Tag: mobile

Our Time in the Desert

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Spending “our time in the desert” carries a long-running history in Western religious and philosophical literature. The desert provides clarity of analysis to the Observer by escaping the subjectivity of densely-populated areas. Whether prophet or philologist, escaping the world of privileged life to find an alien world without our feelings, fears, and troubles; this has long been a clarifying moment. However, as we will find, even the “desert of the real” no longer holds the same significance. We have experienced to many living deserts, too many virtualizations of false lifelessness, smiling at us and walking around out of habit.

In Western philosophy, the desert represents a partial answer to what the world might be when it is absent of life. Many of the problems of philosophy emerge out of linguistic or stylistic flaws, existential particularized instances that thought transforms into generalization prematurely, or abstractions that take on a “life of their own” and run amok in the civilized mind. The spectacle of human society is too full of symbols and signs, leaving the philosopher in search of “bare life” in the wilderness, to at last secure a hold on the sublime. There is immediately a textual question, were one to note it: why the desert? Nietzsche, like his own retreat to Switzerland, has Zarathustra retire to the mountains. Henry David Thoreau escapes to Walden pond, painting a scene of a small cabin among American pines, praising self-sufficiency. In similar fashion, we may try our own hermitage to mountains or forests to escape the confused misrepresentations of society and fashion. The desert, in contrast, represents an alien reality, one that does not welcome us or praise us, a physicality that humbles the consciousness that believes reality manifests for life.

In the process of enduring the desert, we see an escape of the noise, light, and concerns of Others. Yet this escape requires there be something to escape into as well. The desert holds the appeal of an absence of signs, representation, and symbolic exchange. The comforts of the mountain or the forest still let us believe we can make a home, then construct a metaphysics that justifies our selfish human privilege. The alien forms of the desert, self-sufficient without the presence of human mechanization and machination, reveals the Observer’s alienation. The unintended consequences of society become clear in the desert of the real. The alien landscape of human lifelessness reveals the alienation of human society. Then we see that enclosure within the social machine encroaches upon individual moral systems of valuation and signification.

For this, we must strip representation down to bare life, then even forget life itself. At the extremes, the cosmos is a lush paradise, phenomenon created by the human mind and for the human mind; else it is an enormous desert, a system of objects that entraps us, an enormous machine in which matter is more real than our lives ever might be.

The inescapable social machine creates the need to distance thought from its comfortable privilege, opening the individual value system to the experiments of alien reality. The long-running contemplation of inhuman reality as a desert represents a stance on metaphysics. The weight of our decisions in the desert are the moral responsibility of bare life; every metaphysics carries extreme implications for moral systems.

Plato told us that there is a perfect and sublime realm of pure forms, triangles, circles, concepts, and virtues, all complete and wholesome in the full light of the sun. Meanwhile human existence is a sad misrepresentation of the true reality, like shadows cast on the wall of cave, create by puppets and trifles in a flickering fire. The allegory of the cave inspires a long lineage of mathematicians, astronomers, and rationalists, all trying to wake up from the dream of this world so that they may see the true world in all its sublime glory. This effort to deny the significance of bodily life makes its way to the Rationalists, like Descartes and Spinoza. The rationalists insisted that a perfect reality lay outside the material reach of humanity, except through total conceptualization and pure reason.

Aristotle takes a more encyclopedic approach (an apt description of the method by William James). Describing the attributes of human experience, cataloging the ideas found in agreement, and attempting to summarize the most probable and consistent explanation for the full sum of human belief, Aristotle established the framework for the division of our major sciences. The lineage of Aristotle, ending with the British Empiricists, insist that the material perception of humanity is the only reality upon which we can base our judgements. Anything abstract is either self-evident, as the result of a system of abstract machines like 1+1=2, or they are generalizations of experience, hypotheses that must undergo continuous experimentation for validity.

Insisting on exclusively a priori grounds, Descartes builds out a moral system based on the perfection of axiomatization, aspiring to find God-given precepts as pure as mathematics. Descartes wants an ontologically self-evident deity, with a moral code as self-contained – in the absence of any believer – as Euclidean geometry. Insisting on exclusively a posteriori grounds, Hume insists that human nature and justice must arise from probability, experiments, and patterns.

As good literary critics, we must look to the context of these arguments and read between the lines. The foundations of metaphysics and physics, its implications for ontology and epistemology, these were the formal concerns of their arguments. Between the lines, the first modern philosophers were finding that the “pagans” of Rome and Greece were not so different from Europeans and that the divine right of kings ought not trump the sovereignty of individuals. On the one side, the rationalist denial of the validity of human life and the Christian attitude toward worldly pain and desire, whatever the intended consequences, had resulted in abuses of despotism, outlandish inequality, disposability of slaves and peasants, as well as a long series of wars, killing and torturing lives in the name of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hume’s skepticism laid out a groundwork for methodical naturalism that had terrible implications for personal beliefs about the burden of moral responsibility humanity bears. By what means do we justify enslavement, castration, starvation, domestication, or carnism – there is no grounds for any of these injustices without a social machine producing it. Empirical logic dictated that the ontological argument for a deity only gave the cosmos itself the name of God. All the injustices of human life, and many abuses against nature, originate in human prejudices, perpetuated by justifications provided by organized religion.

Hume awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” and likewise startled into action all Western philosophy that followed. Hume stated, “All knowledge degenerates into probability.” Indeed, centuries of improvement in stochastic econometrics proves above all that the average human keeps economics and statistics as far away from their domesticated habits as they can. Probability of two united representations of the senses provide us with increasing certainty, but generalization of correlation into causality can only be an optimism bias imposed by the mind itself. Necessity, power, force, causal agency are thus projections of the mind superimposed on the consistent union of representations in the constant conjunction. Like heat, color, weight, sound, taste, and smell gain signification relative to the context of the Observer, Hume closes the book on generalization from certainty of probability. There is no cause and effect, nor causality and causal agency at all, only a probability we forecast and trust based on consistency of experience; “Anything may produce anything,” and by implication, any king, master, government, or religion who tells your otherwise are deluding you for the purposes of undeserved access to resources, labor, and moral hypocrisy.

Kant takes the extremes of the two approaches and attempts a “Copernican Revolution” by embracing both sides wholesale. Kant argues that the mind produces causality, not as a forecasted probability, but as a category of the mind itself. The representations of the senses, cause and effect, are all produced by the mind, as are space and time, but the mechanical determinism we see outside the mind tells us nothing about the freedom of the will “inside” the mind. The machine may look predetermined and predictable from the outside, reactive within a chain of causes and effects, but the ghost within this shell is free and moral. While causality is consistent beyond a reasonable doubt, the feeling of freedom of the will and moral valuation is likewise consistent beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, he argues, it must be the mind itself that adds everything other than freedom of will and pure reason to our representations of space, time, appearance, and causality. This lensing applies to the perception of other rational agents, and any of our interactions among intelligent beings, so their determinism and our freedom cannot contradict one another.

Based on this approach to bridging the gap between free will and determinism, Kant builds causal agency upon the synthesis of internally true freedom and externally apparent determinism. Without insisting on the rationalist freedom necessary for moral choices or insisting on the naturalist determinism necessary for moral consequences, Kant breaks the world in two. On one side of life we find the phenomena that the mind generates, but on the other side the mind builds this upon the numen of metaphysics, the thing-in-itself about which we can reach no conclusions. This separation is essential to the moral agency we take for granted anyway, because in a purely deterministic world we would have no ability to make choices, and therefore bear no burden of responsibility; while in a purely free world we would have no control over the outcome of our choices, and therefore bear no burden of responsibility. When we begin with the axiomatics of Western philosophy, it is only if we are both free to make choices and the world contains enough determinism to link our choices to consequences that we bear any moral responsibility for actions.

Kant short-circuits the arguments for either extreme by separating human reality from actual reality. This allows for the belief that each choice is its own causa prima without undermining our responsibility for the consequences in deterministic perception. However, this separation, and the postulated numen as a thing-in-itself devoid of human perceptions, built a wall between humanity and the metaphysical realm. The intended consequences of this mechanization lay in finding a logically necessary system of morals. The unintended consequences of this machination are precisely where philosophy finds its desert: a world of numen in which mind refuses to live.

While Kant placed a wall in the individual mind, separating the senses and intellect from the metaphysical reality of the thing-in-itself, Hegel takes this license into senseless material abstraction, under the premise that any narrow view of the material whole may find through its self-reflection the complete understanding of the whole.

Schopenhauer criticizes the entirety of Kant’s approach, saying that it is recycled Platonism. Ironically, it was only Kant’s popularity that drew so much attention to Hume’s methodological naturalist skepticism. Schopenhauer surveyed the full history available from multiple cultures for the first time since the fall of Rome, finding new insights in Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucius, and Taoism. In practice, Kant’s method was too convenient for the morality that submits to the prevailing ideology. If the creation of phenomena occurs in the mind of every self-conscious rational observer, and moral imperatives only apply to self-conscious intelligence, Kant’s prioritization of human valuation over the will expressed in all forms-of-life violated the principle of sufficient reason; instead, Schopenhauer argued our physical experience itself alienates us, the world of representation separates itself from the metaphysical will as a lonely expression of selfish altruism among the collective desire for consciousness.

The will was Schopenhauer’s thing-in-itself, and the will-to-live was far more coextensive than humans or civilization. In the world of will and representation, we experience thorough determinism of signs and even the choices we believe we make are representative interpretations of the movement of the one will; as generator of the forces driving all representational things. Finally, we arrive at the desert of Western philosophy. Stripping away the layers of representation, removing the system of values, both in concept and precept, and anything specific to the strategic goals of the human species, he lands upon the will by wandering into the desert, realizing the will cannot stop willing. Simply, being cannot stop becoming even throughout infinite revolutions and recurrence:

But let us suppose such a scene, stripped also of vegetation, and showing only naked rocks; then from the entire absence of that organic life which is necessary for existence, the will at once becomes uneasy, the desert assumes a terrible aspect, our mood becomes more tragic; the elevation to the sphere of pure knowing takes place with a more decided tearing of ourselves away from the interests of the will; and because we persist in continuing in the state of pure knowing, the sense of the sublime distinctly appears.

– Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea Vol. 1

The inescapable desert of pure knowing led him to immense pessimism, and he believed even the honesty of systems like Stoicism and Buddhism were insufficient for this desert. At one point he articulates this as a conversation among two friends, one wishing to be certain of the eternity of the soul, the other explaining the foolishness of wanting such assurance. In the end, the two call each other childish and part ways with no resolution; this may have been the underlying insight of all his philosophy, that all representation is childish non-sense. The will-to-live expressed in any one life was helplessly biased, and only self-conscious intelligent humanity was fully aware of the terrible burden of moral responsibility implicit in the recurrence.

Supposing anyone agrees to the groundwork of the pessimistic view reacts in the negative, treating its conclusions with any level of anger, indignation, and indolence, where might such a warrior take his passion? For this we find Friedrich Nietzsche, ready to reject the asceticism of any collective religion. He paves the way for a new method of nihilist existentialism that requires individualist positivism. While religious systems had long founded their origins on the ideas of prophets spending their time in the desert, seeking the truth-in-itself, Nietzsche rejected the notion that anyone may meaningfully appropriate these insights from another.

Going even further than Feuerbach or Schopenhauer, Nietzsche deploys his powers of literary criticism to show how the organization of religions around the insights of prophets provides us with the opposite guidance exemplified by their embrace of the desert. We ought to echo these as free spirits, creating our own system of values, not follow blindly the dogma institutionalized complacency. Within the mechanization of an ideological, dogmatic, axiomatized belief system, built in the shadow of these warrior-philosophers, we find the machination of the priests and clerics who, too weak to spend their own time in the desert, prevent all others as well.

The only answer for Nietzsche is to run into the desert, like a camel that has escaped with its burden, shrug it off, become a lion, and battle the enormous dragon “Thou Shalt” so that one may become a child, making new games and values:

“In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust […] he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT—and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.”

– Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil

Nietzsche sets the tone for the personal responsibility to become our own prophet in the desert, a warrior-philosopher far removed from the falsehoods of entrapment in the social machine. Albert Camus, who fought as a rebel during the Nazi occupation of France in WWII, took this moral responsibility as the essential meaning of human existence.

In the face of immense human suffering and depravity, surrounded by casualties of war and hopelessness actualized through countless suicides, Camus likewise found a desert in which we must fight for meaning and purpose. He called this desert the “absurd” – the self-consciousness speculative reality we experience, that is neither the material objects nor pure representation of mind. Representation distances us from the simple possibility that consciousness can distrust itself for some strategic reason; or that humanity repeatedly utilizes abstractions to justify murder. Therefore, we must revolt against the absurd and continuously fight for meaning.

It is here that the full history of philosophers rejecting naïve realism, with comprehensive skepticism that we may ever attain objectivity, finally reaches its absurd conclusion from the phenomenologists, that nothing is certain, “evoking after many others those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others, yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them!” The desert of the real is the end of the power of thought, a limitation few philosophers were willing to accept.

This inability to find justification in knowledge of reality forces the burden of responsibility for our actions on our own shoulders. Thought will not attain certainty of material determinism or spiritual unity. We can only look to other humans for the depravity of the absurd. The mechanization of institutionalized values, which machinate unintended consequences, should not become our complacent acceptance.

“At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there […] to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself.”

– Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

When we reach this realization, that nothing human can be certain, that nothing behind or under perception justifies our life, pleasure, suffering, or death; this is where all the interesting and dramatic intricacies of systems of living representations occur.

The absurd is a desert of the mind, the distance or distortion that lies between what the material of the cosmos might be without representation in consciousness and signification by intelligence. The absurd is everything that painfully fails to make sense, such that we reject the validity of our senses, or even put an end to sensory experience. The revolt against this denial and delusion described by Camus, as well as the reality of our moral systems within the social machine, reflects the prophetic independence of Nietzsche’s warrior-philosopher.

Camus concludes that if the absurd is the quintessential defining attribute of human life, he must maintain the discipline of methodological naturalism in his authentic appraisal of the system: “I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them and pursue them in all their consequences” (Ibid).

He likewise takes stock of the problem of re-valuation of all values and the cowardice to do so. While Nietzsche treats this fear with disgust, Camus treats it with empathy. The desert of the real, the fact that we and all those we love will die, that the world will forget us and everything we ever hoped or desired; to fear the reality of this supposition is only natural:

“But I want to know beforehand if thought can live in those deserts. I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts. There it found its bread. There it realized that it had previously been feeding on phantoms. It justified some of the most urgent themes of human reflection.” Ibid.

For Camus, there is no doubt of how difficult and terrifying it may be to reconsider everything once held valuable, meaningful, and true. An individual re-valuation of all values must proceed when we finally strip away the mechanization and machination that filter our reality. Our time in the desert reveals the alienation and denial that it has brought us, that we are party to the machine, and it prevents us from prioritizing with any lucidity or acumen.

Bertrand Russell summarizes the long-running battle for objectivity similarly in Some Problems of Philosophy, and the alienation it represents, saying, “If we cannot be sure of the independent existence of objects, we shall be left alone in a desert — it may be that the whole outer world is nothing but a dream, and that we alone exist.”

Unfortunately, we have a new problem today. The same mechanization of general intellect implicit in capitalism is a machination that undermines virtuosity and moral responsibility. The interlinked supercomputers in our pockets free us to access more information than ever, but too much information too fast leaves us unable to find any significance in it. This is the decisive step in the process of alienation humanity pursued with the successive objects placed between us: tools, weapons, religion, governments, enclosure, property, currency, contracts, machinery, corporations, computers, the spectacle. The “war of all against all” described by Hobbes, the social machine can finally reduce our natural state of civil war to isolated individuals, so long as they carry their own chains of self-enslavement in their pocket.

We no longer find enclosure in the social machine mechanization of labor, we enclose the machination alienation within our personal machine. The spectacle and virtualization prevent us from reaching any desert of thought and any authentic life. In Simulacra & Simulation, Jean Baudrillard calls this problem hyperreality: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” When social engineering precedes our understanding of rational normative valuation, when the full globalization of economic Oedipalization leaves us with no unaltered experience, we are only able to recognize patterns that Others created ahead of time for us to recognize.

Hyperreality is the universally unauthenticated life. It represents a loss of significance by managing all mystery ahead of time. We do not experience any event authentically because the genuine physicality experience is not the anchor, a virtual experience anchors us ahead of time. If we go camping, virtualization anchors us to what camping is and who campers are through movies, commercials, and social media. To be certain, this is not a new and unexpected result of technology, it is the very essence of technology. Where we once spent time in the desert to escape the representations of the social machine, now we recognize its total inescapability.

Philosophers once inspected the distinction between the world of the mind and the world the mind perceives, some claiming everything was virtual, others claiming everything was machines. Repeatedly, some dualism became established, such that our virtualization, though developed and enclosed by machines, we could feel confident we could escape them. Today our understanding of either loses its innocence, precisely because we finally know how to engineer the patterns. It is no longer a few power-hungry men and the herd instinct of the masses that develops the unintended consequences of our morality, we can no longer claim ignorance or escape. Today we are all party to the data, the algorithms are intentional, and intelligent people fight to manage or mismanage the collateral damage.

“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory […] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. – Baudrillard

Just as the chains of hyperreality prevent us from knowing the distinction between the real and the virtual, between our mechanization and our machination, the desert of the real is no longer a problem between us and material physicality, nor between us and the social machine. Now the absurd reality is within us. As we trace this lineage of the desert, we come full circle to the machines and automata from which self-consciousness attempted to distance us. The remainder of our philosophy will face the ethical and political dilemma in which we awake, to understand the moral weight of decisions, even if these we pursue in a dream within a dream, even if our awakening is only to another dream. We must establish what moral values ought to carry significance regardless of how deep in Plato’s cave we might be. Any mechanization that prevents this personal responsibility to life and existence is a machination.

Regardless of its original evolution, the intended consequence of formalization in written language was to bring humanity together. Abstraction became a powerful tool, trading on the currency of truth-values. Generalization allowed anchored, consistent existential instances to become probable patterns that we could exchange and test against reality. Once language became typography, the rules of grammar formalized and analyzed, and the lexicon of significations network into a matrix of signs, we realized the tool meant to bring us together resulted in our separation. The signs of language are simulacra, words that have definitions prior to our experience of an object. Together, full literacy creates a simulation of the world that we project upon it, distorting its significance. The signs of images in media do the same, so that instead of recognizing an object as a particularized word, we have experiences the name, the image, and the normative reactions of others in advance. Finally, we take all these simulations and place them on our own body, first in the pocket, then as wearable, with a goal to achieve further integration. Virtualization consumes us prior to any experience of reality.

Our time in the desert of the real means that we cannot look to a higher or lower plane of existence, or base our morality on the significance of rules outside ourselves. Now there are no rules outside us, only the axiomatization of our simulations, rules which we either manage or mismanage. For Schopenhauer, the desert was our capacity to resist the will and engage in pure simulation. For Nietzsche, the desert was the struggle to create new systems of significance and new patterns of understanding. For Camus, the desert was the absurd distance that alienates us from objectivity. In Baudrillard, we finally face our desert of the real, that the loss of any objectivity leaves everyone equally speculative, in a simulation we create and cannot escape. We are party to all the unintended consequences of the system and must build a better machine.

Systemic Liberty & Component Freedom

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Components act as units of teleonomic reproduction. They warrant attention as objects reliable as decision nodes. Complex networks of nodes may develop based on simple decision rules despite the pressures of entropy. If the nodes are not stable enough in the reproduction of decision rules, network complexity will not arise. Node reproduction relies on the equilibrium-stable identity maintained. Free play can generate networks, but continuous irreducibility and consistent rule identities are prerequisites of system regeneration.

Freedom of unrestricted components in any system of exchange manifests as unmanaged, uncoordinated interaction of market tacticians. These desiring-machines are not only homogenous but equally rational, equally information-bearing and equally demand-producing. Lumping homogenous tactical components creates unstable networks but fails to produce stable complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems require objectification of nodes as homogenous resources. Therefore, freedom without accumulation of inequalities produces an enormous, boring aggregate of bacterium, heaped in a pile.

The pressure to submit to rules of objectification arises out of power-law dynamics; will-to-power is this final power-law trajectory of the cosmos. These competing systemic forces shape the success of free play at many levels of continuous irreducibility. Without gravity, magnetism, sexuality, pain, discontent, axiomatic drives so ingrained in our sense of mastery that very few recognize their enslavement, the system breaks out of the cadence of synchronization. Homogenous freedom, perfect equality of all components, results in a non-system.

Morality in practice develops consistent rules of ethics. Politics reproduce these ethical systems. Freedom and equality cannot form a complex system of teleonomic reproduction. The State (as with the body, the cosmos) cannot empower its citizens beyond a certain limit of relative freedoms, disseminated through its system of inequalities, justified by the morality of its axiomatics. There can be no anarchy-state. Any freedom of socioeconomic exchange and any individualization of sociopolitical force is thereby post-paternalistic, all liberation is post-despotic.

We find this easy to accept so long as the law is orders of magnitude away from our daily exchange relations. Systems of relations and variables are always systems of inequalities, not only in the mathematic but also the social phase space. Without these inequalities, there is no differentiation of variables, no separation of space-time, no mass or gravity, no weak or strong nuclear force. It is only through an anti-equality, heterogeneity in four or more dimensions, that the system can intelligibly produce homogeneity of one category versus another.

The supply curve emerges unequal to but continuously relating in juxtaposition with the demand curve. The exponential decay of economies of scale emerge unequal but continuously relating to the exponential growth of inventory holding costs. It is precisely when we chain together the abstraction of any given variable into a continuous function that probable inequality is meaningful despite the complete absence of a single representative for the inequalities of the system.

How silly of us to say, as it were, that this particularized man is a “demand variable” or that particularized woman is a “supply variable” of these socioeconomic networks! This was always the fantastic insight of the economics and physics of the early Modern Era – when we take an economic view of a sociopolitical system, there is no need to find any particularized representative of inequalities. The gradation of ranks emerges without management, though this is frequently a mismanagement. Emergent systems only need continuous sampling to keep the function unequal, and thereby meaningful, in comparison to other functions.

We can see that an increasing comfort with abstraction, probability, and tolerance limits has driven human progress. For example, the ability to symbolize (representation) not actual inventory, nor actual intrinsic worth, nor actual persons who exchange, but the logical set of all items held, all wealth accumulated, all persons who may exchange. Only then does the human symbolization of inventory, particles, and citizens plot into waves of normalized, probable, continuous possibilities.

To the quantum system, truth-value is a particle; but it is only a particle in principle. The statistician’s real and indoctrinated citizen must exist somewhere in this probability density of the population. Is she economic supply or demand? Is he political inventory holding cost or political transaction cost? These systems of inequalities are vectors, but only in aggregated calculation, in sufficient populations, driving us toward that ultimate capitalist conclusion – s/he is a superposition vector

Superposition citizenship, a moving-forward forward concretization, a superposition of a multitude of vectors, functions, calculi, and inequalities. The citizen is a particle of the social fabric, if only in principle. The atomic particle and the quantum particle are likewise citizens in principle. These are all inventions of the human mind, “real” functions, mathematically, but non-actual existentially. How lucky for us that such schizophrenia and bipolarity, such increasing alienation of probability from singularity, turned out to be pragmatically essential to a digital revolution that will self-perpetuate, remembering our imaginary simulacra on our behalf!

However, we come to an uncomfortable relation in singularity. Who am I, in a phase of recursive reflexivity, when my most reliable identity is the one defined by standard deviations from a particularized citizen that is true “in principle” beyond a reasonable doubt, but is axiomatized upon the acceptance that existential instantiation is merely relative? The failure of unquestioned personal morality lies in unquestioning submission to the ethics of the political system. More often, this results in displacement into some invasive ideology as system of denial, because the system of values has become morally bankrupt. This is a pornographization of the soul (even in the absence of gods) that would make the most despotic of the medieval popes jealous. The consumer-citizen no longer compelled to produce or consume commodities; that is a foregone conclusion. The weak, cowardly, distracted soul must now produce and consume itself. This production is relative to the gravitational pull of normalized continuous citizenship waves, again, in principle.

Are You Ready for the HaaS Economy?

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Internet of Things innovation is diving hard and fast into the hype cycle’s trough of disillusionment (Check last August’s Gartner’s Hype Cycle).  After all, we have a fridge that can stream video to my phone and…. okay not much going on really.  The real potential for IoT has been in the industrial and B2B space where big “dumb” machines could work together much better with a little “smart” tech.

The cultural quirk that has made innovation in IoT is the enormous emphasis on consumerization of new tech.  If the drone isn’t a personal flying car or the IoT can’t be purchased as a smart home upgrade, people have a tough time caring I guess.  So all the hype is focused on the B2C market while most of the potential for innovation is in the B2B space.

Enter the Hardware as a Service economy.

Having played in the IoT space with several early adopters as a consultant, this is definitely huge.  Essentially, we will see more smart hardware suppliers for both consumer and B2B markets enter.  Containers, logistics, irrigation, experience marketing all have immense potential for startups that can bear the risk of innovation and maintain the expertise of servicing and implementation.  That’s the heart of what makes this a no-brainer – “HaaS transforms an up-front capital expenditure into an ongoing operating expense, which also allows for more accurate cost/value comparisons” via TechCrunch

That’s three huge differences HaaS will make in IoT:

  • Finance is Simpler: Companies don’t need to bear all the risk of innovation in tech they don’t understand.
  • Accounting is Simpler: Companies don’t need to bear all the risk of investment in a massive purchase of tech they don’t understand.
  • Economics is Simpler: Companies can more accurately trace the value-add to their ongoing operations investment, rather than calculating a BullShit ROI for projects based on tech they don’t understand

Identify Existing Alternatives

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Identify Existing Alternatives

When you’ve identified a pain that is shared by a sufficient group, don’t start solutioning yet!  There is actually another crucial step.  Identify the existing alternatives.  If a pain is already perfectly met, it may not make sense to add that new feature, create that new product, or start a new company.

Understanding Workarounds

With Emphatic, some existing alternatives were Tweeting just a photo of the book with a caption, typing notes or quotes manually while fumbling with the book, and (for the research paper student) Microsoft Word does have a tool to help with your citations.

Each of these cases are examples of a workaround, since none of them really solve the key pains – frustration and wasted time typing notes, citation grey areas, relying on my brain’s “file system” for tracking and relating insights over time.

If you have ever emailed a document to yourself, that was a workaround.  AirDrop is an amazing solution to the specific pain “I want these three photos shared from my iPhone to another device Apple device.”

To find workarounds, you need to take a gemba walk.  Go to the place where the pain occurs.  Observe, ask questions, listen.  The closer you are to the pain you need to solve, especially if it is as critical to you as it is to your customers.  This isn’t all user experience fluff.  The workarounds and nearly-good-enough products you see today are the “Threat of Substitution” part of Porter’s 5 Forces after the new feature/product/business exists.  If you make scissors and someone cannot find them or afford them, tearing the paper is a viable substitute.

Competitor Research

The usability and customer interview part of competitive research is both easier and harder than ever due to the internet.  Where there is pain that is significant and shared by a group of people, there is guaranteed to be a place on the internet where you can observe what has been said, what people advise each other to do, etc.  Don’t fall into the temptation of trusting this as the only insight you need.  You need to get involved in the discussion, ask open questions, and listen (even on an internet forum).

As it turns out, Emphatic does have a competitor.  Although I had searched for a direct solution to my pains and found nothing, this week while searching for a workaround I found Quotle.  This is very exciting.  You see, Quotle is exactly what I had initially thought I’d build to solve my pain before I read Rework and Running Lean. It is an OCR scanner for paper books that looks like Instagram. 

I had envisioned artistry and community and got a technical proof of concept. 

Unfortunately, that’s the disconnect that accumulates into a product/market misfit as a demand to alleviate a pain moves from the user through the stakeholders and Product Owners to the development team and back to the user.  More on that later:  in the mean time, download Quotle, try it out, and send me what works and what doesn’t work about it.  I’ll be asking the same of people at the library.

How to Validate the Problem Statement

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Lean Startup Principles – Validate the Problem Statement

Remember when I said that most companies waste money on mobile and that their smart presence makes them look dumber than when they started?  Remember how I said that the Lean Canvas can be used for product roadmap and feature prioritization? 

Let’s dig in to how I’m doing that with Emphatic, the mobile app for sharing physical books with your virtual society.

Now that we have a heartfelt product backstory, let’s build the business model.  You may recall that I encourage the Lean Canvas.  It can be done quickly enough that you can think through multiple possibilities for what the right “Plan A” business model before you start investing time and energy in developing your product.

Lean Canvas Step #1 – Identify Top 3 Problems

“Validating the pain” means two things: 

  • The pain is significant enough that people would pay you for a better way to alleviate it.
  • The pain is shared by enough people that focusing a product on that pain will result in a viable business model.

In other words – “Do I have a problem that is worth solving?”

Brainstorming for Emphatic

Here is the long-winded brainstorming version of the problems. 

Problem 1 – As a father, time to myself when I can read is limited.  When I wanted to Tweet a quote from a physical book or make a quick virtual note about my thoughts so I’d have it later, the process was distracting from the experience of reading the book.  With limited time to read and limited time to write, the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of trying to do both at the same time was extremely frustrating.

Problem 2 – Keeping track of my thoughts and insights is hard short-term and nearly impossible long-term.  I love “book pairing” – I gain more from reading two or more books with topics distinct enough that the synergy between them is worth more than reading the one book alone.  As an example, reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! at the same time as Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup gave me two fairly different but complementary perspectives on choosing what to create (as an artist or writer or worker) and making sure you’re creating something worth the time you spend.  Of course, he drawback if you want to properly attribute/cite your sources (and you should), is that it becomes even harder to keep track of the insights you gain and which author and book should be credited.  As I shared in the Product Backstory, this is challenging enough when I’m writing a short blog post a few days after reading two or more books.  When writing a 30 page thesis with dozens of sources that were found over a 6 month period, this went from challenging to “maybe I should just find some new books instead”.

Problem 3 – Speaking of research papers, the tougher concept to grasp in high school about bibliographies and citations wasn’t the format in which to provide the information (that just takes practice and a handy set of examples).  The painful part was the grey area between researching as a group with your classmates versus “cheating” – too many shared sources looked like you didn’t do your own homework, even though learning and researching as a pair is far more effective than doing it alone.  The flip side of that is the grey area between what you need to cite in the first place – when I combine my philosophy and MBA background with Austin Kleon and Ash Maurya to produce an idea that is fairly unique to me – what do attribute I and when? It takes so much time to properly cite things in double-spaced New Times Roman MLA format that I went ahead and restricted the number of sources to compensate – hardly what my teacher intended!

Get Succinct – Add the Problems to the Lean Canvas

If I was teaching you this in a workshop, I’d get you boil down each problem statement enough that you could write it with a Sharpie and fit it on a Post-It note.  Us workshop peeps do this for two reasons – the rest of the room needs to be able to see it from wherever they are sitting and you need to be succinct.  Thus, the long version up top represents the conversations and musings I’ve had about this so far (like I’d facilitate in a workshop) while below I’ll summarize them.

As Ash Maurya describes in Running Lean, knowing the pains that Plan A will address is important, but its the ability to validate the business plan as a whole – in this case, by sharing the completed Lean Canvas with friends, mentors, or potential customers – that is the real point.  If you can’t explain to a potential customer what pain you can solve for them in under a minute, they probably won’t care about the business model you’re building around their pains.

So here are the Post-It size problem statements:

Problem 1 – Frustration capturing quotes and notes

Problem 2 – Difficulty keeping track of insights

Problem 3 – Grey areas when citing sources

Validate the Problem!

Remember how the title of the post is “How to Validate the Problem Statement”?  You have to go talk to people!  I’m going to head over to the library and ask people who look like they love books about these pains.

Want in?

If you can empathize with these pains, you’re potentially my target customer!  If you’d like to help me solve this pain we share as an early adopter, sign up for the email list here.

My First MVP.

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Notice the blank spaces.  Notice the technological wonders that – despite my imaginative artist-engineering mind, you’d never actually see.

Tentatively Entitled – ShareLighter

Product Vision

Do you love reading physical books, but wish it were easier to share the insights you’ve gained and quotes you love via social media?  

Value Assumption

People want to share quotes from physical book pages with virtual highlights, blackout, or underlines as a form of expression. Someone – somewhere – in the fantastic conversations that grow from this narrative of noting, quoting, and sharing, wants to pay to be a patron for this game of reader-response, learn it and share it, cultural-criticism-gone-viral.

Growth Engine

Viral. People will love the app enough to share it with two or more friends. 

Success Metric

Viral coefficient, tracked by release version cohort analysis. If the viral coefficient is increasing, the cohort is correlated with the newest features, indicating they have tentatively proven their success hypothesis. 

Minimum Viable Product

To establish our baseline, we need the core functionality of taking a photo, highlighting text virtually, and sharing the photo with a caption to a social network.  To track our success, we will need an “invite friend” feature and the ability to correlate the act of inviting to the version of the app. 

“Blue Sky” Potential Features

You’ll have to see the Trello board…

Do you care?

You have other ideas, because you want this app too, right?  @mention me on Twitter for glory or shoot me an email. andrewthomaskeenermba@gmail.com 

Failing Better to Win Sooner

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I interviewed some time ago for what would be my third role in product management in the custom app development space.  This form of “consulting” means I have to be a product visionary on behalf of someone else.  They have ideas and money, we have implementation practices and great engineers.  This interview, like in the pre-sales process of my previous two companies, required I take a backlog, prioritize it, define the Lean Startup -style MVP, and justify the release plan for future enhancements.

Obviously, I have asked, or been asked, in the hundreds-of-times range, “what is the Minimum Viable Product?” and frequently the answer is “all of it”. 

As the bard said, Therein lies the rub. 

The more important question is – “Minimally viable for what?”

I have yet to see a project plan or feature list that included valid success criteria, or any definition of how user stories should be prioritized, or features that would support cohort analysis or A/B testing.  Once, I even heard a CEO speaking of the immense importance of measurable success, only to have the head of operations and the head of sales immediately undermine him with the claim that staying under budget and releasing on schedule were okay success metrics – and the CEO nodded!

The Lean Startup has a clear definition of what the MVP must be minimally viable for: tuning the growth engine that keeps the business alive. 

That means the MVP builds a baseline for testing your hypotheses. 

Unfortunately, what is really missing is the lack of vision and discipline needed to do this.  No matter what you are building, it either solves a problem that makes people want it or it doesn’t. Without the ability to know if each feature was the right feature, the product is not viable and your business is not sustainable, and no amount of minimalism is sufficiently minimal – you’re still just wasting money. 

So in my spare time, as my pet project, I’ll show you how to do it.  How lean is my startup going to be?  $0 invested.  My first product solves a real pain that I have. I know that the demand for this pain to be solved is increasing. I would solve this pain even I was the only user

Enjoy the ride. 

You Look Dumb – 5 Mobile Marketing Mistakes

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Your smart presence looks pretty dumb.

Welcome to the “smart” era – smart phones, smart cars, and smart homes are finally here! You can officially go to display rooms in your local appliance store instead of booking a trip to Orlando to see the home of “the future”.  In our smart era, a fair percentage of the population now carries supercomputers in our pockets with computing power that would have filled a warehouse even in science fiction during the baby boom.

Unfortunately, as “smart” as all this technology should be in your business, I’ve noticed your company looks pretty “dumb” because things are getting done exactly the way they were before, but now on a smaller screen!   As much as technophiles may blame late-adopters for not buying in to new devices and new apps, wake up – if you’re asking people to do the same old story, same old song and dance, but you’ve given them a more difficult form factor to do it on, they have no reason to adopt!

In that light, here are the 6 mobility mistakes you might be making RIGHT NOW that keep your mobile presence looking dumb where it ought to be smart:

 

#1 – You Encourage Channel Hopping

If your mobile marketing strategy has shifted consumers from one conversion funnel (web or brick) to another (apps) but hasn’t resulted in increased revenue, you’ve encouraged channel hopping.  This is a nightmare scenario that often pits employees of each channel against each other internally, fighting for additional budget, unable to fully justify forecasted ROI.  What happened? When you built your native app, the value created by your investment was captured 100% by your consumers!

This looks dumb to the smart consumer, because it is painfully obvious when the only difference between the native app and the responsive site is Touch ID. The choice between a link on the home screen versus a downloaded app comes down to space on the phone and speed of content loading.

The math for the mobile marketing individual is so simple that this mistake looks extra “dumb” to your boss. When traffic stays constant, but an additional channel is added, aggregate conversion across the channels must increase or else your funnels are just cannibalizing each other. That’s the ROI problem every mobile marketing initiative must overcome: when you invest $200k in mobile eCommerce and revenue stays constant, your consumers have captured all the value created. Sure, they may be happier. They might say “how convenient to have a desktop site AND an app for researching and executing my purchases!” Unfortunately, the return on your investment they capture doesn’t inherently result in more traffic, conversion, sales, or loyalty.

Admittedly, companies don’t make this mistake in a vacuum. They see traffic and sales moving from their desktop site to a new competitor’s mobile app – panic ensues – and they build an app of their own to stop the bleeding.

Remember, a bad bandage can be more dangerous than no treatment at all. The smart mobile marketing plan requires one of two approaches to respond to the threat of new entrants:

  1. Double-down on web. Yes, I make mobile apps and I’m saying its okay not to have a (native-coded) mobile app. If your plan for mobile is to reproduce a brochure, a paper form, or a website, don’t do it. Seriously, just throw your money in a pile and set it on fire like the Joker in Dark Knight.  If your site is working great but it isn’t a responsive site – start there. If it is outdated and anything is unintuitive, fix it. If you can’t create a unique relationship with consumers through your native mobile presence or capture the channel-specific value created, double-down on making your web presence best-in-class. This is Game Theory 101 – If you can’t win at both web and mobile, win big at one and forget the other.
  2. Create a unique market via app(s). If your audience is shrinking or your relationship with your consumers is suffering due to the mobile presence of a competitor and a truly unique relationship can be built through a mobile app – do it. This means your mobile presence needs to accomplish at least one of two things: augment the physical experience in ways a website can’t (to increase conversion) or create a completely new experience for a totally new audience (to increase aggregate traffic). Which path is right for you will depend on your market, products, and competitive landscape – so do your homework (and get a “tutor” as needed).

 

#2 – No Context Awareness

This is at the heart of what is so dumb about the way many companies establish a market presence on smart devices. If you have the opportunity to look “behind the curtain” you will notice this problem is not isolated, but occur on two fronts for that firm – externally in their consumer native apps and internally in their custom enterprise solutions. I’ve touched on specifics of Context Awareness several times. The differentiating power of a native app is in its intimate knowledge of where a user is, where they are going, and how they think. Segmented push messaging, one-tap deep-linking, and social API integration make the native app capable of a completely new relationship with your consumer. They are using a supercomputer that aggregates an unprecedented amount of personal information – all you have to do is offer a reward that justifies opting in.

Don’t fall prey to the opposite though – opting out should be easy, transparency on the use of private data is key, and you typically have one “strike” per consumer when it comes to keeping an app on their device. Whether it is download size, loading time, or privacy betrayal, as W.B. Yeats wrote, “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Talk to technology professionals so you don’t plan your mobile presence in a vacuum. Geofences, iBeacons, IoT hardware, Photos integration, BLE, IoT, QR, wearables, and triggered messaging are all tools of the trade for ensuring you are able to create a unique proposition in a native app. Find the biggest impediment to solving your consumer’s pain in a way they will pay money for you to solve. Do NOT invest in native mobile unless the pocket supercomputer is going to augment physical realities with digital awesomeness.

 

#3 – No Business Intelligence

Ignorance is bliss. Unless you are driving a drastic paradigmatic shift in how you engage fresh generations of consumers through a new and constantly-evolving medium. In that scenario, ignorance is death – the death of any success you could have achieved.

“No Business Intelligence” is the bad-joke-telling best friend of “No Context Awareness” who crashes the wedding reception of your otherwise-integrated-marketing strategy. Where context awareness can drive new forms of engagement by proactively anticipating needs and supplying easy answers, business intelligence is a trailing ROI that takes effort to reap.   Business Intelligence is like planting a vegetable garden, as much as the visual presence of a lovely variety of plants may have delighted you on its own, you are leaving ROI out in the field until you harvest it. The same is true in mobile marketing. Until the big data you have created is collected, curated, and learned from in order to provide better plans, more focused campaigns, and the tightest possible updates to forecasts, you are creating white noise that should have been a joyful symphony.

At a minimum, it is essential you collect enough meaningful data to justify that you have accomplished your goals. The less you can prove directly that you have created new traffic, new converted sales, or new revenue sufficient to justify your investment in mobility, the more you need business intelligence to prove the indirect benefit provided to other channels. Better yet, even when new revenue is both directly and indirectly attributable to your mobile presence, you should drive BI insights like you are starting a company that will sell its knowledge. You may start by “selling” it internally to help justify you P&L, but don’t rule out the possibility external buyers may exist.

 

#4 – No Game Plan for IoT

If you don’t have concrete plans for drone technology or self-driven cars, I forgive you.  Not every industry will need direct adoption for these new technologies.  However, if you haven’t given serious thought to what your products and services can be in a connected world – called the “Internet of Things” – you are going to find yourself left behind over the next five years.

IoT is already within reach and less cost prohibitive than you may think. Connected power indicators, pipe flow sensors, BLE chipsets for detecting and communicating almost anything – they are all out there. Today what is being “tacked on” to products by R&D will tomorrow be a seamless experience seen as the baseline for market entry. You can afford not to be the first mover to the extent Silicon Valley startups are learning the hard lessons for us all today. That said, don’t get out of touch and don’t get left behind.

The Internet of most connected Things means at least one of two potential realities your business:

  1. Some products you currently market “dumb” will be expected to connect soon – a significant event in your product strategy because the value proposition of your physical Thing will not matter as much as how it connects to the app you provide with it. Think today what that app must be in order to compete. In fact, you should probably be building that app instead of reproducing your already-responsive web site. Then, more dauntingly, think about that product and app and their ability to connect with other Things that are connected in a way that creates a meaningful brand relationship.
  2. Widespread IoT products will further segment your target market and the position of players across your competitive landscape. If your product’s three year plan does not clearly indicate whether you will focus on selling non-connected versus connected variations or both, including the business case for how each will be priced and marketed, schedule meetings right now to drive those discussions.   The threat of new entrants on both sides will be higher as major players struggle to straddle the fence strategically.

 

 

#5 – You’re Stuck in Analysis Paralysis

Speaking of sitting permanently on the strategic fence, one of the dumbest responses to the introduction of smart technology is analysis paralysis. As my strategy professor emphasized while introducing Michael Porter, refusing to make a decision is your decision. That favorite Porter quote – “Strategy is the art of making choices”. In a Zero Sum game with multiple players and finite economic resources, strategy is the art of committing not only specific resources, but also commitments as a competitive position to the long-term continued investment of resources. By holding resources – even in the most uncertain times – you’ve made a decision to wait. The key to the good life, as Aristotle would say, is that the decision to wait, if virtuous, must intrinsically be deliberately decided.

If your organization is stuck in analysis paralysis, overwhelmed by the amount of aging IT investments behind you and the mountain of new (and sometimes unproven) technology ahead of you, a lack of action may preserve some capital in the short-term, but you are racking up immense opportunity cost and learning curve disadvantage. If your company has too many ideas and no commitment to a roadmap, here is how to get smart:

  1. LESS IS MORE – Don’t try to reinvent your entire IT and Marketing infrastructure in one big push. Define Lean Startup-style MVPs that give you a “quick win” (or a few) while getting you past the rookie mistakes, first-time jitters, and growing pains that are inevitable out of the gate.
  2. SOLVE REAL PAINS – Mobile for the sake of mobile fails the stakeholder, the end user, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of executives and investors. Look for the biggest complaint of your customers or the biggest inefficiency in your operations workflow. If the solution is mobile, do the smallest possible iteration of that solution. If it isn’t mobile, fix the pain without mobile. Rinse and repeat as needed.
  3. OFF-THE-SHELF is an OKAY START– On that note, with the thousands of tech companies out there, don’t go custom on everything. Open or paid APIs, packaged solutions, and white-label solutions, and SDKs are all alternatives to re-inventing the wheel in a vacuum. Review your options carefully (but keep the scope of your goals tight enough your review doesn’t paralyze you).

How to be the Apple of Lean Six Sigma

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Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and Process Improvement have revolutionized the way businesses approach Operational Effectiveness in their physical processes for decades.  Elimination of wasted time, energy, and materials in physical processes took the world from the industrial revolution to the smart phone.

For an example of process improvement in Lean Manufacturing, imagine:

You start a lawn mower engine company in your garage.  By the end of the engine assembly process the engine weighs 50lbs.  The process requires six tables with equipment necessary for the process.  These tables are arranged three on each side of the garage in the order you purchased them, oldest to newest .  Your back hurts, your feet hurt, and you’re having trouble keeping up with demand.

One morning, sipping your coffee, dreading the job you once loved, you have an epiphany – changing the arrangement of the tables would allow you to eliminate walking across the garage three times while holding the engine as it gets increasingly heavy!  So you take 20min to move the tables, but cut 30 minutes per engine from the process.  You spend more time doing what you love, less time in pain, and now – energized and more efficient – you meet customer expectations easily.

Starting a small engine company in your garage in the digital era sounds pretty unlikely today right?  Won’t we all 3D print engines soon?  Won’t lawnmowers use solid-state hover-board technology that never breaks in the next decade?

This physical mindset for Lean is the fundamental issue facing anyone I know in Six Sigma or Lean Process Improvement.  Companies large and small are facing the same problem I’ll call “Improvement Saturation”.  Improvement Saturation is exactly why Operational Effectiveness is not Strategy – best demonstrated practices become common knowledge across and outside industries.  While Lean initiatives can secure margins and save the health of employees, each short-term edge is destined to become commonplace (and sometimes, mandated by law).   But what if that well dries up?  What happens when you just can’t find another way to get more operationally effective than the competition?

Companies today MUST rethink their approach to Six Sigma in the digital era.  The physical world has reached Improvement Saturation.  The ROI of Lean projects are shrinking.  What should you do?

Don’t just aspire to be the Toyota of Lean orSix Sigma.

Be the Apple of Lean Six Sigma.

In the digital era, process improvement must shift to the cost, the waste, and the inefficiency of the way information is handled, carried, and distributed across your employees in both the physical and virtual world in which your key business processes are completed.

What is the number one sign your company has information process inefficiencies?  THE CLIPBOARD

Imagine the most important piece of information your company writes on a clipboard everyday.  Now pretend that one piece of information is a 50lbs box.  If you want to really feel the three gen of that information, grab a real 50lbs box and follow that clipboard with its imprisoned, currently useless, but mission-critical information until it reaches its final destination.  How many days did it take?  How many minutes or hours from Point A to Point B?  How far did it walk?  Are you tired now?

If that were a real 50lbs thing and you could “fax it” to a 3D printer instead of carrying it, how much time, energy, and money would you save?

Companies who keep carrying around baggage like this will get left behind.

If that information is truly mission-critical, that clipboard is delaying information symmetry and encouraging decision fatigue.  A mature mobile strategy fixes this and it will launch your Lean Process Improvement program into the information age.  Take the leap from improvement to transformation.

To become the Apple of Lean or Six Sigma you need three things:

#1  Intuitive workplace experience – Just like the assembly line removed virtually any need to train the location of fabrication and assembly steps and Apple brought the one touch visual interface to our preferred window to the world, mobile apps done right take the training out of new best practice implementation, minimize the on-boarding of new hires, and give your Process Improvement projects version control, instant feedback, and usage analytics.

#2  Crowdsource everything –  Just like autonomation at Toyota let one Quality Control person oversee the output of triple or quadruple the output and safety has been revolutionized by empowering every employee to stop the line when they spot a hazard, the iPhone “went viral” once the App Store gave everyone a place to publish and distribute supply-side, download and consume demand-side billions of new smart phone software options.  Lean Six Sigma in the digital age of social media and blog posts must empower the passion and pride of the people, engage the disruptive mavericks, and re-create the social ecosystem of your company in ways that transcend corporate structures to solve problems.

#3 Learn the ROI of Information Efficiency – 2014 was deemed the year of “Consumerization of IT” and 2015 was the “Re-enterprisation of IT” – the next three to five years will be both.  The worker as enterprise consumer and the enterprise as solution provider will need cross-functional collaboration to reinvigorate stagnant processes.  Just like Kanban removes the waste of a batch-and-queue system, Apple’s iPhone shifted information consumption to “on-demand” or “notification” driven.  People love apps.  They put the world easily and instantly at our fingertips, personalized to our needs.  They tell us it will rain before we ask, where to go when we’re lost, and instantly answer virtually any trivia, schedule, and sports question we may have.  Information efficiency is contextual, proactive, and self-advertising.  You don’t need to “hunt” on a clipboard, spreadsheet, or green screen for the data that matters – that data, and its implications, should alert you proactively, predicting your need-to-know.

#4 – Don’t do it alone!  If you are looking for ideas or training on these concepts for you and your team, send me a message!

Disrupt & Win: Next-Level Lean Process Improvement

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Disrupt & Win: How to Achieve Next-Level Lean Process Improvements with Custom Apps

Is your business having trouble keeping up?

It is time to get lean.

Kaizen – Continuous Improvement

Kaizen is a core principle from Lean that lays the foundation of how we choose the right custom enterprise mobile and web apps for process improvement efforts.  Loosely translated from Japanese, kaizen means “change for the better”; but kaizen is bigger and bolder than tacking on an improvement to an existing structure – it is the process of continuously breaking down a process, removing unnecessary effort or waste, and rebuilding it as a more efficient and effective process.

In custom enterprise app consulting, kaizen is the ultimate goal of the discovery and analysis we follow in finding the key enterprise workflow that is both proprietary to an organization’s competitive advantage while (sometimes surprisingly) it is also a source of pain and waste.  Because this seems contradictory, companies rarely ask for the application that will make the biggest difference to their organization.  To plan a truly disruptive roadmap that will position your key processes for sustainable competitive advantage takes a level of honesty and vision that is not easy to tackle alone.   Here are some key concepts from Lean that we use to help you plan your enterprise app portfolio and take your kaizen to a whole new level.

The Three Actuals – Genba, Genbutsu, Genjitsu

Lean consulting begins with finding the 3 Gen or “actuals” of your enterprise.  Kaizen is impossible without direct insight into the organization, so these three “actuals” are critical to finding the right apps that can succeed big and drive the adoption of innovation and mobility as a competitive strategy:

  1. The Genba – By visiting the Genba or “Actual Place” where business is done, products are built, and revenue is generated, an enterprise solutions consultant can view and understand the operations that create value, whether in a factory, a medical facility, or a sales showroom.  Through first-hand observation, rather than conversation, far more can be learned about what an organization does, how it is done, and why it is done.  Whiteboards and conference calls can never convey the real heart of an enterprise, the “What’s the point?” or the “What’s it worth?” as it is experienced by the people who keep each process moving, so coming to the actual place is critical to building out a solution that speaks to the pain felt by the people performing the work.  These pains tend to originate from inefficiencies and information asymmetries that workers will protect out of a fear of change.  Changing a process through training or a set of new rules often fails for this reason.  The disruptive influence of a mobile solution shortcuts this fear – mobile adoption rates are accelerating and new generations of employees demand the simplicity and focus of apps in the workplace.  These employees must capture real value in order to drive higher revenue and operational cost savings – getting to know their daily workplace experience is crucial.
  2. The Genbutsu – If possible, a great consultant doesn’t just watch, it is even better to directly interact with the genbutsu or “Actual Thing” – the real equipment being moved throughout a hospital or the customer “hand-off” artifacts.  In Lean Manufacturing, this often focused on the actual parts being assembled, the path those parts travel in a factory, and finding ways to simplify repetitive motions, reduce unnecessary travel distances through better placement of the work stations, or reducing the complexity of a step in the process by changing the order in which pieces were added to the final product.  In enterprise mobile solutions the “actual thing” is often information and the path it takes before and after that information becomes data and drives actions that produce revenue.  Information is easily decontextualized, so minimizing context-switching in the information-data-action flow is critical.  Mobile solutions drive context-awareness that turns social information into actionable data immediately and cuts out waste.
  3. The Genjitsu – Jitsu is an art, skill, or practice; a word that evolved etymologically from the characters meaning “a step along the middle of a road”.   In Lean consulting, this means we must grasp and communicate the “actual situation” as it pertains to one process as a step in an overall flow.  More importantly, we must quantify the reality of the process as objectively as possible, separate from emotional responses due to ego, social status in the organization, or feelings of blame.  We do this by obtaining data, making hypotheses, documenting workflows, and validating assumptions.  The goal is to not only make a well-informed decision about the most valuable apps that can be created, but to validate the features that will be part of it.

Once the three “actuals” are known, sources of waste can be objectively identified, solutions crafted and prioritized, and an initial Minimum Viable Product can be determined.  First, let’s review how we can create custom apps using proven Lean process improvement tactics.

Just In Time – Why mobile?

Mobile apps are fundamentally on-the-go and on-demand.  The instantaneous nature of communication using mobile allows the Just-in-Time management philosophy  to apply to operations processes, delaying resource commitment and investment until it is absolutely necessary.  This allows the shortest possible feedback cycle between demand and supply and removes waste due to information asymmetry.  If you have ever been left alone as a sales rep checks inventory or watched someone wait on hold to obtain manager approval, you know you know how painful – for the employee and the consumer – a lack of instantaneous information-data-action can be.

Just-in-Time is well defined by its original proponent, the Toyota Production System:

Supplying “what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed” according to this production plan can eliminate waste, inconsistencies, and unreasonable requirements, resulting in improved productivity.

via Toyota

Since our app strategy is founded on upgrading key resources by removing wasted time and effort, mitigating inconsistent process throughput and output, and unreasonable rules and requirements to “protect” against costly mistakes, Just-in-Time is central to every great enterprise app portfolio.  Social information becomes actionable data, from answering time-sensitive questions to triggering purchases.  Real-time communication can replace unnecessary meetings, a highly focused and intuitive user experience can replace training memorization of rules.  The ability to ignite a chain reaction from 3 taps of an iPad is an incredible time and cost saving that can also create enormous additional value that can be captured more quickly.

Implementing Just-in-Time through custom apps allows real-time analytics about the process and its evolution, a “version history” for process improvements, gamification of as-you-work training, and a real-time feedback system for future kaizen.  This means creating continuous flow, level-loading process steps, creating “smart” tools, standardizing quality of work, and balancing minimal investment against highest value productivity is not only simplified, it is easy to validate process impact quickly.

The Yamazumi Board – Creating Continuous Flow

The first step in improving a process with one or more apps is documenting the existing workflows as the focal point of discussion and as the baseline for hypotheses about potential improvements.  There are software tools for this, but post-it notes on a whiteboard can work as well.  Yamazumi literally means “to pile in heaps” and this is exactly what how the analysis is completed, by stacking each step in a process in columns representing each person or role in the workflow.  This could be fairly high-level, tracking the flow of a paper form across the organization, or extremely granular, such as every step in the manufacturing and assembly of a complex product.

via Michel Baudin

By documenting the steps of a process in this way we can easily visualize the imbalances in a workflow, identify the “pace maker” process, discover bottlenecks, and clearly see the cost of unproductive downtimes.  Combining roles that cause diffusion of responsibility, separating roles that cause unnecessary task switching, and removing unnecessary “fail-safe” measures will remove waste and reduce cycle time, making the process more efficient overall.

Once each process in the workflow is organized into an ideal future state on the yamazumi board, we can easily see the specific tool each role will need to be as effective as possible at creating value.  If each tool has a unique user base, we will consider each tool a separate app that we can evaluate and prioritize based on expected returns.  Next we evaluate how strategic disruption using a mobile-first mentality will create impact above and beyond simply reorganizing existing resources.  Whether we are targeting information, inventory management, or customer interaction, our app portfolio needs to work as a seamless ecosystem that facilitates continuous flow across the entire value stream.  Through notifications, context awareness, and on-the-go data connectivity, we are able to brainstorm solutions to each identified pain that can achieve heijunka.

Heijunka – Level Loading

The Lean Lexicon, 4th Edition defines heijunka as:

Heijunka is leveling the type and quantity of production over a fixed period of time. This enables production to efficiently meet customer demands while avoiding batching and results in minimum inventories, capital costs, manpower, and production lead time through the whole value stream.

Once we have seen how our piles of work are should be distributed to achieve continuous flow we then need to identify the pains and inefficiencies that exist even when the process is running smoothly.  Before we can prioritize a roadmap of custom mobile apps, it is important to know the elements of a process that are consuming unnecessary time and resources, find and remove batch-and-queue systems that create process bottle necks, and smooth out supply and demand.  Because we have distributed process steps across focused roles using the yamazumi board, we can now look at the specific pain points that each tool can address for each role.

In Lean Manufacturing, the concept of heijunka is taught using forecasting in supply chain management.  The more unpredictable the demand, the more advanced the forecasting algorithm may be but delaying differentiation, stabilizing production, and reducing inventory holding costs is always possible.  When creating disruptive-grade process improvement with custom mobile apps we can apply the same principles to “memes” and look for the inefficiencies, loss of fidelity, and bottle necks in processes that transform context-specific social information into data that is actionable across multiple roles.  To win at disruption and to resolve internal information asymmetries and bottlenecks, we need to think through solutions that remove the noise from the signals we rely on to forecast processes.  To this, we use custom apps to control selection, throughput, and output.

Jidoka – Autonomation

From the Toyota Production System, the concept of jidoka – “automation with a human touch” means that machines are “smart” enough to identify their own failure, empowering human operators to rectify the problem before faulty parts enter the production line.  Before autonomation these parts were only tested at the end of the production line, so a single machine creating bolts for engines could make an entire day’s work unsuitable to ship!  To mitigate the immense risk of an entire factory-day’s production being scrapped, an operator could be placed at each machine, checking quality of output at regular intervals.  Jidoka is the next evolution of this process improvement, so that machines judge their own quality and a single operator is able to validate the accuracy and quality of several machines, reducing the number of resources required per machine.

In an enterprise app portfolio, the ability to focus a user on completing a single workflow quickly with context-based help and input validation accomplishes similar autonomation.  The more focused an app is on a single user completing a specific task, the less we will need restricted access and complex logic.  Instead, the technological investment can be focused on context awareness and assistance.  This creates a powerful ability to the guide subjective observation of an employee into objective judgment.  Rather than increasing training, creating new policies and punishments, and increasing managerial oversight – an a attempt at a “fail-safe” environment – we want to create intuitive “smart” solutions that create a “safe-to-fail” environment in which some mistakes are no longer possible and consequences are minimized.  This empowers employees to consistently succeed and removes the stress of failure, all while reducing the need for direct managerial oversight and human approval processes.  Anywhere your employee is asked to supply critical information or responsible for continuous flow to the next process step, we want to facilitate responsiveness and guided interaction, then capture and aggregate data as Business Intelligence that can inform both the worker and organization leadership about decisions being made.  Anywhere an employee must manage machines or technology, the inner working of which only a specialist would understand, we want to create an interface into the health of the process rather than set the false expectation that every employee can be skilled at

Once the solutions to process pain and waste are imagined – with an eye on “smart”, intuitive mobile workflow tools – we want to look for ways to ensure that throughput and output are consistent in time, effort, and quality.

Standard Work

Through effective information architecture and user experience design, the mobile app user is able to follow an established and intuitive workflow of interactions that are ideally context-aware.  So in addition to the focus, empowerment, and autonomation improvements, going mobile is a time to analyze current best demonstrated practices internally and externally, and standardize them.  Standardizing what is done, how it is done, and creating consistency of output not only reduces the necessity of identifying and addressing under-performers, it creates a context for the employee in which output quality is held constant for them, enabling focus on critical thinking and social engagement rather than policies and spreadsheet-like information tables.  Even more importantly, once work is standardized with a mobile application (e.g. instead of a document template) the consistency of output and capture of Business Intelligence will allow an objective review of “best” practices, assist with hypothesis and experimentation removing some of the emotion and politics from the kaizen process.

Once changes are identified, effective MDM enables your organization to control the shift to a more effective practice by simply releasing a new version of the software.  Build any training (using interstitial screens) and feedback (with modal per-feature ratings) directly into the application.

Minimum Viable Product

The end goal of removing interruptions to continuous flow, level-loading processes against fluctuations in supply and demand, and removing information asymmetries and process waste is to attain Minimum Viable Production – a process state in which we find a “sweet spot” in the tension between minimizing invested value while maximizing return on that investment.

This goal will need to be reached on three levels:  the process being improved upon, investment in improving the process, and prioritization of the custom app investment portfolio.  Because we are disruptively and potentially drastically rebuilding a process we need to understand the point of diminishing marginal utility for inputs to the process itself as a precursor to determining the investment we should make in it.  If we are attempting to increase revenue through an improved sales representative process, we need to recognize that increased capacity does not increase demand – we will need to identify stabilizing and increasing supply can result in an unfair advantage in the market.  If demand for a process output is unlikely to grow, investing in increased capacity is ill-advised.

If we focused purely on minimalist production, we would drastically rebuild our core operations processes – stripping out anything unnecessary to gaining the “easiest” productivity possible.  A true focus on minimalism might even cut revenue in favor of margins by creating less value.  Opposing this approach would be a total focus on viability, in which we invest to upgrade processes and resources regardless of ROI to achieve the most robust value stream possible.  Ideally, this would give us sustainable competitive advantage, assuming we raise so many barriers to entry that we create near-monopoly conditions.  However, most gaining economic rents in this way can take years to capture, making the investment risky.  By maintaining a tension between minimal investment and maximal viability, we can minimize necessary inputs while holding output constant, increasing process ROI.  If desired we can then establish a path for increasing input while holding ROI constant.

With mobile apps, we facilitate minimum viable product by transforming the nature of the steps taken in a workflow, the number of steps, the number of operators required, and minimizing time to complete each step.  By removing all delays in information transfer and introducing autonomation we are able to bring downtime to an absolute minimum.  Maximizing ease of completion and minimizing time to completion is therefore the overarching goal of mobilizing any process.

Once we have a full understanding of the next-level lean processes, we take the mobile apps we have dreamed up and create a prioritized roadmap for investment in our app portfolio.  While the “big dreams” white-boarding session is an important first conversation, defining Minimum Viable Product for both the processes we will disrupt and the process improvement investment we will make is critical to ensuring the app roadmap is continuously focused on the improvement with the highest incremental impact.