” no-one can say for sure. But I can say with certainty that many people in many sports have lost precisely because they stopped trying to “win” and instead tried to protect their lead by being overly conservative; changing the approach that got them ahead. 

Francis Scott Key, of course, wrote the words to the American National Anthem which ends on the phrase, “…the home of the brave.” Of course, every nation has stories of people behaving bravely and the United States of America is no exception. For the American colonies to rebel against the far superior naval and land forces (to say nothing of sheer wealth) of the British Empire certainly qualifies as “brave.” 

IMG_8499

In my reading of American history, one of our strengths has always been taking risks in doing things in new and different ways. In other words, one of our strengths has been being brave. Until now. Now, we seem in full retreat. We are plunging headlong into the losing “prevent defense” borrowed from American football. 

American football can hardly be called a “gentle sport” – the risk of injury is ever present and now we know that even those who manage to escape broken legs and torn ligaments may suffer internal brain damage. But there is still the tendency of many coaches to play the “prevent defense.” In case you’re unfamiliar with American football, here is an illustration of the effect of the “prevent defense” on the score. A team plays a particular way for 3 quarters of the game and is ahead 42-21. If you’re a fan of linear extrapolation, you might expect that  the final score might be something like 56-28. But coaches sometimes want to “make sure” they win so they play the “prevent defense” which basically means you let the other team make first down after first down and therefore keep possession of the ball and score, though somewhat slowly. The coach suddenly loses confidence in the method which has worked for 3/4 of the game. It is not at all unusual for the team who employs this “prevent defense” to lose; in this example, perhaps, 42-48. They “let” the other team get one first down after another. 

red people outside sport

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America has apparently decided, now, to play a “prevent defense.” Rather than being innovative and bold and embrace the challenges of new inventions and international competition, we instead want to “hold on to our lead” and introduce protective tariffs just as we did right before the Great Depression. Rather than accepting immigrants with different foods, customs, dress, languages, and religions — we are now going to “hold on to what we have” and try to prevent any further evolution. In the case of American football, the prevent defense sometimes works. In the case of past civilizations that tried to isolate themselves, it hasn’t and it won’t. 

landscape photography of gray rock formation

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This is not to say that America (or any other country) should right now have “open borders” and let everyone in for every purpose. Nor should a tennis player hit every shot with all their might. Nor should a football team try the riskiest possible plays at every turn. All systems need to strike a balance among replication of what works, providing defense of what one has and exploring what is new and different. That is what nature does. Every generation “replicates” aspects of the previous generation but every generation must also explore new directions. Life does this through sexual selection, mutation, and cross over. 

This balance plays out in career as well. You need to decide for yourself how much and what kinds of risks to take. When I obtained my doctorate in experimental psychology, for example, it would have been relatively un-risky in many ways to get a tenure-track faculty position. Instead, I chose managing a research project on the psychology of aging at Harvard Med School. To be sure, this is far less than the risk that some people take when; e.g., joining “Doctors without borders” or sinking all their life savings (along with all the life savings of their friends and relatives) into a start-up. 

At the time, I was married and had three small children. Under these circumstances, I would not have felt comfortable having no guaranteed income. On the other hand, I was quite confident that I could write a grant proposal to continue to get funded by “soft money.” Indeed, I did write such a proposal along with James Fozard and Nancy Waugh who were at once my colleagues, my bosses, and my mentors. Our grant proposal was not funded or rejected but “deferred” and then it was deferred again. At that point, only one month of funding remained before I would be out of a job. I began to look elsewhere. In retrospect, we all realized it would have been much wiser to have a series of overlapping grants so that all of our “funding eggs” were never in one “funding agency’s basket.” 

brown chicken egg

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I began looking for other jobs and had a variety of offers from colleges, universities, and large companies. I chose IBM Research. As it turned out, by the way, our grant proposal was ultimately funded for three years, but we only found out after I had already committed to go to IBM. During this job search, I was struck by something else. My dissertation had been on problem solving but my “post-doc” was in the psychology of aging. So far as I could tell, this didn’t bother any of the interviewers in industry in the slightest. But it really freaked out some people in academia. It became clear that one was “expected” in academia, at least by many, that you would choose a specialty and stick with it. Perhaps, you need not do that during your entire academic career, but anything less than a decade smacked of dilettantism. At least, that was how it felt to me as an interviewee. By contrast, it didn’t bother the people who interviewed me at Ford or GM that I knew nothing more than the average person about cars and had never really thought about the human factors of automobiles. 

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The industrial jobs paid more than the academic jobs and that played some part in my decision. The job at GM sounded particularly interesting. I would be “the” experimental psychologist in a small inter-disciplinary group of about ten people who were essentially tasked with trying to predict the future. The “team” included an economist, a mathematician, a social psychologist, and someone who looked for trends in word frequencies in newspapers. The year was 1973 and US auto companies were shocked and surprised to learn that their customers suddenly cared about gas mileage! These companies didn’t want to be shocked and surprised like that again. The assignment reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s fictional character in the Foundation Trilogy — Harry Seldon — who founded “psychohistory.” We had the chance to do it in “real life.” It sounded pretty exciting! 

antique auto automobile automotive

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On the other hand, cars seemed to me to be fundamentally an “old” technology while computers were the wave of the future. It also occurred to me that a group of ten people from quite different disciplines trying to predict the future might sound very cool to me and apparently to the current head of research at GM, but it might seem far more dispensable to the next head of research. The IBM problem that I was to solve was much more fundamental. IBM saw that the difficulty of using computers could be a limiting factor in their future growth. I had had enough experience with people — and with computers — to see this as a genuine and enduring problem for IBM (and other computer companies); not as a problem that was temporary (such as the “oil crisis” appeared to be in the early 70’s). 

airport business cabinets center

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There were a number of additional reasons I chose IBM. IBM Research’s population at the time showed far more diverse than that of the auto companies. None of them were very diverse when it came to male/female ratios. At least IBM Research did have people from many different countries working there and it probably helped their case that an IBM Researcher had just been awarded a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, the car company research buildings bored me; they were the typical rectangular prisms that characterize most of corporate America. In other words, they were nothing special. Aero Saarinen however, had designed the IBM Watson Research Lab. It sat like an alien black spaceship ready to launch humanity into a conceptual future. It was set like an onyx jewel atop the jade hills of Westchester. 

I had mistakenly thought that because New York City was such a giant metropolis, everything north of “The City” (as locals call it) would be concrete and steel for a hundred miles. But no! Westchester was full of cut granite, rolling hills, public parks of forests marbled with stone walls and cooled by clear blue lakes. My commute turned out to be a twenty minute, trafficless drive through a magical countryside. By contrast, since Detroit car companies at that time held a lot of political power, there was no public transportation to speak of in the area. Everyone who worked at the car company headquarters spent at least an hour in bumper to bumper traffic going to work and another hour in bumper to bumper traffic heading back home. In terms of natural beauty, Warren Michigan just doesn’t compare with Yorktown Heights, NY. Yorktown Heights even smelled better. I came for my interview just as the leaves began painting their autumn rainbow palette. Westchester roads even seemed more creative. They wandered through the land as though illustrative of Brownian motion, while Detroit area roads were as imaginative as graph paper. Northern Westchester county sports many more houses now than it did when I moved there in late 1973, but you can still see the essential difference from these aerial photos. 

YorktownHts-map

Warren-map

The IBM company itself struck me as classy. It wasn’t only the Research Center. Everything about the company stated “first class.” Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a trivial decision. After grad school in Ann Arbor, a job in Warren kept me in the neighborhood I was familiar with. A job at Ford or GM meant I could visit my family and friends in northern Ohio much more easily as well as my colleagues, friends and professors at the U of M. The offer from IBM felt to me like an offer from the New York Yankees. Of course, going to a top-notch team also meant more difficult competition from my peers. I was, in effect, setting myself up to go head to head with extremely well-educated and smart people from around the world. 

You also need to understand that in 1973, I would be only the fourth Ph.D. psychologist in a building filled with physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and materials scientists. In other words, nearly all the researchers considered themselves to be “hard scientists” who delved in quantitative realms. This did not particularly bother me. At the time, I wanted very much to help evolve psychology to be more quantitative in its approach. And yet, there were some nagging doubts that perhaps I should have picked a less risky job in a psychology department. 

The first week at IBM, my manager, John Gould introduced me yet another guy named “John” —  a physicist whose office was near mine on aisle 19. This guy had something like 100 patents. A few days later, I overheard one of John’s younger colleagues in the hallway excitedly describing some new findings. Something like the following transpired: 

“John! John! You can’t believe it! I just got these results! We’re at 6.2 x 10 ** 15th!” 

His older colleague replied, “Really? Are you sure? 6.2 x 10 ** 15th?” 

John’s younger colleague, still bubbling with enthusiasm: “Yes! Yes! That’s right. You know. Within three orders of magnitude one way or the other!” 

I thought to myself, “three orders of magnitude one way or the other? I can manage that! Even in psychology!” I no longer suffered from “physics envy.” I felt a bit more confident in the correctness of my decision to jump into these waters which were awash with sharp-witted experts in the ‘hard’ sciences. It might be risky, but not absurdly risky.

person riding bike making trek on thin air

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Of course, your mileage may differ. You might be quite willing to take a much riskier path or a less risky one. Or, maybe the physical location or how much of a commute is of less interest to you than picking the job that most advances your career or pays the most salary. There’s nothing wrong with those choices. But note what you actually feel. Don’t optimize in a sequence of boxes. That is, you might decide that your career is more important than how long your commute is. Fair enough. But there are limits. Imagine two jobs that are extremely similar and one is most likely a little better for your career but you have to commute two hours each way versus 5 minutes for the one that’s not quite so good for your career. Which one would you pick? 

In life beyond tennis and beyond football, one also has to realize that your assessment of risk is not necessarily your actual risk. Many people have chosen “sure” careers or “sure” work at an “old, reliable” company only to discover that the “sure thing” actually turned out to be a big risk. I recall, for example, reading an article in INC., magazine that two “sure fire” small businesses were videotape rental stores and video game arcades. Within a few years of that article, they were almost sure-fire losers. Remember Woolworths? Montgomery Ward?

At the time I joined IBM it was a dominant force in the computer industry. But there are no guarantees — not in career choices, not in tennis strategy, not in football strategy, not in playing the “prevent defense” when it comes to America. The irony of trying too hard to “play it safe” is illustrated this short story about my neighbor from Akron: 

police army commando special task force

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Wilbur’s Story

Wilbur’s dead. Died in Nam. And, the question I keep wanting to ask him is: “Did it help you face the real dangers? All those hours together we played soldier?”

Wilbur’s family moved next door from West Virginia when I was eleven. They were stupendously uneducated. Wilbur was my buddy though. We were rock-fighting the oaks of the forest when he tried to heave a huge toaster-oven sized rock over my head. Endless waiting in the Emergency Room. Stitches. My hair still doesn’t grow straight there. “Friendly fire.”

More often, we used wooden swords to slash our way through the blackberry and wild rose jungle of The Enemy; parry the blows of the wildly swinging grapevines; hide out in the hollow tree; launch the sudden ambush.

We matched strategy wits on the RISK board, on the chess board, plastic soldier set-ups. I always won. Still, Wilbur made me think — more than school ever did.

One day, for some stupid reason, he insisted on fighting me. I punched him once (truly lightly) on the nose. He bled. He fled crying home to mama. Wilbur couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

I guess you got your fill of that in Nam, Wilbur.

After two tours of dangerous jungle combat, he was finally to ship home, safe and sound, tour over — thank God!

He slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and smashed the back of his head on the cement floor.

Wilbur finally answers me across the years and miles: “So much for Danger, buddy,” he laughs, “Go for it!”

Thanks, Wilbur.

Thanks.

—————————————-

And, no, I will not be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Your days of fighting for freedom may be over. Mine have barely begun.


Author Page on Amazon

Find and Cultivate Allies

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

allies, Business, collaboration, cooperation, HCI, IBM, organizational change, pattern language, politics, teamwork, usability

Find and Cultivate Allies

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Prolog/Acknowledgement: 

The idea for this Pattern comes from personal experience although I am sure there must be many other writers who make a similar point.

Author, reviewer and revision dates: 

Created by John C. Thomas in May, 2018.

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Abstract: 

Human beings are highly social beings by nature. We work more effectively in groups (for many tasks) and it’s also more pleasurable. In a group of any size and complexity, people will have a large variety of goals and values. To achieve a goal, including but not limited to change within the group itself, it is useful to make common cause with others within the larger group. Whenever it becomes useful to promote social change of any kind, it is important to seek out and then cultivate allies. You will achieve greater success, enjoy the process, and learn much.

Context: 

Complex problems and large problems can often only be solved by groups. Within a large group, there will be many sub-groups and individuals whose motivations, expertise, and values are partially different from those in other sub-groups or from those of other individuals. In order to achieve any kind of goal including but not limited to changes within the group itself, a great deal of knowledge must be brought to bear and a large number of actions will be required. Generally, an individual or a small group will not have the knowledge, power, or resources to take all of these actions.

The variety of goals, values, experiences, and scope of power of various individuals and subgroups within a larger group can be viewed as a resource. The interactions among such individuals be a source of creativity. In addition, in order to accomplish some goal, you may seek and find among these individuals and groups those whose goals are compatible with yours and whose power and resources allows them to do things you cannot do yourself.

Individuals are subject to a variety of perceptual and cognitive illusions and these may be exaggerated by being in a large group. Changing a group, team, organization, corporation, NGO may be even more difficult than changing an individual even if the change would benefit the group, team, organization, corporation or NGO. Within any organization, there come to be entrenched interests that are orthogonal to, or even antithetical to, the espoused purposes of the group.

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Problem:

Over time, organizations eventually begin to behave in ways that are ineffective, inefficient, or even antithetical to their purpose. Whatever the cause, an individual who recognizes these infelicities in the organization will typically not, by acting alone, have the power to change them. Force of habit, custom, the culture, and the entrenched power of others will tend to make change by an individual extremely difficult or impossible despite their pointing out that the current way of doing things is counter-productive.

Forces:

  • People who wield local power in an organization are often afraid that any change will weaken their power.
  • Changing one part of the organization generally means that other parts much also change, at least slightly.
  • What works best for an organization must necessarily change over time because of changes in personnel, society, technology, competition, the environment, and so on.
  • Organizations typically codify the way they currently work by documenting procedures, providing training, incorporating current processes into software systems, floor layouts, and so on.
  • Each person in an organization is typically rewarded according to the performance of a small area of the organization that centers on or near them.

* People within an organization of any size will exhibit large variations in knowledge, skill, values, goals, and the resources available to them.

* In many organizations, a valid reason for continuing to do X is simply to say, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

* It is not considered a valid reason for change from doing X to doing Y to simply say, “We’ve never done it this way before.”

* Organizations are therefore prone to continuing along a path long after it is a fruitful, ethical, or lawful path.

Solution:

If a person wishes to change how a large organization does things, they need to find and cultivate potential allies within the organization. Allies may be people who can be convinced that the change is best for something that is best for that individual, their department, the organization as a whole, for society or for life on earth. These allies will have crucial information, power, friends, or resources to help make the change possible.

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Example: 

For two years, in the early 1980’s, I worked in the IBM Office of the Chief Scientist. My main mission was to get IBM as a whole to pay more attention to the usability of its products. No-one worked for me. I had no budget. I did, however, have the backing of the Chief Scientist, Lewis Branscomb. Among his powers, at the time, was the ability to “Non-Concur” with the proposed plans of other parts of IBM. This meant that if other IBM divisions did not have usability labs or adequate staff, the Chief Scientist could block the approval of those plans. Lewis himself was a great ally because he had a lot of personal credibility due to his brilliance. Having the power to block the plans of other divisions was also critical.

IBM at this time already had some Human Factors Labs who had done excellent work for years. However, there were large areas such as software that were mainly untested. In addition, most of IBM’s users were technical people and many of the usability tests had been done on other technical people. This had been appropriate but with the extension of computing into other areas of life, many of IBM’s “end users” were now people with little technical computer background. This included administrative assistants and clerks; even chemists, physicists, MD’s, lawyers and other people with advanced education found IBM products hard to use. None of these fairly new groups of users had typically used computers much or had been taught their use in their schooling.

I needed to find allies because the changes that were necessary to IBM were widespread. One important ally was already provided: Tom Wheeler had a similar position to mine within another corporate staff organization called “Engineering, Products, and Technology.” Tom could also get his boss to non-concur with the plans of divisions who were unwilling to “get on board” with the changes. But I needed more allies.

One obvious source of allies were the existing Human Factors Groups. Where they existed, they were typically staffed and managed by excellent people; however, they were often understaffed and often brought in near the end of the development cycle. In many cases, only their advice on “surface features” or documentation could be incorporated into the product. This was frustrating to them. They knew they could be more effective if they were brought in earlier. Often, this did happen, but typically because they had developed personal reputations and friendships (allies) within their organization. It was not mandated by the development process.

Who else would benefit from more usable IBM products? There’s a long list! A lot of “power” within IBM came from Sales and Marketing. The founder, Thomas J. Watson was himself primarily a sales and marketer. Most of the CEO’s had been from this function of the organization. Many in Sales and Marketing were beginning to see for themselves that IBM products were frustrating customers. Finding people within such organizations who were willing to stand up and “be counted” was critical. It was especially useful to find some allies in Europe who were on board with suggested changes. In many countries in Europe, there were various social and legal constraints that gave even more weight to having products that did not cause mental stress, repetitive motion injuries, eyestrain, hearing loss and so on.

In many parts of IBM, there were also “Product Assurance” organizations that required products to be tested before final release. In this case, two simple but crucial and fundamental changes needed to be made. Again, people who worked in Product Assurance wanted these changes to be made. First, we needed to convince development to work with Product Assurance earlier rather than later so that any problems would not be the cause of product announcement slippages (or ignored). Second, we needed to convince Product Assurance to test the procedures and documentation with people outside the development teams. Current practice was often for the Product Assurance people to watch people on the development team “follow” the documented process to ensure that it actually worked. The problem with this process is that language is ambiguous. The people on the development team already knew how to make the product work, so they would interpret every ambiguity in instructions in the “proper” way. IBM customers and users, however, would have no way of knowing how to resolve these ambiguities. Instead of making sure that the documentation was consistent with a successful set-up, the process was changed to see whether documentation actually resulted in a successful set-up when attempted by someone technically appropriate but outside the development team.

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People within IBM product divisions did care about budgets. Adding human factors professionals to existing labs or, in some cases, actually setting up new labs, would obviously cost money. We needed to show that they would save money, net. Some of the human factors labs had collected convincing data indicating that many service calls done at IBM’s expense were not due to anything actually being wrong with the product but instead were because the usability of the product was so bad that customers assumed it must not be working correctly. In most cases, fixing the usability of products would save far more money than the additional cost of improving the products.

In some cases, developing allies was a fairly simple business. For example, IBM had a process for awarding faculty grants for academic research relevant to its technologies and products. These were awarded in various categories. Adding a category to deal with human-computer interaction required a single conversation with the person in charge of that program. Similarly, IBM awarded fellowships to promising graduate students in various categories of research. Again, adding the category of human-computer interaction resulted from a single conversation. It should be noted that the ease of doing that resulted much more from the fact that it was known throughout the company that usability was now deemed important and the fact that I worked for the well-respected Chief Scientist than from any particular cleverness on my part.

In at least one case, an ally “fell in my lap.” Part of how I operated was to visit IBM locations around the world and give a talk about the importance of usability for IBM’s success. Generally, these talks were well-received although that did not guarantee any success in getting people to change their behavior. When I gave the talk to the part of IBM that made displays, however, I got a completely hostile reaction. It was clear that the head of the division had somehow made up his mind before I started that it was complete nonsense. I had no success whatever. Only a few months later, the head of this division got an IBM display of his own. He couldn’t get it to work! He did a complete 180 and became an important supporter, through no fault of my own. (Of course, there may have been additional arm-twisting beyond my ken).

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There were also two important, instructive, and inter-related failures in lining up my allies. First, it was very difficult to line up development managers. An IBM developer’s career depended on getting their product “out the door.” Not every product development effort that began resulted in a product being shipped. Once the product was shipped, the development manager was promoted and often went to another division. So, from the development manager’s perspective, the important thing was to get their product shipped. If it “bombed” after shipment, it wasn’t their problem. In order for the product to be shipped, it had to be forecast to make significant net revenue for IBM. No big surprise there! However, these predictions did not take into account actual sales, or the actual cost of sales, or the actual service costs, or even the actual production costs. The only thing that was really known were the development costs. So, for every additional dollar the development manager spent during development, there was one dollar added to the development costs, but also an additional dollar added to predicted service costs and predicted manufacturing costs. Moreover, there were an additional five dollars added to the predicted sales and marketing costs. If they spent an extra dollar doing usability tests, for example, it added not just one but eight dollars to estimated overall costs. Moreover, since IBM was in business to make a profit, an increase of 8 dollars in costs, meant an increase of nearly 20 dollars in projected price. This meant fewer predicted products sold.

In actuality, spending an additional dollar to improve usability of products should reduce service costs and sales and marketing costs. But that is not the formula that was used. The logic of the formula, corroborated by correlational data, was that bigger, more complex products had higher development costs and also had higher service, manufacturing and sales costs. When one compared a mainframe and a PC, this formula made sense. But when used as a decision tool by the development manager, it did not make sense. (By analogy, there is a strong correlation between the size of various species of mammals and their longevity. This, however, does not mean that you will live twice as long if you double your own body weight!).

Recall however, that the development manager’s career did not much depend on how successful the product was after release; it mainly depended on showing that they could get their product shipped. Development managers proved to be difficult to get “on board.” In some cases, despite the organizational pressures, some development managers did care about how the product did; were interested in making their products usable; did spent additional money to improve their product. Making such allies, however, relied on appealing to their personal pride of ownership or convincing them it was best for the company.

Some development managers suggested that perhaps I could get the Forecasters to change their formula so that they would be given credit for higher sales to balance the projected increase in price (and attendant reduction in sales volume forecasts). It would have been an excellent leverage point to have gotten the Forecasting function as an ally. I was not, however, sufficiently wise to accomplish this.

The organizational payoff matrix for the forecaster was quite skewed toward being conservative. If they used the existing formula and ended up thereby “killing” a product by reducing the sales forecast because of the money spent improving usability, no-one would ever find out that the forecaster might have erred. On the other hand, if I had convinced them by giving them evidence (which would necessarily be quite indirect) that the product, by virtue of its being more usable, would therefore sell many more units, there were at least two logical possibilities. First, I might be right and the product would be a success. The forecaster would have done the right thing and would keep their job (but not be likely to receive any special recognition, promotion, or raise). Second, I might be wrong (for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with usability such as unexpected competition or unexpected costs) and the product might tank. In that case, the company lose a lot of money and the forecaster might well lose their job. While I occasionally found development managers I could convince to be allies because I could get them to value making the most excellent product over their own career, I never was able to gain any allies in the Forecasting function. In retrospect, I think I didn’t take sufficient time to discover the common ground that it would have taken to get them on board.

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Resulting Context:

Finding allies will often enable the organization to change in ways that will benefit the organization as a whole and most of the individuals and sub-groups within it. If done with the best interests of the organization in mind, it should also increase internal mutual trust.

There is a related Anti-Pattern which is finding allies, not to change the organization in a positive way, but to subvert the organization. If, instead of trying to make IBM be more effective by making its products more usable, I had tried to ruin it by finding allies who, in the process of ruining IBM would also profit personally, that would have been highly unethical. Such a process, even if it ultimately failed, would decrease internal mutual trust and decrease the effectiveness of the organization. Of course, one could imagine that some competitor of IBM (or of a government or team) might try to destroy it from the inside out by favoring the promotion of those who would put their own interests ahead of the company or its customers. Finding allies may be likely ethical when it is for the best interests of the overall organization and all its stakeholders and if is a known initiative (as was the case for improving the usability of IBM products).

References: 

https://gps.ucsd.edu/faculty-directory/lewis-branscomb.html

Branscomb, L. and Thomas, J. (1984). Ease of use: A system design challenge. IBM Systems Journal, 23 (3), pp. 224-235.

Thomas, J. (1984) Organizing for human factors. In Y. Vassilou (Ed.) Human factors and interactive computing systems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Thomas, J.C. (1985). Human factors in IBM. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 29th Annual Meeting.  Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society. 611-615. 

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Author Page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Fool Me!

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

IBM, life, magic, NYNEX, school, stories, user experience, user interface

 

 

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Long before seeing television, or even knowing it existed, I listened to stories on the radio mainly with my grandmother. As I mentioned earlier, my favorites were The Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, and Tom Corbett and The Space Cadets. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why she listened although she might have answered questions for me or provided some additional commentary. As I only learned much later, these programs used special props for the sound effects of whizzing bullets, thunder, horse hooves, rocket engines, etc. At the time, it never occurred to me that there were “sound effects.” I just listened and constructed an entire “TV program” in my mind’s eye. More accurately, I was there along with the villains and heroes.

Although the stories presented each week in these programs fascinated me, my grandma’s “Old Pete Stories” captivated me even more. Grandma presided over the Firestone Park Dramatic Club and her performances for me were filled with all the drama she could muster. Her “Old Pete Stories” arose out of an actual character she knew from her days growing up on a farm. Old Pete was a hired hand on the farm; a loner and a drifter, Old Pete had a talent for getting into trouble. In fact, it is rather surprising that Old Pete seemed to get into precisely the type of trouble that a five year old boy might get into and rarely into the kind of trouble that you would expect an adult farm hand to get into. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But it didn’t make me wonder! Not at the time. Instead, I found myself, just like Old Pete, wondering what mysteries that deep blue pond held. I found myself, just like Old Pete, terrified when he became tangled in the unseen currents and forces below the surface. And, like Old Pete, my gratitude and relief came in waves when I … er, Old Pete, I mean … struggled to the shore and pulled himself out. Although “Old Pete” inspired my grandmother’s stories, I’m pretty sure that the plots she constructed were “cautionary tales” much like Aesop’s Fables.

My mother also read me stories, mainly from a giant book of stories. Each story typically only had one ink drawing on the title page for that story. There was one about a mouse who played the piano and another about a Bull in the China Shop. She too loved to practice her most dramatic voice when reading aloud. And then, some time in the first grade, something magic happened. We were sitting around in a circle struggling through our primers when my teacher made some comment that caused everything to “click into place” for me and from then on, I could pretty much read anything! I could now read stories to myself! The stories in the school primers were generally pretty lame, but soon, I got my own books and soon after that, Tootle, and The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy gave way to Tom Sawyer! Huckleberry Finn!  I went to the library every week and picked out three books. Generally, these included some science books and some fiction books and often some combination. The Earth for Sam was a fictionalized account of a boy going back in time to see first hand what dinosaurs were like (among other things). I discovered that our library had a copy of our first grade science text. In fact, it also had a copy of every grade 1-6 science texts. I went through them like the proverbial knife whose molecules had extremely high kinetic energy through butter. Stories of the Knights of the Round Table thrilled me as well as The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Some people found it odd that I read Nancy Drew, but I think they are better written and I can relate to a girl hiding in the closet trying not to get caught and not trying to scream when a spider dropped on her just as easily as if a boy were hiding in the closet trying not to get caught and trying not to scream when a spider dropped on him.

You might think from my catholic tastes and prolific reading that I would forgo television when we finally got a TV set. No way! I loved Gabby Hayes, for instance, and Superman. We had a couch and a reclining rocking chair in our living room. When Gabby Hayes explained that Quaker Oats were shot from guns (!), I hid behind the rocker as the cereal exploded out of the canon. When the Superman theme song or that of The Lone Ranger came on, I ran across the room full speed and flung myself into the recliner. My parents hated this and told me on numerous occasions not to do it despite the fact that I only knocked over the rocker once. Their story was that I would “hurt myself” or “break the chair.” But neither of these things happened. I don’t recall ever actually getting severely punished so I concluded this was just one of those things parents feel obligated to say because they see themselves as responsible adults who must therefore say such things. Meanwhile, I didn’t understand how they could be so blasé about these shows. Why on earth were they also not running across the room and flinging themselves into the chair or couch? Did they not hear the strains of The William Tell Overture? Didn’t they realize that this meant that another episode of The Lone Ranger was about to begin? Didn’t they understand that he would right wrongs? The Lone Ranger not only prevailed every week; he did so without bloodshed! He would gallop up alongside some bad guy and then jump and tackle him off his horse, wrestle him to the ground and subdue him with fists alone. On occasion, The Lone Ranger would shoot, but only to defend himself or others and even then, only shoot the gun out of the villains’s hand! He never missed the target and accidentally gave the bad guy a free appendectomy or craniotomy. And, Superman? Come on! In case you forgot from last week, it always began by reminding you that he could leap tall buildings at a single bound (though why he needed to do this when he could fly is unclear). He was faster than a speeding bullet! He was more powerful than a locomotive! How could they possibly forgo these shows to do some other thing? That seemed incredible but only for the first few milliseconds of the show. After that, I was glued to the tube and lost interest in what they were doing.

Although people hate to “be fooled” so much that when they are fooled, no matter how much evidence accumulates, they tend to dismiss the evidence and insist that they were not fooled. And yet, there are other occasions, like movies, television, novels, and plays were people welcome being fooled. This really struck me hard many many years later watching Apollo Thirteen for the third time. I knew this movie was based on a true story and I knew how the real life events had unfolded and I had seen the same exact movie twice before. But that didn’t stop me from being excruciatingly worried about whether the astronauts would make it back alive. Other species of animals and plants can certainly “communicate” with their own kind and even with other species. It seems doubtful, at least so far, that they can “tell stories” however. This may be one of the quintessential differences between humans and other species. Whether we sit down in a campfire circle to trade ghost stories or streak across the room to throw ourselves into a rocking chair, we seem to be saying “Fool me!”

“Fool me” arises in other contexts as well. The first few years that I lived on North Firestone Boulevard, a peddler appeared several times each summer with a small hand cart filled with toys, puzzles, and games. Generally, these items were not to be found in stores. One item in particular held my attention. A small number of wooden rectangular blocks, roughly card-sized but much thicker, were held together with ribbon. However, when he held them up, he ticked one and allowed them to cascade in a magical fashion so that each block changed from one side to the other. He did tell some cock-a-mamie story as he did this and no doubt, like any other magician’s patter, it was designed to draw attention away from what was actually going on. But in this case, it wasn’t the story, per se, that was so cool. It was the (seeming) physical impossibility of what was happening before my very eyes. In this case, it wasn’t that I wanted to stay fooled. I wanted to see the trick again to understand what was really happening. The peddler, however, relished making money. He wasn’t really trudging up and down the street in his rather heavy coat (especially for summer) for his health nor to entertain children. He wanted to turn a buck. So, despite our pleadings, he would never do this trick more than twice. After that, if we wanted to see it again, we would have to pay for one of these sets of “magic” interconnected blocks and figure it out on our own. I raced back inside to wheedle my parents into giving or at least lending me some money so I could buy one of these. I breathlessly and ineptly explained how these were magic blocks but they seemed singularly unimpressed with my analysis. Dad muttered something vague and incoherent about it just being the way the blocks were connected by the ribbons, but he had not seen the actual demonstration. I did not score the money nor the blocks, at least that time. I did, however, save up my money. My allowance at that point was a dollar every two weeks. So, I had to forgo my favorites from the popsicle man, substituting grape popsicles at 4 cents each rather than the more expensive (and much tastier Mr. Goodbars or even fudgesicles) in order to save, but save I did. The next time the peddler appeared, I was ready! But damn! He wasn’t! He didn’t have any more of the magic tumbling blocks and tried to interest me and my friends in some other toys. I suppose some of those were pretty cool too, but I didn’t care. You’ll be happy to know that I eventually found some when I had my own kids. I was delighted that they were delighted but they no longer held any mystery for me personally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIpUUsIsVE

Everyone I know likes stories and magic tricks. What I find hard to understand are people who prefer to stay fooled. They don’t want to know how a Jacob’s Ladder works. They don’t want to know how a magic trick works. They don’t want to know whether their political candidate lies and cheats. They don’t want to know whether climate change is really going to affect the lives of their children and grandchildren. If there were only say, 100 stories in the world, maybe I could understand that they wouldn’t want to know the outcomes of those 100 stories. But there are way more than 100 stories! There are way more than 100 damned good stories; I don’t see any shortage. But more than that, I don’t see any problem with knowing the outcome (as I did with Apollo XIII) still being engaged and entertained and transported by a good story, well told.

Don’t get me wrong. Just because I want to know how magic tricks work, doesn’t mean I think it is necessarily right for me to explain it and that people who don’t want to know are inferior or stupid. Different people have different preferences. I like cilantro and anchovies and blue cheese but not everyone does. When it comes to what is actually happening in the world in ways that impact our ability (and even more importantly, the ability of our families) to live and function though, it seems to me the truth is much more important than is the pleasure of listening to the same false but comforting story over and over.

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Imagine that we are all sitting around a campfire listening to a “ghost story” about a guy trapped in a pit with scores of foot long spiders who come out and nibble on him whenever he tries to sleep. I am not going to spoil everyone’s “fun” by pointing out that this is very unlikely. No way. On the other hand, if I see a forest fire headed our way, I am going to interrupt the frigging story and let people know! Furthermore, I cannot fathom why some people would rather stay and hear the story if it means they are going to die or at least suffer a lot of third degree burns. Perhaps stories are not only one of humanity’s greatest gifts, but also, under some circumstances, our greatest curse as well.

My fascination with stories continued throughout grade school, high school, and college. Although as an undergraduate at Akron U and then Case-Western Reserve, I took almost a dozen psychology courses, none of them delved with any depth into stories. I did, however, also take courses in English Literature, Shakespeare, and Drama. Even to this day, it’s a little hard to believe that these psychology courses largely skirted the whole issue of stories considering how important and fundamental they are to understanding the human psyche. Freud and Jung did discuss stories in some depth. Even in four years of graduate study at the University of Michigan, stories seldom came up as a topic in cognitive psychology. In fact, the whole enterprise of experimental and cognitive psychology at that time seemed to be about deconstructing human thinking, problem solving, learning, and decision making into different little boxes and finding out about the little boxes.

 

Humans are notoriously varied but one thing you can pretty much count on is that whatever else is going on, these little boxes communicate with each other. My senior year as an undergraduate, I had three part time jobs. One of these was teaching astronomy and space science at the Sixth Grade Educational Center in downtown Cleveland. Another was working with kids in a psychiatric hospital. Another was as a research assistant to a Professor doing experiments in operant conditioning. In the latter set of experiments, kids went into a large “Skinner Box” and pulled a lever for nickels. In front of them, during training, was a large red circle. Later, they continued to pull the lever but got no coins. During this phase of the experiment, they might be shown a smaller red circle, a red ellipse, a green circle and so on. During the time the kids were actually in the Skinner Box, there wasn’t much for me to do. So, I went out to the waiting room and used the blackboard there to teach the kids who were waiting a little astronomy such as the names of the planets and their “order” around the sun. Although my Professor was a behaviorist, he did ask me to debrief each kid as to what they thought about the experiment. To my astonishment, the kids who had heard my little mini-lecture about astronomy tried to relate what I said to the little circles and ellipses that were shown during the experiment. Of course, once they said that, I realized that to them, it made perfect sense to try to relate these experiences. After all, they came to the University, and here was the same guy (me) telling them about weird unusual things. Naturally, they tried to make one unified story out of it.

In graduate school, I got my chances for story telling to my kids but also at a more adult level. It was tradition for each sub-area within the Psychology Department to put on “skits” and I co-authored two satirical musicals, mainly about the professors (and still managed to get my degree). To show you how much on the edge I was, my advisor the first year was Dr. Reitman who studied cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. One of the main characters in the play was “Dr. Brightman” whose student (played by me) was building an AI program and trying to impress a very cute grad student.

I told her my program simulated human thought. “Oh, really?” she replied. “Your program simulates human thought?”

“Absolutely,” I answered, “although for now, purely for convenience and ease of measuring accuracy, we’ve decided to focus on mathematical thinking as a representative domain of human thought.”

“I see,” she answered, “So, this program simulates the way humans do mathematical reasoning.”

“Precisely!” I continued. “Of course, because of storage limitations on our computers, we are initially focusing on arithmetic.”

Now, her brow furrowed to signal that she was less impressed. “So, you are saying your program actually does arithmetic problems?”

So, I said, “Indeed! Or, at least it will if I ever get the code debugged.”

Well, you get the tenor of this satire. (And, by the way, the hype in AI still exceeds the actuality by about the same ratio today 50 years later!) Looking back on it, I am very impressed that the Professors in the department were able to take it all as good-natured fun.

There were important stories told in graduate school. For example, my Professor in physiological psychology discovered the “pleasure center” in the rat brain. The reason he discovered it was his inexperience. He and his professor were doing research on stimulating the “Reticular Activating System” in rats. This part of the rat (and human) brain is important in keeping you awake and alert. A small current into this part of the brain makes the rat much more alert but is punishing to the rat. You can “prove” this by implanting electrodes into the brain and turning on a very tiny current (which is not painful in the sense of an electric shock) and then the rat will soon avoid whatever part of their environment they are in when you turn on the current. But something was terribly wrong with the rat that James Olds had prepared. Instead of avoiding the area, his rat was falling head over heels in love with that area! The rat kept going back for more! When the rat was “sacrificed”, it turned out that Olds had not waited long enough for the cement to dry and the electrode had moved forward into another area of the brain. A whole line of research grew out of this “mistake.” What was “good” here was that Olds and his professor did not try to hide this unlikely result or sweep it under the rug. Instead, they strove to understand it. Although there are certainly scientists who are not as honest as these two, by and large, people go into science in order to find the truth. Not many people go into science in order to make a career out of lying. If you want to be dishonest as a career, you’ll make much more money much more easily by becoming a con artist, or some kind of unscrupulous business person than becoming a scientist. I’m not saying it never happens, but it is a rather stupid path to take. Besides the fact that people who go into science want to know the truth (and do not go into it to get rich), there are all sorts of checks and balances in science to “weed out” dolts who lie about or cover up results.

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My interest in stories and my interest in psychology, though both strong, for many years stayed separate. At one point in my IBM career, I was trying various ways to study and improve a system called “The Speech Filing System” which later transformed into the “Audio Distribution System.” This was a system which functioned a little bit like an answering machine, but was much more sophisticated. One big advantage was that you called it on purpose to leave an audio message. This puts the user in a much better frame of mind than an answering machine. If you call a human being and expect to talk to a human being and instead, get an answering machine, you are (even to this day) more likely to leave a somewhat incoherent and incomplete message such as:

“Leave a message after the beep. BEEP!”

“Oh, hi. It’s me. I wanted to … well, I… I wanted to … maybe it’s .. . you know what? Call me back. I will be gone for an hour or so unless you call in the next ten minutes. Anyway, you know my number, right?”

Yeah, we’ve all been there. By now, a few decades later, people are not quite so surprised by an answering machine, but it still sucks.

Instead, if you called the Audio Distribution System, you knew ahead of time you were going to be leaving a message so you prepared it mentally. You could also easily edit or delete your message and start over. That is just a taste of its many features. But it was new; not just a new product, but a new concept. Furthermore in those dark days of the distant past, there were no mobile phones. People were not used to using something with twelve buttons for a User Interface. The system had a lot of functions but only twelve buttons. Speech recognition was too unreliable to be used for the command interface. So this provided something of a puzzle; how could the buttons be used to make a good interface. Luckily, there were plenty of psychologists on the case. In fact, the main inventor of the concept, Stephen Boies, had been a student of Mike Posner, one of the most brilliant experimental psychologists ever, and John Gould, a prominent and experienced member of the Human Factors Society was also on the project as was I. In addition, the team included Jim Schoonard and John Richards. John was another Posner student. We may have had the only project team with more psychologist by training than computer scientists! As it turned out, both John Richards and Stephen Boies ended up doing a lot of the programming and most of the maintenance.

By using standard processes of design, test, and re-design, we developed a good set of commands. Beyond that, the interface, prompts and documentation were all derived from a state transition table so that changes in the User Interface could be made fairly easily and the documentation could be automatically updated and kept congruent with each other. However, I felt the need for something else. It wasn’t that people had much trouble “figuring out” how to accomplish a particular thing with the User Interface. That, they could do. The problem was that many of them never thought to use the Audio Distribution System. It did not require anything different. There on the desk was your same old phone. (True, there was a little template of commands that sat around the square keys). The trick was, how do you get someone to send an audio message as opposed to calling someone or sending a memo or email? For that purpose, I found a bit of video story-telling to be more effective. I portrayed by voice over what was going through my head and modeling what I hoped the thought process of the user might become.

For a variety of reasons, the Audio Distribution System, although it became an IBM product briefly, never became a “best seller.” For one thing, it was inexpensive. That’s right, inexpensive. It provided a lot of function for the customer but not a lot of sales commission for the sales person. On the other hand, for the sales person to sell the Audio Distribution System required them to learn a whole new way of thinking and then a whole new way of convincing their customers. It was much easier, and much more lucrative, to sell the customer on more storage or processing power.

I happened to attend a talk at an IBM meeting by Shelly Dews who mentioned storytelling. She worked in Raleigh at the time on a new IBM suite of networking products. We ended up working together on what was essentially a story to explain to customers what Netview was and what it did. That seemed to work very well and people who read the “story” version remembered the concepts better than the standard form of documentation and training. However, at about that time, I had an opportunity to begin an Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEX and so left IBM for a dozen years. At NYNEX, I mainly sublimated my storytelling by writing a play and three novels and some day we’ll come back to that.

I also worked with Heather Desurvire to develop a variation on the User Experience technique called “Heuristic Evaluation.” In that technique, you basically ask people to look for issues in the User Experience. It works better if you use experts, but even non-experts can find many of the issues in the User Experience that would come out in tests.  The variation builds on people’s ability to use empathy. So, rather than simply being asked to find issues with the User Experience, people are told to look at the interface via a series of different perspectives; e.g., a cognitive psychologists, a worried mother, a physical therapist, a Freudian therapist, and so on. People who look at the interface in a variety of ways were able to see more issues and also to make more suggestions for additional features than folks who spent an equal amount of time simply looking at the interface (presumably from their “own” perspective). This relates to story in that people who enjoy stories must be able to experience what is going on in the hearts and minds of the characters in order to comprehend and enjoy stories. It’s a little disconcerting that education doesn’t spend more time improving on people’s natural empathic abilities.

It was not till I returned to IBM to work on “Knowledge Management” however, that I was fully able to marry my interest in stories with my interest in cognitive psychology and indeed with the applied field of “Human Computer Interaction.” I was lucky enough to manage a project for several years that was focused on the “Business Uses of Stories and Storytelling.” This is not the time or place to try to summarize all of that work here, but here are a few interesting tidbits.

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At the time, there was a fairly well-known commercial about “Knowledge Management” that claimed that the “secret” to “Knowledge Management” was “simply” to provide the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. Of course, it is anything other than “simple” but even assuming you could do that, it seemed problematic in concept. I immediately thought back to my college professor who taught German. Professor Maciw was Ukrainian by birth and spent most of World War II in a German Prison Camp which is where he learned German. Perhaps that was part of the reason he tended to be a bit on the sadistic side.

At the end of the first semester, rather than giving us a written test as most Professors do, he determined he would give us an oral exam. He prefaced this by saying, “Who is dis class vants A?” Well, of course, every student in the class raised their hand. Who doesn’t want an A? In our class, happened to be a young woman who had had four years of German in high school, and had lived in Germany for three years. Her German was quite a bit better than mine or anyone else’s in the class. He began with her. His method was simple but mind-boggling. He would begin with a question, always shouted, never spoken, such as “In story of small village, who was main character?”

She would begin with “Eric.”

He would then scream in somewhat broken English (never German), “Please to give complete sentence!”

She would begin answering in German in a complete sentence, but she would not get far. After about three words, he would shout: “Please to decline!” This meant that she would have to think back to the last noun she uttered and then say the noun with the various grammatical cases. Nouns in German all come with articles that differ according to whether the noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, as well as whether it is singular or plural and what the grammatical case is. And, so she would begin with the declination of, say, “Der Hund.”

But no sooner had she begun than he would scream, “In story of Hans, who was wife?”

So, she would say, “Erica.”

Then, the Professor would yell, “Please to say in complete sentence!!”

So, she would put it in a sentence and he would immediately interrupt with: “Please to conjugate!!”

This meant that whatever the last verb out of her mouth was, she would have to conjugate the verb.

This went on for about forty minutes. At last she broke down in tears.

I am quite sure she could have correctly answered any of his questions correctly. It wasn’t the information that was problematic. It was the way in which he interrogated her.

The professor strutted around the room for a few moments with his back turned to the class and then spun about facing us as he said, “NOW, who is dis class still vant A?” Only two of us, out of a class of about thirty raised our hands. Then he started on me. I poured buckets of sweat but did not panic or break down in tears. At last he curled the outer part of his lips down to his shoulders and shook his head a little up and down. Then he started out on the other student, Mr. Lepke whose main sin, I am pretty convinced was that he had been born in the wrong country though I no longer remember what that was. At least twenty minutes of a typical hour and half class were taken up by arguments (in English, or some semblance thereof) about European history. I honestly don’t think I recall a single fact from all that argumentation. In any case, Mr. Lepke’s turn began and after about two minutes the bell rang signaling the end of the double period. All of us left.

By chance, around dinner time, I ran into the professor at the student union. He eagerly strode up to me, his eyes ablaze, “Ah! I had Mr. Lepke in class for two more hours! Finally, he said, ‘No more Dr. Maciw No more, I beg you.’” Now, I have never been in a prison camp so I can’t really say what was up with that particular professor. And, I have to say that his method, although it may have temporarily broken the other two students, gave me a great deal of confidence. Nothing since has so far been as harrowing a verbal interchange. So, in a weird way, it was actually useful for job interviews, exam questions, presentations, and so on in later life.

In any case, the next semester, we were back. None of the three of us who had been questioned dropped out. One of the early spring lectures about European history, the professor stopped mid-sentence and said, “Vat is DIS?! Someone in my class passing notes?” He sped down the aisle and snatched the note out of a student’s hand, striding back to the front of the classroom. !” I vill read note in front of entire class!” 

In his loudest stage voice meant for hundreds of students, though we were only about thirty, he read, “Dr Maciw. Your zipper is open.” And, so it was. But here too, this was the right information, delivered to the right person, at the right time. So, it seemed to me that it was crucial to think, not just about the right information content getting to the right person at the right time. It was also very much about how that information was presented. Certainly, one way that information is presented with thought about how is in the story format. Stories are about emotions, feelings, character, relationships, in other words about people. And, by the way, it doesn’t matter whether the characters are doorman or ducks or dogs or dragons or demigods from Damian three or doctors. The stories are always about people. As a child, or as an adult, I am every bit as stricken with “Lady” in the “Lady and the Tramp” as if she been a beautiful woman. I know just how Tramp feels!

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Another interesting feature of stories as a communication medium is that they allow us to talk about the union of our experiences rather than the intersection. In business, one reason the meetings are almost universally boring is that everyone must frame everything into a single corpospeak which tends to be gray and rectangular. Stories, on the other hand, are a different matter. They come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, colors, textures, smells, tastes, and movements. Since each is about people, the variety of possible characters is essentially infinite.

Another consideration about stories is that they tend to focus on the edges of human experience rather than the “central tendency.” The universe is a complicated place, full of wonderful and dangerous surprises. Try as we might, we can never step in exactly the same stream twice. Our knowledge is limited and our personal knowledge is very limited. But, we can learn from the experiences of others. We find this especially interesting if it is something on the edges of human experience. In the same way that we find the largest and smallest and fastest mammal to be interesting, we find it interesting to see what happens when the vilest criminal imaginable falls in love with the nicest person on earth. It makes us consider what we would do; it makes us see the question of “what is love, anyway?” in a new light. A story, in other words, is far more than “mere entertainment.” It can literally be life-changing.

Charles Dickens, for instance, is largely credited at least by some for ultimately improving conditions for the poor in England. Little Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe opened the eyes of many to the horrors of slavery in a way that statistics could never do. Why? Because if you actually read the story with an open heart, you become just a little, of a slave. And, hopefully, of course, you realize that whatever pain you feel in merely reading about something hateful, terrifying, or despicable is only a teeny fraction of the pain a person actually experiencing these things would feel.

David McClelland, a former Harvard professor of psychology helped develop a three factor theory of needs: Need for Achievement, Need for Affiliation, and Need for Power. Some people, and some organizations, have various mixtures of these needs. I identify personally a lot with the need for achievement. I want to find problems, solve them, get things done, understand how things work, improve things, etc. I also identify a lot with the Need for Affiliation. I like people. I like their variety and their surprise. I do not identify much at all with the Need for Power. I like it okay, but only when it’s combined with the other two. If I am in charge and I can make good decisions and genuinely feel that I am doing what’s best for the entire group, I am totally fine with being in charge. But the instant I feel like I want to manipulate someone or bully them or make them do something so that I personally benefit, I will quit. I want no part of that.

McClelland studied children’s literature and found that over time and cultures, these needs were more or less in evidence. What he further found was that about forty years after a particular need was most prevalent in the children’s literature, that need begin to manifest itself in society. Whenever, for instance, the need for Achievement was exulted in most children’s stories, then, when those people grew up and began to make decisions and impact life, that society embodied that need and people made a lot of advances with relatively little violence. On the other hand, when the need for power was prevalent, then the adults raised on those stories had a generation with lots of heat and not much light; a lot of violence but not much progress. Stories are powerful.

Let’s now briefly revisit Jacob’s Ladder, the peddler’s toy that fascinated me so much as a small kid. Recall that the Peddler told a story as he demonstrated Jacob’s Ladder. This was no random story, after all. I recall now that in the story, the various tiles/blocks represented places such as a house or temple. The coins used in the story stood for people. So to my five year old imagination, this was not about coins disappearing and reappearing, though that would be a good trick. No, this was about human beings, being in one place and then, suddenly disappearing from that place and then reappearing in another place! Holy Toledo! If that could happen to Jacob and his brother, maybe it could happen to me! This was magic I had to understand! I didn’t realize this until this moment.  I bought one of these for my kids, and they failed to show anything like the level of interest in it that I had. But, I never told them the story.

What is your story?


UPA talk about stories with more links and references about story

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Selection of my short stories

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