Way back in 1982, futurist John Naisbitt authored the fascinating book Megatrends. I especially recall my reaction to one of the trends – High tech, high touch – and the need to balance between technology and human interaction. I recently caught a small segment on television about the making of Avatar. (There’s lots of interesting clips of this stuff on YouTube.) A couple of things really struck me.
The breadth and depth of new technologies invented (or, in come cases, refined) by James Cameron and his team is truly astounding. Not just the “performance capture” technologies and related techniques, but also the technology to integrate the video streams from dozens (in some cases, hundreds) of video cameras and computer generated graphics in real time to a single ‘virtual camera‘ device that Cameron could look through as the filming was being done, and let him select the best angles and perspectives to capture the moment. According to Wikipedia, the virtual camera system:
…displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the actor’s virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, “It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.”
Other technical innovations included a system for lighting very large areas, a massive motion-capture stage and the technology and methods for full performance capture, including facial expressions. He also reduced the weight of notoriously heavy and unwieldy 3-D cameras to something that could just about be hand-held and up to the dynamics he envisioned for Avata.
But what most intrigued me, and took me back to Naisbitt and Megatrends, was the attention Cameron paid to the “hi touch” to make such a hi tech movie work. This included taking the actors to rain forests in Hawaii to spend time getting the feel of such a landscape – and some of the most similar terrain he could find to his imaginary Pandora. He wanted the actors to hike around the forest – to be able to recapture the feeling of a lush forest when they were on the concrete sound stage. He wanted the actors to really look as though they were in control of the flying creatures, so he build a gimbal rig to let the actors get the feel of the movements (which had been previously worked out with wire frame models and their possible flight paths).
How are you balancing the high technology you are deploying with the high touch techniques that will help them integrate into the human world in which they must operate?
Image Courtesy of Collider.com
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Way back in 1982, futurist John Naisbitt authored the fascinating book Megatrends. I especially recall my reaction to one of the trends – High tech, high touch – and the need to balance between technology and human interaction. I recently caught a small segment on television about the making of Avatar. (There’s lots of interesting clips of this stuff on YouTube.) A couple of things really struck me.
The breadth and depth of new technologies invented (or, in come cases, refined) by James Cameron and his team is truly astounding. Not just the “performance capture” technologies and related techniques, but also the technology to integrate the video streams from dozens (in some cases, hundreds) of video cameras and computer generated graphics in real time to a single ‘virtual camera‘ device that Cameron could look through as the filming was being done, and let him select the best angles and perspectives to capture the moment. According to Wikipedia, the virtual camera system:
…displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the actor’s virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, “It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.”
Other technical innovations included a system for lighting very large areas, a massive motion-capture stage and the technology and methods for full performance capture, including facial expressions. He also reduced the weight of notoriously heavy and unwieldy 3-D cameras to something that could just about be hand-held and up to the dynamics he envisioned for Avata.
But what most intrigued me, and took me back to Naisbitt and Megatrends, was the attention Cameron paid to the “hi touch” to make such a hi tech movie work. This included taking the actors to rain forests in Hawaii to spend time getting the feel of such a landscape – and some of the most similar terrain he could find to his imaginary Pandora. He wanted the actors to hike around the forest – to be able to recapture the feeling of a lush forest when they were on the concrete sound stage. He wanted the actors to really look as though they were in control of the flying creatures, so he build a gimbal rig to let the actors get the feel of the movements (which had been previously worked out with wire frame models and their possible flight paths).
How are you balancing the high technology you are deploying with the high touch techniques that will help them integrate into the human world in which they must operate?
Image Courtesy of Collider.com
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Diminishing Returns of Collaboration
by kaitlin on 2009-06-15 10:07 PM read 857 times Source: http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/?p=3965 |
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While generally a believer in how collaboration can lead to better insights and greater efficiency, I continually see examples of where it is neither effective, nor terribly efficient – and in the worst cases totally counter-productive. I work in a highly collaborative environment and study many others, and my experiences have led me to two areas where problems typically emerge:
If you put the two of these together, the worst-case scenario is that in an individual could join a project as the Nth person who ‘spoils the broth,’ while the time they dedicate towards doing so distracts them from their other work – which, continuing the cooking metaphor, leads them to burn the toast as well.
The problem is, it’s very difficult to apply a scientific approach to measure exactly how many people per project, and conversely how many projects per person is optimal. The most well-known study around this is Dunbar’s Number, which sets “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” at 150. In terms of collaborative overhead, Dunbar speculates that “as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming.” Now that might be acceptable for the hunter-gatherer societies described in Dunbar’s anthropological study, but I would imagine this amount of “grooming” time would be extremely unproductive in an enterprise context.
In his book Collaboration, released this month, Morten Hansen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and INSEAD, identifies two costs related to enterprise collaboration. The first is the opportunity cost collaborating (i.e. the opportunities individuals could have been pursuing had they not been collaborating), the second is the cost associated with fostering co-operation. In both cases, as the number of projects or the number of individuals grow, so too does the potential for diminishing returns.
At the project level, I feel as though most people have general understanding that there is a certain point at which there are simply too many stakeholders and collaboration breaks down.
However, at an individual level, I think we are less cognizant of – or less willing to admit – our own limitations. I’ve seen many cases where an enthusiastic and eager collaborator was clearly overburdened and well past the point of optimal effectiveness. Incidentally, my personal hypothesis is that this point of optimal effectiveness is a fairly small number of projects per person. My main “proof” for this is anecdotal, but I notice that the busier one is, the more likely they are to quickly skim a topic and provide feedback in short (sometimes valuable) chip-shots without contributing to a better in-depth understanding of the topic space. Worse, in some instances perceived value comes from dissenting, so instead of constructive feedback, you get wildly varying opinions with no one working towards a coherent solution.
On the subject of cognitive overload, a recent Deloitte report notes, “Even a Sunday newspaper contains more information than the average 17th century citizen encountered in a lifetime. Add to that the stress of decision-making amidst uncertainty, corporate change, and a tidal wave of tasks. Never before in history have workers been asked to absorb and make sense of so many data points.” One more sensational study even suggests that information overload is more damaging to the brain than smoking pot. I think we can certainly make an argument that where collaboration is most likely to break down is at the individual level.
This brings up another point: What about the virtues of solitude? Are we losing our capacity for individual decision-making? Moreover, who’s actually doing the deep thinking needed to solve complex problems? We talk about the multitasking Net Gen brain that is not actually doing multiple things at once, but rather switching more efficiently. Does constant switching allow for deep analytic thought?
So what is the solution? Overall, I’m wondering if there’s a Dunbar Number for the optimal number of simultaneous projects per person (small and large). How is this number affected when you take into account broader ecosystem participation and places where quick feedback from multiple participants is actually desired over in-depth participation?
As a start, I think collaborative technologies can help by streamlining different types of feedback. So, for example, a project can have 1,000 collaborators if they are providing feedback via a prediction market. Conversely, if only three people are collaborating on a document, perhaps a wiki is most effective.
One possible model for managing cognitive overload is letting individuals self govern – i.e. everyone decide where they can add the most value. Of course, this also raises many issues, including: people, especially in high-performance cultures, tend to overextend themselves; people tend to pick project that interest them, but that may not add the most value to the organization; and people tend to be social and so will gravitate towards the same projects, thus contributing to project inefficiency.
In order for this to work, you would have to architect a system that would allow people to allocate their own time in a structured way (similar to the Freiburg budget example). I’m envisioning a system where resources are finite but can dynamically allocated; where employees are guided by decisioning logic that identifies the projects that provide the most value to the organization; and where limits are set that prevent projects from being staffed by too many people and that stop people from taking on too many projects.
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These are some really interesting thoughts on collaboration - I really enjoyed pondering your arguments. These issues are very pertinent and present themselves often in the world we live in. I recently came across “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” and am incredibly intrigued to find out more about the studies done about this topic. I’m very pleased to find it as an audio book at http://www.audiobooks.net as I really battle to find time to sit down and read.
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[...] am in general agreement with Naumi Haque’s observation about the limits of collaboration: While generally a believer in how collaboration can lead to better insights and greater [...]