Organizational Democracy

‘“I’ve always hated the danger part of climbing, and it’s great to come down again because it’s safe,” he said in 1977.

“But there is something about building up a comradeship — that I still believe is the greatest of all feats — and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers.

It’s the intense effort, the giving of everything you’ve got. It’s really a very pleasant sensation.”’

-from “Sir Edmund Hillary, a Pioneering Conqueror of Everest, Dies at 88“, by Robert D. McFadden in the New York Times, with photo by the Associated Press of Edmund Hillary and Sardar Tenzing Norgay in 1953

When I was four or five years old, my grandfather took me for a ride in his convertible with the top down.  He drove fast, the wind rushed by, it was thrilling and fun.  Afterwards, he asked me how I liked it. I said, “It was cool!”

He got excited for a moment, and said, “Do you mean ‘cool’ as in fun, or ‘cool’ the temperature?” He was excited because I didn’t usually use slang, if ever, because I wasn’t usually around friends or family who used slang.

I was puzzled because I hadn’t ever heard anyone say ‘cool’ as in ‘fun’ before.  It was out of context for me.  “‘Cool’ the temperature,” I said.

Please, imagine you write something –

a thought, a blog, a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn, a webpage, a research paper, an entire book –

And as instantly as ads pop up when you read an email in your inbox, as instantly as search engine results, as instantly as viewing a blog or a profile on Facebook or a webpage –

in half a second –

you see the most similar thought anyone has written anywhere on the internet.

* * *

Let’s start with this blog, because…are you sure this can be done?

Rob Marsh, S.J., made a program, a WordPress Plugin called “Similar Posts.” It finds similar pages. You could say it searches entire pages of text to find the best matches for every other page.

Every time I write a new blog entry, Similar Posts updates. You can see the results at the bottom of any entry on this blog, where it says “Similar Posts” and shows the five most similar entries.

* * *

Why do I care?

Without doing anything, every time I write a thought, Similar Posts reminds me of my most similar thoughts.

Not similar by narrow topic, but –

similar by the general underlying meaning –

triggering similar combinations of distributed words across “similar” pages.

In March 2005, my life was changed when I searched a page of text I’d written –

not a search of a few words, but a search of a whole page. It referred me to Virginia Satir, who’d pioneered family therapy. Soon after, I lived in Galveston, TX, and read all of Ms. Satir’s books. They turned out to be essential in my helping people tell their stories about work in companies, and gave me insights into my own life. But enough about me. Here’s what some other people have said:

‘Ryan was looking for a new career. He wrote me a half–page letter asking for advice. When I searched the text of his letter, two of the four top results were links to art magazines. Ryan liked the content of the art magazines very much. But he said that what surprised him was that, before he had written to me, he had actually been in the process of starting his own online art magazine.’

-from an earlier entry on this blog

‘what you’re talking about is for the search engines to have a higher comprehension of what a set of words is really about. to understand the meaning, to deduce based on consistent subtleties, without conflicting elsewhere. it’s not easy, and is the holy grail so to speak of that industry…

‘“should I ask her” could be referring to someone thinking of starting a
relationship, but it could also mean “if she’s pregnant” or “how old she is” - the goal here is simple:
know all the potential endings for the phrase “should i ask her” and then analyze the surrounding text to see which of those potential endings matches.

‘they will be there… from what i’ve seen, the fact that they’re not there,
is evidence of how hard this really is…’

-from a comment by ’smitty’ at the bottom of another entry on this blog

‘When a key piece of data changes in the enterprise, one must first treat this new data like a query (i.e., what does this new data mean in relation to what the enterprise already knows). And if new data is not treated first like a query, one will never know if this new information matters unless someone asks. I often refer to this notion as Perpetual Analytics – a world where the “data finds the data and the relevance finds the user.”‘

-from Jeff Jonas’ blog

‘Ideally, similarity or relatedness would be based on a post’s meaning….The Similar Posts plugin compares posts by comparing their words.’

-from the Similar Posts website

* * *

Similar Posts chooses better links on my blog than I can. It “knows” and “recommends” the order of a three-part article I wrote: first part 1, then part 2, then part 3. Even though it doesn’t “know” which comes first, the similarity of words in part 1 is most similar to the words in part 2, then to part 3. That’s kind of incredible when you think about it.

It also “knows,” Blockbuster movie-style or Amazon.com-style, if you like this page, you might love this other page. Similar Posts suprises and delights me constantly ever since I installed it on December 1st, a month ago. It reminds me of writings I’d forgotten I’d written.

Imagine the Google of similar webpages across the internet. Every page you read will link to pages which on a deep level relate.

When you search online, instead of typing one or two words, you’ll be able to write a page of what you want. You’ll be referred to your answer, maybe even your soulmate.

* * *

For all ya’ll techies out there, we don’t need “tags” or “semantic web” or “labels” or “categories.” Our natural language –

our words –

contain the answers of what we’re looking for.

A computer program can tell on its own when someone is writing about something abstract, say, something “blue” –

and it can differentiate between blue the color and blue as in “feeling down.”

Likewise, when the words “should I ask her” appear on a webpage –

it is very likely that the subject of the page will be related to a guy wondering about asking a girl out. Google’s current PageRank system helps get the most popular usages to the top of the search results.

Similar Posts can be chunked down into Similar Sentences —

and meaning can be linked.

Call it “contextual search,” “soulpage search,” or whatever ya wanna –

try it out. Start by installing Similar Posts on your own blog. It takes half an hour to install. Go ahead.

I doubledare ya.

And if you don’t believe me, look immediately below this line to see what Similar Posts “thought” were the most similar writings on this blog.

At Picasso´s Guernica, I watched faces in the crowd. 

I´ve been curious about whether smiling indicates a subconscious choice has been made — when someone smiles, can you predict what they´ll do next?

For long minutes, I watched four faces — a guy, a gal, and the gal´s two parents.  They were facing Guernica intently, just like the folks in the photo above.  Then, the girl started to smile — the corners of her until-now somber mouth went up, just like the girl in the photo below – and she turned and spoke to her mother.  The guy abruptly left.

Later, the gal smiled, turned and walked away from her parents, still smiling.  She smiled bigger as she saw her friend, another girl, standing against the back wall to the right of this arch.

From where I stood in the back-right corner, a sudden smile caught my eye.  Another woman, this one in her thirties, smiled, turned, then walked away. 

A guy in his early thirties smiled.  I waited and counted seconds.  One, two, three, four, five…he turned and walked away.

Guernica is not a cheery painting.  There isn´t much smiling going on.  I stood, sometimes in the back off to the side, but more often in the front-right corner, where I could watch the thirty people in the front row all at once.  I could see occasional smiles.

People crowd around and look at the painting for two, five, eight minutes.  During this watching time, they rarely smile. 

Every time I saw someone smile — by which I mean the corners of their mouth quickly lifted up big in less than a second — they then either turned their neck and head right or left on their shoulders by at least 60 degrees, or moved towards or away from the painting by taking at least three steps.  As they walked, the smile stayed on their faces for many seconds.

Not everyone who moved smiled.  But everyone I saw smile, then moved big within six seconds and usually within three seconds.

I watched hundreds of people en masse.  Over 50 people smiled and moved, and there were over 120 smiles.  There were only three exceptions out of the 120 smiles. 

The three exceptions:

• a gal in her 20´s smiled, then bobbed her head up and down like a bird, looking at different parts of the picture.  She grimaced, froze, then, ten seconds after her smile had started, turned and walked away.
• another gal in her 20´s smiled, turned her head then kissed her boyfriend.  He smiled, then turned his head and kissed her cheek.  These were 110-degree neck-turn kisses.  Then, eight seconds later, she smiled big again, bobbed her head up and down, looking at the picture, but did not move much.  Perhaps she was remembering the kiss.
• a 30-year old woman smiled and then turned her head towards her boyfriend. He smiled and turned his head.  She turned her head back, then smiled without moving.  Probably she was smiling because of their smile-teraction.

Those were the only exceptions.  Women smiled more often than men.  97% of the smiles — 117 of 120+ smiles — were followed by a big movement of the neck or walking.  That´s a pretty incredible correlation, an amazing match of a smile indicating you can predict what that person is going to do next in a specific situation.  You´ll know what the person is going to do before they know themselves.

I am not suggesting that a smile always pre-indicates a big movement in other situations.  Folks often smile when they look at Miro´s paintings without moving.  But I am saying that at Picasso´s Guernica in the Reina Sofia museum, there is a definite Guernica Smile, and you can bet big money what´s gonna come next. 

I do think a smile always indicates a decision of some sort in any situation, but this is the first controlled study I´ve done.  Next time you´re at Guernica, stand in the corner, look around, and tell me what happens.

Footnotes:  My research was done on December 29, 2007, in the late afternoon.  Probably the Guernica Smile indicates a subconscious preparation to move in the presence of an uncomfortable image.  I once read that people sometimes smile when they are validating their own assumptions by smiling at something that counters their beliefs — the example being when you read that Madonna’s given birth to aliens from Mars, you smile, because your are reinforcing your belief that this is impossible.  I forget where I read this, but it may have been in Steve Denning’s recent book on leadership — he also wrote the incredible Squirrel Inc.

Why am I fascinated by smile-watching? 

I´ve been observing ever since I got interested in producing live theatre back in 1998.  I started by watching people in the audiences instead of the performances on stage — because I always cared about theatre as being for the people who came to see it — so what turned the people in the audience on, and what did they want to do?

With smiles, I’ve had a hypothesis that when people smile, it correlates with great and exciting interactions with other people, and increases their likelihood of taking an action which they enjoy.

Next, I´ll do some reading on smile research, starting with a book by Paul Ekman. 

[Photo credit links: top large photo of smile is by mobender on image44.webshots.com , arch photo , second small photo of the Smile is by ÁLVARO HERNÁNDEZ / ALTERPHOTOS , photo of audience from house right , photo of people pointing ]

Last year, my brother introduced me to his mentor, a teacher of his.  She was very busy greeting lots of her students at an event, and seemed to quickly ignore me as another face in a crowd.  Then her husband came over and said, “You´re Eric´s brother?”  To Eric he said, “You have a brother?!!!“  This man was delighted I exist.

He reminded me of my first business teacher, the one who got me excited about business:

Early on, Professor Dunbar showed us a picture of a beach.  Then he showed us a closeup of an umbrella on the beach. 

He said, “This is framing.  What we choose to look at influences what we see and think and do.  What we draw a box around affects the assumptions we make about what´s in front of us: a beach on a sunny day or an umbrella.”

That was my introduction to business.

Short comic strip will download in a minute and appear below:

Translation: I was standing in the Reina Sofia, a serious art museum in Madrid.  There was an Alexander Calder mobile but it wasn´t moving.  I said to a girl nearby, “On the count of three, we´ll blow: ´whhhhhh!´ Yeah?”  She nodded.  “One, two, three…” We blew on the mobile and it spun around.