It used to be that when you flew on shuttle from Boston to New York (or vice versa) you'd see a bunch of magazines laid out for you to pick up at the gate - all for free. That's the only place in the US where I've seen that. When you fly from California to Chicago or Denver or Boston or New York, there are no free magazines. And you never see free magazines at the gate for flights between Northern California (SFO, OAK, SJC) and Southern California (LAX, SAN, BUR, SNA). But on that shuttle flight between BOS and EWR, there they were. So you pick one up, and half the time you end up not even reading it.
If that seems like strange behavior for distribution and consumption of a magazine, consider the fact that we behave the same way in downloading apps for our iPhones. If you have more than three screens' worth of apps, I bet there's at least one that you downloaded but haven't even tried yet.
People who don't have an iPhone find it crazy that people will download a good number of iPhone apps that they use for a couple of weeks before abandoning, or they end up not using them at all. The odd thing is that a surprising set of applications that seemed trivial at first have stayed on our phones as regular stand-by apps.
First of all, by calling these things "applications" we're already confusing ourselves. Because of the mobile device context, these apps must be extremely simple, intuitive and useful. So we expect to be able to pick them up without any need for a "user's manual" or even a "getting started guide." While we call them applications, they bear no resemblance to the things that we used to install by inserting multiple floppy disks into a personal computer. They're more intuitive than most websites.
Secondly, we can acquire and dispose of these apps as easily as a song. People with years of experience in the "mobile industry" like to kvetch that there have been "mobile application stores" for years. But the fact that the iPhone app store put them all to shame so quickly indicates that these mobile app mavens didn't know what they didn't know.
Lastly, we - the phone owners - are changing. For years we have consumed entertainment - especially music - and gladly discarded last year's hits in favor of new sensations. But that was content that required little conscious attention. Games are actually more interactive, so we have a more conscious, interactive engagement with them, as well as a more conscious decision when we dropped one in favor of another. But mobile applications are a step beyond games. Like games, apps are interactive, but more significantly, they play a critical role in our "real lives."
The iPhone apps we choose to keep become our companions in our daily lives, and the ones we choose to discard (no hard feelings, right?) are dropped after days and weeks of trying to fit them into our lives. I'm not kidding about this. People actively debate which weather app makes the better call on the hour-by-hour forecast, or which shopping app finds the best prices. And let's not even start with Gowalla versus FourSquare.
Forget about "augmented reality" that requires heads-up-displays and real-time 24x7 cameras. Millions of people are augmenting their realities every day through their iPhones. Grok that, and you see the seismic shift that Apple created that everybody else has to keep up with.
We arrived at this point not by careful planning and strategic selection of the best applications for mobile users, but by the establishment of a big, imperfect marketplace for mobile applications. Nothing in the future is guaranteed. But the lesson is there for us to see: the future of the mobile experience will be characterized by hundreds of thousands of options, and consequently, individuals trying out hundreds or even thousands of application experiences, most of which will be abandoned.
So here's to the disposable mobile app. It's a sign that we're going in the right direction.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Three Types of Expertise
It's commonly accepted that there are two types of knowledge - "knowledge about" and "experience doing." The former can be acquired by studying, but the other kind of understanding comes through hands-on experience. Both are necessary. Conventional wisdom favors real world experience over book learning. But the ability to step back from a situation and objectively examine all your options requires both kinds of knowledge.
I'm a big fan of my kids' pediatrician, Dr. Joe. A good while back, before my oldest could speak, she suddenly stopped eating. She would literally burst into tears whenever she put anything in her mouth. Even a sip of juice would spark a painful outburst. As new parents, my wife and I were confused and worried. But when we brought her in to Dr. Joe, he identified the problem with one glance inside her mouth. She had stomatitis on the back of her tongue - a painful infection that went away in a couple of days.
That experience got me thinking - you might know enough about stomatitis to pass exams medical school, maybe even do well in a pediatric internship, but with the average doctor seeing scores of patients a day, can you catch it and diagnose it correctly within seconds on the first visit? That's the difference that practical experience makes. Dr. Joe knew that the infection is most common in one and two-year-old children (all that drooling gives a lot of opportunities for oral infection). What's more, Dr. Joe's protocol for a pediatric exam led directly to the tell-tale symptoms on the tongue.
I'm not saying that a younger, less experienced doctor would have missed the call. But this is just an example of the difference made by decades of practical experience.
Here's another example: when our second child was a newborn, he was feeding irregularly so he lost more weight than he should have. Dr. Joe put us on a strict feeding schedule, which we followed precisely for the next four days. At our next visit, the nurse weighed the baby and entered his weight on the chart. According to the chart, it seemed that our baby was continuing to lose weight. Dr. Joe interviewed us in detail. Had we stuck to the feeding regimen? We assured him that we had. Well, he said, there's only one explanation. He went over to the infant scale, calibrated it carefully to zero (which the nurse had forgotten to do), and weighed the baby again. Much to our relief, the baby had in fact gained weight.
In our most recent visit to Dr. Joe, I encountered a third kind of expertise. Our younger child had developed a respiratory infection, and Dr. Joe prescribed the appropriate antibiotics to treat the infection, as well as medicine to reduce the swelling of the airway, to facilitate breathing. He was adamant that we monitor the boy's health very carefully (you don't mess around with respiratory infections, he advised us) and come back for a follow-up visit in two days. The follow-up visit was with one of Dr. Joe's colleagues, and I was impressed by how much her protocols and treatment were in synch with Dr. Joe's. What's more, she told us that this respiratory bug had been going around for more than a month and it was a tough one. It might take two rounds of antibiotics, but with consistent treatment we would clear it up.
That led me to think about the third kind of expertise - an awareness of what's currently happening in your field. In a larger practice, with a team of doctors that communicate well, there's a collective intelligence that's aware of the most currently relevant information. Later, as the current bugs and drugs and research are displaced by newer issues, the "currently relevant information" becomes "experience" - which might be summed up as "previously relevant information that is now possibly future-relevant experience."
We take this transformation for granted - it's captured in the heads of doctors in a practice. But if you were to look for it in the practice's records - those enormous shelves of patient charts, you wouldn't find it.
In the business world, one of the key benefits of the new "Enterprise 2.0" technologies is that they give knowledge workers an effective means to complement their "book knowledge" and official reports with the other two kinds of knowledge. People can communicate their first-hand experience in a timely manner, so relevant expertise is both shared and discovered more easily. In addition, communication is more current and timely than it could be in tradition systems that were designed to archive documents. Inevitably, a system that works this way will seem more conversational in nature, which might give the impression that it's less "professional." But to dismiss conversational communication as less professional is to mistake form for substance.
The Tayloristic mind-set sees a water cooler conversation happening in a social network and thinks "those people should get back to work." But in fact, knowing each other - and what each of us is currently working on or seeing in our work - that is our work. Perhaps by thinking about the three types of expertise we might help people to understand this idea better. What do you think?
I'm a big fan of my kids' pediatrician, Dr. Joe. A good while back, before my oldest could speak, she suddenly stopped eating. She would literally burst into tears whenever she put anything in her mouth. Even a sip of juice would spark a painful outburst. As new parents, my wife and I were confused and worried. But when we brought her in to Dr. Joe, he identified the problem with one glance inside her mouth. She had stomatitis on the back of her tongue - a painful infection that went away in a couple of days.
That experience got me thinking - you might know enough about stomatitis to pass exams medical school, maybe even do well in a pediatric internship, but with the average doctor seeing scores of patients a day, can you catch it and diagnose it correctly within seconds on the first visit? That's the difference that practical experience makes. Dr. Joe knew that the infection is most common in one and two-year-old children (all that drooling gives a lot of opportunities for oral infection). What's more, Dr. Joe's protocol for a pediatric exam led directly to the tell-tale symptoms on the tongue.
I'm not saying that a younger, less experienced doctor would have missed the call. But this is just an example of the difference made by decades of practical experience.
Here's another example: when our second child was a newborn, he was feeding irregularly so he lost more weight than he should have. Dr. Joe put us on a strict feeding schedule, which we followed precisely for the next four days. At our next visit, the nurse weighed the baby and entered his weight on the chart. According to the chart, it seemed that our baby was continuing to lose weight. Dr. Joe interviewed us in detail. Had we stuck to the feeding regimen? We assured him that we had. Well, he said, there's only one explanation. He went over to the infant scale, calibrated it carefully to zero (which the nurse had forgotten to do), and weighed the baby again. Much to our relief, the baby had in fact gained weight.
In our most recent visit to Dr. Joe, I encountered a third kind of expertise. Our younger child had developed a respiratory infection, and Dr. Joe prescribed the appropriate antibiotics to treat the infection, as well as medicine to reduce the swelling of the airway, to facilitate breathing. He was adamant that we monitor the boy's health very carefully (you don't mess around with respiratory infections, he advised us) and come back for a follow-up visit in two days. The follow-up visit was with one of Dr. Joe's colleagues, and I was impressed by how much her protocols and treatment were in synch with Dr. Joe's. What's more, she told us that this respiratory bug had been going around for more than a month and it was a tough one. It might take two rounds of antibiotics, but with consistent treatment we would clear it up.
That led me to think about the third kind of expertise - an awareness of what's currently happening in your field. In a larger practice, with a team of doctors that communicate well, there's a collective intelligence that's aware of the most currently relevant information. Later, as the current bugs and drugs and research are displaced by newer issues, the "currently relevant information" becomes "experience" - which might be summed up as "previously relevant information that is now possibly future-relevant experience."
We take this transformation for granted - it's captured in the heads of doctors in a practice. But if you were to look for it in the practice's records - those enormous shelves of patient charts, you wouldn't find it.
In the business world, one of the key benefits of the new "Enterprise 2.0" technologies is that they give knowledge workers an effective means to complement their "book knowledge" and official reports with the other two kinds of knowledge. People can communicate their first-hand experience in a timely manner, so relevant expertise is both shared and discovered more easily. In addition, communication is more current and timely than it could be in tradition systems that were designed to archive documents. Inevitably, a system that works this way will seem more conversational in nature, which might give the impression that it's less "professional." But to dismiss conversational communication as less professional is to mistake form for substance.
The Tayloristic mind-set sees a water cooler conversation happening in a social network and thinks "those people should get back to work." But in fact, knowing each other - and what each of us is currently working on or seeing in our work - that is our work. Perhaps by thinking about the three types of expertise we might help people to understand this idea better. What do you think?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
