Grimsdyke Consulting

Why it’s not just ageing mice that need to worry about memory loss

// April 19th, 2011 // Comments Off // Information Overload

This news item on the BBC site refers to some published research that suggests elderly mice struggled to remember their way around a maze when subject to an excess of cortisol. Cortisol is one of those “goldilocks” hormones that we need a little of but not too much. We can end up with too much cortisol as a consequence of experiencing stress or burnout.

I had this article in mind on Friday evening when playing tennis with a few mates. One of them struggled to keep up with the score throughout both sets of doubles that we played and seemed genuinely surprised on a couple of occasions that the game had ended. This being men’s doubles, he was inevitably subjected to fair amount of banter. Afterwards, over a drink, I asked him what sort of week he had had. It turned out he had spent the whole week in a project management role dealing with multiple bosses, team members and frequent interruptions by phone and email. Naturally, he was dealing with each email as it came in. I left him with a few tips including putting his email on autoreply and checking messages only two or three times a day. I saw him last night – it’s early days but he said the tips were working.

Of course this is purely anecdotal and unscientific but how many of us are subjecting ourselves to short term memory problems because of the way we work? Neuroscientists are increasingly getting a grip upon the impact of the way we work on cognitive performance and are increasingly seeing symptoms recognisable in those with ADD, Accidental Brain Injury and Alzheimers. Worrying indeed.

Twitter: Can they innovate their way out of information overload?

// October 15th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload, Social Networking

I am a big fan of Clay Shirky’s famous Web 2.0 talk on filter failure, particularly where he acknowldges the role of social norms that we have allowed to arise in the way we use communications technology. But it seems that the world now focuses its efforts exclusively on addressing filter failure rather than some of the behavioural issues that Shirky highlights.

There is a very striking example in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek in which Twitter’s new CEO, Dick Costolo, is interviewed (thanks to Marty Bariff of the Information Overload Research Group for bringing this to my attention). Costolo says:

“One of the things that we’re seeing is that there’s more and more information coming at people on Twitter. And so we’ve got to do a better job of filtering that information.”

I’m struck by the mindset of Twitter feeling that the answer to being overwhelmed by Tweets lies in their technology. Costolo goes on:

“People have devices in their homes now that tweet. You know, weight scales that tweet, tennis shoes that tweet how fast you ran your 5k, an armband that tweets how long you slept last night. One of the things that we’ll have to do a much better job of is providing filters for that information, both human-curated filters and algorithmic filters.”

Algorithmic filters? Surely, if you are overwhelmed by tweets perhaps the first thing to do is follow fewer people. You might want to stop following your own tennis shoes as a starting point…

Are the death notices for email premature?

// October 5th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

In a recent article on BNET, Inder Sidhu of Cisco predicts that email will be replaced by other communications media such as blogging, Twitter etc. I think this may be true for some individuals – I have read one or two blogs where people have announced “email bankruptcy” and said they will only communicate through blogs and tweets henceforth. Fair enough, although I wonder how anyone doing this can buy things online without an email address…

In an organisational context, however, email is far from dead. On the Guardian Tech podast last week, Jeff Bonfiorte of Xobni made the point that Microsoft Outlook, with upwards of 500m users, remains the largest internet application and the time spent by execs compulsively checking messages exceeds that spent on Facebook by the world’s twenty-somethings. Imperfect as it is – or rather our use of it – email is not going anywhere just yet.

Can Google innovate our way out of email overload?

// September 6th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // BlackBerry, Information Overload

There has been lots of coverage of Google’s new filters for G-mail which use algorithms to establish which emails are high priority and which aren’t – see the BBC online coverage here. If you believe that the Clay Shirky “it’s-not-information-overload- it’s filter-failure” premise applies to the issue of email overload, then you will welcome this innovation. Most of the expert commentators I have seen are unimpressed by this and make the point that this is about human behaviour rather than technology.

For my own part, I believe there are two aspects of human behaviour that mean email filtering – already available in a variety of forms – is not the solution: these are a) the compulsion to check all new messages, however trivial and b) the organisational tendency to use email for pieces of communication best suited to another medium. The first aspect of human behaviour is most apparent among users of BlackBerry and other devices – what another news item suggests to me is that the piece of innovation we really need is a better thumb. This is the first news coverage I have seen of “BlackBerry Thumb” - a US woman is recovering from surgery on her thumb after too much activity on her iPhone (I know, but “iPhone Thumb” doesn’t have the same ring, does it?). When humans first evolved reversible thumbs, it was a huge step forward when it came to handling tools, food etc. and helped set us apart from other primates. But it now looks as if the human thumb is no longer adequate for our 21st century environment. Are Google working on this also?

Tetris for Trauma Victims? – Implications for Multitasking

// March 29th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

Friday’s Telegraph had a really interesting piece on some research by a team at Oxford University – the original research paper is well worth a read.

The team took 40 guinea pigs and subjected them to a harrowing 12-minute video of death and injury – this is apparently a standard analog for post-traumatic stress disorder. After a 30 minute break, half sat quietly while the other half…. …played Tetris. All kept a diary for a week and the Tetris players had significantly fewer flashbacks than the control group.

Why? Because the brain has only “limited visuospatial working memory resources” to consolidate experiences as memories and Tetris is, apparently, a great way of soaking up those resources at the expense of other – in this case harmful –  cognitive activities. So, as an alternative to drugs or cognitive behaviour therapy, this is being viewed as a potential treatment for PTSD sufferers.

But turn the idea on its head for a minute. What intrigues me about this is the brain’s powerful ability to constrain its own activity if multiple demands are made on its resources. For me it’s another powerful argument against attempting to multitask.

Microsoft markets Bing as “cutting through information overload”

// March 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

Interesting positioning from Microsoft for Bing, its search engine to rival Google. According to Marketing Week, here’s how UK MD Ashley Highfield describes the TV advertising campaign they are launching in the UK this week:

“The ad campaign brings to life the concept of Bing as a decision engine, a tool that both cuts through the information overload and offers a new search experience. We’re confident that this will help grow our user base, offering advertisers an alternative search solution.”

As someone who watches almost no commercial TV (and what I do watch is recorded so I can fast-forward through the ads), I am genuinely interested in seeing this ad. It’s the first time since Xerox’s 2007 viral video that I can think of a technology vendor using “information overload” as part of the selling proposition in an above-the-line campaign. In fact, the only other instance I can think of is Xobni in their sales material for the enterprise version of their inbox plug-in.

Is this a cynical exercise on Microsoft’s part – tapping into the information overload zeitgeist – or is the company genuinely trying to demonstrate it is dealing with the issue? Certainly, Outlook 2010 has a number of new features that will help customers manage email better. If this is a trend, it is a welcome one. With past innovations such as the red flag and four different ways of letting you know a new email had arrived, there is some lost ground to recover on this one…

“Shorter working week inevitable” – really?

// February 18th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

The New Economics Foundation put out a release on Saturday calling for a 21 hour week. Part of the rationale is that this would help address “lasting damage to the economy caused by the banking crisis”. What this utopian suggestion forgets is that the banking crisis was partly caused by homeowners mortgaging themselves to the hilt. That issue has not gone away so I can’t see hard-pressed homeowners voluntarily cutting their hours in order to help “distribute paid work” a bit more evenly or reduce their carbon footprint. Most need all the paid work they can get.

NEF is right in two areas – the country is becoming increasingly polarised and those in work are working ever longer hours. It reports that since 1981, two-person households have added 6 hours to their work week. As everybody will be asked to do more with less, this trend will continue upwards.

It is odd that nobody talks about the “Leisure Society” any longer. When the Edwardians stopped factory work on Saturday afternoons, professional football took off. Saturday working for manual workers stopped altogether in the 1950s when Churchill seriously thought he might be able to introduce a 4-day week for the working man. In 1981, when NEF base their research, I was a schoolboy working in a warehouse near Moorgate during my summer holidays and remember the foreman telling me authoritatively that we would all get Friday afternoons off before long.

So what happened? Firstly, those manufacturing jobs aren’t there anymore. We are increasingly becoming a nation of knowledge workers – the FT on Monday mentioned an IDC report which suggests that in 5 years’ time, only 10 percent of EU jobs will not require IT skills. (That warehouse in Moorgate is now a financial business of some sort – I walked past it the other day and a fleet of drivers in silver Mercs was waiting outside).

What’s happened over the last 20 years is that knowledge workers have begun to use new communications technologies such as email, mobiles, BlackBerrys etc. Paradoxically, we use these tools in such a way as to wind up working longer hours and carry our work increasingy into our home lives.

Taming Technology and doing more with less

// February 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

Stefan Stern wrote a really excellent piece in last week’s FT in which he observes that “more with less” may become a management mantra. He makes the point that the real challenge is taming technology, establishing boundaries for its use and recognising that we will not achieve more with less if we are “always on”, 24/7.

I love his anecdote about someone posting on her Facebook page: “So much to do, so little time”.. Only to receive a prompt post reading: “Get off Facebook then.”

Read the article here.

“The Stress of Higher Status”

// February 2nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

An article in the December 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review by Scott Schieman, Paul Glavin and Melissa Milkie analyses research conducted on US workers to establish the relationship between the extent of bleed of work into non-work life and the circumstances of the worker. They have found a “paradox” that has been apparent for some time i.e. that the more senior you are, the greater the bleed, in spite of also having greater control over a number of aspects of work. They coin the expression “the stress of higher status”.

The definitions of status are pretty soft and include social indicators such as having a degree so the organisational indicators you might hope for are not there. Also, the data is from 2005. However, it is good to see this issue quantified.

I am not sure how you could research it but my suspicion is that this level of “stress” is self-inflicted – the more senior we are, the more likely we are to work at all hours because, now that most other indicators of seniority have evaported, we have come to equate activity with status. If you don’t agree, seat yourself in the business lounge at any airport and watch…

The Death of Courtesy – Too busy to respond

// January 15th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

I am really struck by Peter Bregman’s post on the Harvard Business Review site. He talks about a friend pitching for a piece of work and getting no response to follow-up voicemails or messages. This appears to be business as usual for a lot of people these days.

Peter asks (via email) the opinion of his brother, a film producer who gets 400+ emails a day. I think the response is really interesting:

“If Sam [the person being chased] has 400 emails to answer a day, 200 of which are crisis emails that he’s prioritizing and answering at, say, 2 AM on a holiday night — LIKE THIS EMAIL — then it’s not Sam’s obligation to write 200 more 30-second emails to people who Sam doesn’t need to write to. Alex [the person chasing] just needs to wait.”

I wonder about the nature of the 200 “crisis” emails? What’s happening in Haiti is a crisis. This sentiment is not untypical of a number of senior corporate people that I know who wind themselves up into a frenzy of self-dramatizing email activity in which nothing matters beyond the next incoming message. Of course, there’s no point bugging people like that – would you really want to work with them in the first place?