Alpha Mind Blog

We live and die by ideas. Thinking is an endeavor of the highest importance.

Not only every person, but every social grouping lives and dies by ideas. Families, communities, non-profits and churches, business enterprises, nation-states, and even, when the stakes are global, all humankind, must originate, evaluate, accept or reject, and act upon ideas. As every problem whose stakes are large is a problem that will be thought about, effective thinking is as urgent a craft as any we engage in together. Thinking is a social endeavor of the highest importance.

This book concerns itself with how ideas are realized. It is a book about thinking, but its focus is not every kind of thought, but that sort of thought which aims toward an idea’s realization in the world outside its originator’s mind. In studying this matter I have, like many before me, found it to be immense. It is as if, wanting to explore the Azores, I had set out from Lisbon and discovered the Americas. The subject contains worlds; whole, well-established arts and sciences are encompassed within it. This, I believe, is why it is so little studied: academics by the nature of their work must go deep, so that each of them can necessarily study only part of a field so vast. Yet as a subject of keen interest to many people in many stations, thoughtcraft deserves, if possible, to be made manageable.

My model for this effort is a military document which, in two editions, has been made public. It is the small book Warfighting, and it treats warfare at a high conceptual level. At around twenty thousand words, it is a small book on a vast topic, yet, by staying above details, it conveys considerable wisdom in a short read. Like many war manuals, it has become standard reading for business executives. Its design is to establish for its readers (U.S. Marines) a common understanding of what is undertaken when a war is fought. My aims are similar, and so I use Warfighting as a model for this essay: “short and easily read.” My goal has been to discern the most important twenty thousand words that can be said about thoughtcraft and say them.
I borrow from Warfighting not only its brevity but its style, because those who need and will engage with my ideas are those for whom thinking is done in warlike environments, where much as at stake and thinking can seldom be allowed to become reverie. (I treat reverie seriously, as a legitimate and valuable form of thought, but those engaged in it will find little motivation to seek out my advice as to how it should be done.) Also, Warfighting is a very cold book about an art, and legitimately so. War encompasses many engineering problems, but is not itself such a problem. The warrior deals in too many uncertainties, and must make too many judgments in unclear circumstances, to succeed only through engineering. And so it is with thoughtcraft.

The quest of an idea for realization is in some sense a quest for territory. In most cases, that territory is other human minds. Even if an idea’s realization will be in a physical object, it must, in most cases, need to find its champions and defeat its opponents. At the heart of this book, then, lies the relationships between the thought and its thinker, and between the communicated idea and its receiver. Crucial, too, is the idea’s fate at the hands of multiple hearers, who will reject, adopt, or adapt it.

The highest duty of any leader in any group is to think clearly, creatively, flexibly, and effectively, and to help their organization to do so. And the highest duty of anyone who originates an idea is to give that idea its best opportunity to be realized and of benefit. This book is intended to provide practical guidance for both. It is not, however, a book of procedures and techniques. Rather, it provides a framework for discerning and understanding the challenges which face ideas and thinkers. Despite a certain arrogance in taking on so vast a subject in so few words, I offer it humbly, in hopes that it will be of help.

After quite some time blogging, I’m now pretty comfortable with it.

So I can see no further excuse not to get this blog onto its topic, which I have neglected for a while.

The premise of “The Alpha Mind” is that thought leadership needn’t always remain a nice-sounding, meaning-free buzzphrase. Quite the contrary, I believe it is worth taking very seriously, which means it is worth defining.

It makes sense to say that a thought leader leads thought. Fair enough. But, as we normally use the words, there’s already an inherent contradiction, or at least a tension.

Our normal thinking about thinking is that it is an individual endeavor. Our normal thinking about leadership is that leaders lead more than one person at a time—that is, leaders lead groups. Then the phrase “thought leader” seems to depict a person who leads a group in a process that is an individual not a group process.

Then the key to taking “thought leadership” seriously, and to understanding it, is to start thinking of thinking as a social activity. It has taken me only a few minutes of this effort to realize that, while we’re unused to conceiving it that way, thinking is a social activity. This is so in two ways:

First, even individual thought is informed by one’s social environment, and in fact a great deal of human thought is about how to negotiate the social environment.

Second, every act of communication between people is an act of corporate, communal thinking.

Clear as this seems to me as I write it, still the prejudice against seeing thought as anything a group can do is deeply held. It’s embedded in our language—notice we have a word “groupthink” which denotes flawed thinking. When we use this term, we use it in some assurance that groups cannot think.

Ah, but there’s precisely why I think the effort I’ve embarked on has begun to look valuable to me.

Because groups really can’t think.

And yet they must.

And so “thought leader” must morph from meaning someone who’s publicly opinionated and who wields opinions as a tool for self-advancement, to someone who is undertaking one of the most crucial human endeavors.

I named this blog a long time ago, so you might guess that I’ve done more thinking about this than I’ve posted. And I have. And tomorrow I begin sharing it.

I’m writing a book called Thoughtcraft. Tomorrow its chapters will begin appearing serially here on the blog.

I hope for feedback.

And I hope you enjoy the book.

…Shel Israel needs a nap. And maybe blogging is wee bit tired, too.

This page on Shel’s blog is a study in what I wrote about in Unfashionably Late. Read the comments.

Shel wants people to respond to his book ideas as they come out, and he’s not getting enough response. And we who commented are saying that maybe a blog isn’t the place to write a book any more. Shelley Powers is especially succinct:

Weblogging really has pushed the limits of ADD–creating it where it didn’t exist before. The medium doesn’t translate well into longer efforts requiring more work or analysis.

And Ted Koterwas chips in with this:

so, if blog posts are getting shorter, fewer people are taking the time to read and comment thoughtfully on long meaty posts, and the twitter hype is true, it would seem that for many people, the ability to broadcast and be social is much more important than having anything meaningful to say.

I appreciate Ted’s mentioning twitter. If blogging has shortened the attention spans of its practitioners, what will twitter do? Or perhaps, what is it already doing?

And maybe it’s not just twitter. There’s also the overabundance of all social media. Some of the best bloggers are getting positively lost to us as they explore Second Life.

Somebody has finally read and written about Unfashionably Late.

Ian Delaney in New Media Knowledge - Should You Blog? says:

Despite its alleged benefits, blogging costs time. And time is money. A new paper by Max Christian Hansen argues that new bloggers should count the cost before they enter the fray. Ian Delaney examines the arguments.

Thanks for paying attention, Ian!

Yikes! From Techdirt:

Apparently, the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, Maine ran a photo of a lottery winner which clearly showed the lottery paperwork, including the winner’s name, address, telephone number, date of birth and Social Security number.

At least the paper is trying to make amends.

Full story here.

Kathy Sierra: Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, etc.

She asks the rhetorical question (I paraphrase), “Why do we still go to conferences when there are so many media to bring them to us.”

Here’s my list of reasons:

• One-on one in crowds. Why is it more fun to see a movie with someone else? Because, even if you’re too polite to talk to each other loudly, you still hear, see, sense each other reacting, in real time. Your companion’s reaction shapes and informs yours, and enriches the whole experience. You’re seeing a different movie when you see it with someone else.
• One-on-a-few in crowds. Even the best video-conferencing tools can’t capture this. The few people sitting near you provide (decreasingly with increased distance) the same thing your one companion provides. We are made to do things in groups, and we are made to read each other.
• Giving what you get. What companions give us, we give them, and we get a kick out of it.

All in all, I think giving is the most important thing, even when it’s on the very subtle level. Here’s an example:

My friend Lee Hopkins is one of the most skilled appreciators I know. One of the many persons he appreciates is Kathy Sierra. Why would he want to be in the audience rather than sitting at home seeing live video of her speech? Because, even if he’s sitting 13 rows back, she just might see him, hanging on every word, contributing his wee mite to what a good audience does for a good speaker.

I admit this list is partial, and admit further that Kathy’s probably right that no list is likely to cover all the reasons face time matters. It’s just my wee mite.

I hate to say something or someone sucks. It’s a vulgar, nasty expression. But sometimes it’s just the thing that has to be said.

Take my recent post about Technorati, for instance. Within thirty hours of my posting, Technorati showed every link to my blog that I knew existed when I wrote the post. (Yes, I admit it’s not that many, but hey, I’m still new.) Still no explanation as to how they found those linking pages after they were already several days old, or why they hadn’t been found earlier.

Perhaps it’s my imagination running away with me, but maybe, must maybe, someone at Technorati monitors what bloggers are saying about the company, found my post, and investigated the problem.

Strictly speculation.

But if a company is wise enough (and I believe this is indispensible wisdom) to monitor how bloggers are talking about it, what’s the first search it should do every morning? Well, for me it would be

“[Company_name] sucks”.

It’s by far the most common form of rant about a company.

So maybe it’s not what happened at Technorati when I kvetched about them. But it’s what I hoped might happen. And, for whatever reason, the end result is what I wanted.

And, Technorati, if you’re reading this, thanks for finding my missing links.

Church of the Customer Blog

They’re no American Idol winners but as a tool to create momentum for a cause, it sure beats marching with a picket sign in 20-degree weather that no one cares about anyway.

Trafcom News: How teens communicate in 2007. A fine post by Donna. Laughed out loud.

The whole post is funny, but am I alone in thinking it takes a very serious, perhaps grave tone at the end?

And let’s all think about these teens coming to work in our organizations in a few years.

Part of the post’s thrust is that teenagers are failing to learn, or are unlearning, key communications competencies:

Teens have lost the skill needed to ring a bell or knock on a door. No more: “Hello, Mrs. Cleaver, can the Beave come out to play?” Instead, today’s teens stand on the front porch, or in their cars if they are 16+, and call the person inside the house, using the mobile phone conveniently glued to the palm of the hand.

If Donna reads her own post the way I read it, then, there is a real foreboding in that ending. If kids don’t know how to knock at a door, how many other skills will they be missing when they enter the workforce?

Of course, Donna may not see things as grimly as I. Perhaps I’m seeing (more than others do? more than is real?) that our new technologies for instant communication lead to superficial communication. If I can use my cell phone to avoid meeting the Beave’s mom at the door, then, while I still know the Beave, I’m missing an important piece of deep information about him, to wit: what’s his mother like and how does she behave at the boundary of her domain? I hope I don’t need to explain how this is information about Beaver. Without it, my understanding of him is just slightly diminished, my relationship with him slightly less rich than it might have been.

(photo by permission Jana Werner)

Dave Winer on the future of Twitter:

I’m very reluctant to dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, aware that many people said that about blogging, and I was sure they were wrong, and they were.

I’ve been trying to avoid Twitter for some time now. Blogging eats time, and one of the ways I cope is that I studiously avoid testing every new social media tool that I learn about in the b-sphere.

But something happened yesterday that tells me I’m going to have to learn about Twitter. What happened?

I checked my stats and found I’d gotten almost as many referrals from Twitter as from Seth Godin’s blog.

I didn’t even know Twitter could link. That’s how careful I am to preserve my ignorance and husband my time.

I suspect it happened because of Scoble. Here’s Winer again:

…if I were a Scoble fanboy, I would love that he posts every event in his busy life to his Twitter channel.

Last week I left a trackback on Scobleizer, and I think Robert might have Twittered it, for whatever reason. At least I know that two of the referrers were

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer (etc).

If Robert was the originator, he certainly has some fanboys (and girls) out there, because I got referred by 8 Twitter URLs for a total of 55 requests. For my newish, scantily-read blog, this is a flood.

Since I need to know how readers get to my blog, I’m going to have to check out Twitter. At the prospect of which I sigh, even though the reason (increased traffic on my blog) makes me smile big-time.