Freedombox, A Suggestion

The Freedombox is an idea who's time has come. Unfortunately, it's still just an idea.

Why is it still "just" an idea? Joshua Spodek has some thoughts. To paraphrase: it's probably because the idea isn't perfect yet (engineers are notorious for never being ready to release their work). He figures someone (or someones) needs to step up and organize an effort, no matter how poor the initial outcome might be. Once SOMETHING is out there it can be improved by feedback from actual users.

Pictured: users.

I agree that open-source projects either publish or cease to exist. OS projects just don't work until a person or a small group takes responsibility for getting results. Ideas are a great contribution, but someone has to contribute time and money too. Arguably an idea that can't attract even one person to take responsibility for it must not be a very good idea.

Freedombox is a great idea. We need to shift the momentum of the internet back to individual control.

That being the case, why hasn't the idea gotten more attention?

At the moment it catches the attention of people who 1) understand technology and 2) are not invested in using it to control people (for one reason or another). Unfortunately that means the vast majority of the world is not, and possibly WILL not, be captivated by the idea.

Getting a lot of people to use one is kind of the whole point of the freedombox concept, so failing to capture the collective imagination is pretty much total failure period. Therefore, it seems to me that a big part of getting some momentum behind the idea is getting people interested in it.

Or, failing that, latching onto something people are already interested in.

Time to get sneaky.

On average, people don't care about security. They will instantly compromise every single security precaution established if it saves them a moment's frustration. They will not "opt in." So, to get them to do secure things, you have to restructure their environment such that they must "opt out."

Rather than focusing on all the security advantages of the freedombox, emphasize its NON-security features. For example don't advertise the idea as a personal security initiative (freedom from oppression), instead advertise it as a personal cloud initiative (freedom from

cost/frustration). THEN build in all the security stuff you would have anyway. Tell people that's all there to guarantee the security of their cloud data. People love the idea of the cloud right now, and arguably a bunch of freedomboxes working together would fit under that umbrella.

The project could still be called "freedombox" and the product could still be pretty much the same as before, just change the marketing.

The strength of the idea is that it is the most "inherently" secure of all the options. When your data is on a company's servers it's under THEIR control. When your data is in your closet it's under YOUR control. In every society a person's home is considered more sacred than anywhere else. If an entity (cops or criminals) has to break into some faceless corporation to compromise you, that's one thing. When they have to go into your personal residence, that's an entirely different thing. No only is it simply physically easier to protect your dat

a when it's at home, but the government (even if it's corrupt) is far more likely to extend extra protections under the law to anything in your home.

Play up all the ways the freedombox will "free" people to go anywhere and still have access to their data. It will absolutely accomplish that goal. When people embrace that they'll also be getting all the security built into the gadget by its creators. If they want to turn that stuff off, they can. It's theirs and they can do what they want. Since it's open-source someone will probably even create a security-lite release that runs on the same hardware. Whatever. All the people grabbing up the "personal cloud" will create momentum that will help out the people who live under repressive governments.

Trickle down freedom.

Basically, attach the idea to something that's already popular and it will get a lot more support. Play up one or two features that appeal to the largest audience. That way the few people who can REALLY benefit from it will get it even though they would never have been able to create enough momentum on their own.

Awareness of System Boundaries is Necessary for Success

A system is where you define it. Sometimes it's easier for people to agree on the boundaries of the system, sometimes it's harder, but either way it's always arbitrary. In keeping with the fractal nature of systems, the subsystem boundaries are also arbitrary.

The definition of a system's performance depends on its boundary. A car's performance is measured in miles per hour because the boundary of the "car system" is between the tire and the road. We could say that the car actually stops at the axle and that the wheels are a separate system. Then the performance of the "car system" would be measured in revolutions per minute. However, car and the wheels are generally considered the system. On the other hand, when we talk about a highway at rush hour the cars are considered subsystems of the traffic jam. Alternatively, an company's organizational chart is an illustration of subsystems within systems.

People who are in charge of a subsystem will generally consider themselves in charge of a system. When they strive to do the best job possible they will usually try to optimize the performance of their system. Just like the performance of the axles in a car is measured differently than the performance of the tires, the performance of one group is measured differently from the performance of the larger group it is a part of. The person in charge of the subsystem can't measure the performance of the system, because that's not where they are; all they have to work with is the performance of their subsystem.

This is a problem because to optimize the performance of a system you must de-optimize the performance of all the subsystems.

For example, a "tuned" car doesn't have the most powerful engine because it would rip the transmission apart. If the transmission were beefed up it would spin the tires instead of moving forward. If the tires were stickier it would warp the frame. If the frame were reinforced it wouldn't leave enough space for the big engine, or it would weigh too much and it would need a bigger engine, starting the cycle over again.

The Tsar tank. More like the reTSARded tank! Am I right?

A system must have subsystems that are in balance with each other based on the performance goals of the system, not on the performance goals of the individual subsystems. This is relatively easy to understand when the systems are not people. But as soon as people get involved they start to get all pissy about being a subsystem rather than a system.



This is why the executives of companies are constantly being reminded, often by highly overpaid consultants, that they have to explain to employees how their actions affect the company's overall goals. Otherwise, all they have to go on is the performance of the system they are aware of, which is the one they happen to be in charge of. When they do their best they will actually be destabilizing the company.

BTW, this is why companies alternately claim it is better to keep their employees powerless and scared, or empowered and brave, depending on which extreme they are already closer to. A company that judges its employees on how well they aid the overall goals will strengthen the company by empowering everyone. A company that judges its employees on how well they perform on their section's individual metrics will strengthen the company by squashing everyone.

Spontaneous Misorganization Stifles Innovation at Large Companies

New ideas rarely emerge from bureaucracies. Large companies are generally bureaucratic, therefore new ideas rarely emerge from large companies. This is because people suck.

Pictured: People. Sucking.

A person doesn't suck (usually), but people do. The more persons are involved in something the more likely it is to suck. Observers often say that culture is the reason small companies are better at innovation than large companies; like Bruce Nussbaum, Marty Cagan, and Jeffrey Baumgartner. (respectively)

[large companies] don’t understand the critical cultural and social science components of [innovation].

...there is much that the typical large company could do to improve the ability of their employees to innovate.

The culprit behind this discrepancy is the decision making structure in each kind of company.

It's not culture, at least that's not the first cause, it's the number of people. That's not to say it's the number of people technically grouped together. What is important is the number of people who have power over the outcome. As a general rule, people all want something different. It is impossible for everyone in a group to have the power to get what they want, but it is possible for everyone in a group to have the power to stop the process and ensure no one else gets anything. We have a built-in feeling of what is fair or not and we act on it by refusing to accept deals in which we get something, but the something is less than we feel is fair. Give enough people power over the outcome and nothing will ever get done.

Small companies tend to have few people in them. They're "streamlined." That's a nice way of saying they have fired, or simply never hired, people they didn't need. Large companies tend to have a lot of people. They're "bloated." That's an acceptably crude way of saying there are too many people involved in what's going on. large companies provide a reliable flow of income, so they attract the people who can't hack it anywhere else. That's fine as long as they do their well-defined job and nothing else.

You can have some power when the guy above you either loses all of it or gets more.

A lot of people becomes "bloat" when those people start getting the power to make decisions affecting their own job. Since their job is all they can handle, they are not going to make decisions which result in changes to their job. This is not to say that hiring more people is bad, only that distributing power over one decision is bad, and more people hanging around makes it more likely power will end up distributed.

Large companies can innovate just fine, and do, when they realize that throwing more people at a problem actually makes it worse. As groups grow larger, and more secure in their position, they become much more likely to spontaneously mis-organize themselves.

For example, as a company grows it tends to take on larger and more complicated projects, which necissarily involve more people with specific expertise than before. That's as it should be, the mistake is giving all those people power over the project. The appropriate way to organize it is to give one person power over the project, and make sure they get good advice from all the experts. This takes deliberate structuring because anyone who feels crucial to a project's success will feel it is unfair that they have no official power over it. This makes it much more likely one of them will demand, and get, some measure of power. That makes it more likely the others will demand, and get, the same.

Then they will use their power to stop the project when it doesn't meet their standards, which it inevitably won't, as I'll explain in the next post.

National Healthcare Reform Leadership

A new national healthcare system is in the works, or at least a modified one. Which is good, because no matter how you slice it the country needs to do something about steadily increasing healthcare costs, says the CBO.

If rising healthcare costs were a steamroller. . .

In BusinessWeek, Nikos Mourkogiannis proposes that the new system should focus on cutting costs. He also says that, while that is a fairly obvious consensus view, actually implementing it will require prodigious acts of leadership. The general idea is to create a system that ensures the average person will have a minimum level of benefits.

As Mourkogiannis points out, the new healthcare system will not be able to do everything for everyone, it will have to make triage decisions which first reduce costs (and do everything else second). From the White House:

President Obama is committed to working with Congress to pass comprehensive health reform in his first year in order to control rising health care costs, guarantee choice of doctor, and assure high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans.

The fun thing about mission statements is that they often utilize a lot of commas. Giving commas to a bureaucrat is the linguistic equivalent of giving a credit card to a teenager. All sorts of commitments are made with little consideration given to whether or not they can all be delivered. The term "high-quality" has a lot more wiggle-room than "affordable," and the situation demands the focus be on "affordable" anyway, so "high-quality" is really only in there to attempt to placate fears that the healthcare storm troopers are going to drag you off to the crematorium when you reach 65.

Your grandpa ran off to join the circus. Here's his replacement.

High-quality will have to be secondary to low cost. The only reason we need healthcare reform is that our current approach will bankrupt us. So, at a minimum, we have to do the same thing only cheaper. Improving quality would be nice, but it is not the primary driver; cost is.

Now, try explaining that to the people who will cost too much to take care of.

This healthcare reform situation is a good example of a situation that demands attention be paid to systems, innovation and leadership. The system is monstrously complex, implementing it won't work without some innovations that no one's thought of yet, and even then the leadership challenge is pretty much guaranteed to be beyond anyone's capabilities. We (Americans) are okay with the idea that the system can't take care of everyone. We are not okay with the idea that the system will officially not be taking care of everyone because they are officially on the wrong side of the cost/benefit analysis.

That being assumed, what sort of leadership approaches have the best chance of getting people to at least let the necessary changes happen, if not get people excited about the changes?

• "We are working hard for you, but someone/thing else is working against us." Whoever gets saddled with the job of representing healthcare reform can try casting themselves as the plucky, unquestionably-good-hearted hero valiantly struggling against an evil menace. The menace could be immigrants flooding our emergency rooms, greedy HMOs, or just the vast scale of the problem.
  
• "We all know more than you and we say this is a good idea/working." Several large stakeholders in the healthcare marketplace, like the pharm-companies and AARP, have already expressed support for healthcare reform. It could be possible to present a unified front that overwhelms any attempt to claim it's a bad idea.
• "Every alternative is worse, especially doing nothing." Proponents of healthcare reform, like me, have pretty much started here anway. This approach assumes that this will remain the primary tool moving forwards. It could be expanded upon by occasionally adding a new description of just how bad the future will/could get if things aren't done in a particular way.
• "I was worried, but now I see there's nothing to worry about." Instead of the leaders speaking, they could get average Joes and Janes to speak for them. That way the people who need to be convinced could see people just like them being convinced, rather than Ivy-league, smooth-talking socialist puppets trying to be convincing.
  

Leaders Are Framers

Since not much can be said about what leadership actually is, but people talk about leadership a lot, they must be talking about something else. I think they're talking about the incredibly complicated art/science of framing reality.

According to a study by the Hay Group, a global management consultancy, there are 75 key components of employee satisfaction (Lamb, McKee, 2004). They found that:

• Trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization.
• Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence:
  1. Helping employees understand the company's overall business strategy.
  2. Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.
  3. Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee's own division is doing - relative to strategic business objectives.

I think this illustrates THE thing that people in leadership positions have to do. They have to frame reality for everyone else.

There is more in the world than we can possibly perceive, and there is more in what we can perceive than we can possibly focus on, and there is more in what we can focus on than we can possibly make sense of. Appropriately, this scares the bejezus out of us. No matter how well we manage to understand the world, there will always be (infinitely?) more that we do not understand. This awareness leads us all to the obvious conclusion that if we can only understand part of the world, it should be the most important part.


But how can we be sure we understand the most important part of the world if there are things we don't understand? Maybe the most important part is one of those things we missed. This universal doubt drives all of us to the next obvious conclusion; to ask someone else.





Since we are searching for the most important thing, upon which we can focus, we naturally assume it can be known. Therefore it makes perfect sense that someone else could know it. Whether or not they actually do cannot be determined, but they could know it. We look for a framework we can use to understand the most important thing, and from there to build our life around.

Leaders provide that framework for us. They tell us what is important. This is why leadership looks the same at all levels, including personal, because everyone has some idea about what might be important. Leadership is touchy because when an organization tells us what is important we might be grateful, or we might be offended. Or we might be apathetic. It all depends on how we frame reality for ourselves and how our personal framework meshes with the leader's framework.

When the leader's framework contradicts our own one of them has to be rejected, so either we think we are wrong or we think the leader is wrong. When the leader's framework merges with our own we feel completed. It is that feeling of appropriateness that creates a leader-follower dynamic.

The Consciousness Consensus

There is no consensus regarding what consciousness is, let alone whether or not it can be created artificially. The introduction to Cognition Distributed does an excellent job of walking the reader all the way around the abyss that is our lack of understanding of consciousness.

It takes a $100 book to explain that something can't be explained.

When you say to yourself, "What is seven times nine?" and then "sixty three" pops up, you are certainly conscious of thinking "sixty three." So that's definitely mental; and so is the brain state that corresponds to your thinking "sixty three." But what about the brain state that actually found and delivered "sixty three"? You are certainly not conscious of that, although you were just as conscious while your brain was finding and delivering "sixty three" as while you were breathing, though you don't feel either of those states.

We can agree that consciousness emerges from a sufficiently complex system, but not from insufficiently complex systems. While the metaphysical doubt that a rock could be somehow conscious, or a tree, or Gaia, always remains. . .it is merely a qualification made to preserve intellectual honesty. The doubt is really reserved for things like biomes and planets, not for dust and bushes. It's subjective, sure, but it's the best we've got.

This question has been addressed so often that the language for discussing it is well established. It is possible there are just things that cannot be something, kind of like how "0" and "zero" are things that represent nothing. It's a paradox, not an inconsistency.

Anywho, the really interesting development is that as we offload cognition into artificial actors we are accumulating context for the discussion that was impossible before the microchip. New innovations are being created every day that do things we previously associated only with conscious actors. Since we do not consider these new mechanisms conscious, we can no longer say those functions are conscious. If a function can be provided by purely vegetative processes then consciousness must be something else.

Consciousness is one of those leading-edge concepts because everything we've nailed down as mere complexity, so far, has failed to explain it. Like how the round Earth was just a theory until someone actually managed to sail all the way around it, because the surface that had been explored up to that point didn't fully explain the Earth's roundness. I think we'll figure it out eventually. . .probably a few seconds after SkyNet becomes conscious and tries to kill us all. . .but life's a journey, not a destination.

President Obama's Healthcare Newsconference

The President addressed the nation. . .or at least as much of the nation as felt like watching the whole thing. The ones who relied on soundbites will miss out on the chance to draw their own conclusions, because anyone who uses soundbites or quotes is trying to back up a predetermined point :-)

He said, "I'm the president, and I think this has to get done." This sort of statement is interpreted as arrogance by people who don't like the speaker, and as authority by people who do. I think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle because the laws of physics actually require a phenomenal concentration of arrogance to stabilize the phenomenal concentration of authority that comes with the Presidency.

What's he got to be smug about anyway?

On the subject of healthcare reform, I think he did a good job of summarizing the reason we should at least talk about it. He said the cost of doing nothing is more than enough reason to do something (cuz the current system is on track to bankrupt the federal government); since we should do something, we should do it right. Doing it right means it doesn't add to the deficit, it protects the middle class and it satisfies healthcare experts. He also said there is so much waste in the current system that we can provide healthcare to everyone; if we can get people insurance that pays for preventative care they won't end up in the emergency room making the rest of us pay for their amputated foot instead of for cheaper counseling on diabetes prevention.

An apple a day keeps our economy afloat for another fiscal year.

The healthcare system is incredibly complicated. That's something that seems to be forgotten when discussing healthcare reform. Additionally, it is a service that cannot be suspended while being overhauled. The average person doesn't even have the language skills necessary to frame the issue, let alone discuss anything approaching a solution. By way of an example, out of the dozens of times pundits mentioned the "cost" of the healthcare reform plan, only a couple times did anyone bother to mention that it was the projected cumulative cost over 10 years, expressed in current dollars.

Even trying to talk about how much it might cost requires several qualifications and each qualification can be further qualified. Thinking about it is tough, let alone expressing it in a sentence. So, instead of admitting how complicated it is, we just gloss over the parts (99.99%) we don't understand and assume there is nothing significant hiding in the fog. It's like when people assumed the ocean floor was flat until they actually got a look at it.

Pictured: Advanced sentence structure.

Anywho, the commentary which followed was even more fun.

CNN

• he didn't add anything new
• apparently Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest is way more important than national healthcare

I suppose we should forgive CNN. Their Black In America 2: The Revenge of Black In America program was airing next and they really wanted to plug it. Apparently the best way to keep the attention of people who tuned in for a 45 minute lecture on healthcare reform is to claim it was a waste of time and that we should be paying attention to some dude who got arrested and then wasn't charged with anything. CNN is classy that way.

FOX

• he's a great liar
• nothing is worth doing unless a list of bullet points can fully explain it

Luckily, FOX was busy furiously ignoring the discussion of what happened to that dude who got arrested (oh, was he BLACK, we totally didn't notice) so they had plenty of time to talk about the news conference. Of course, by "talk about" I mean link everything to Republican talking points and, when that was too hard, tell the audience they should be too confused to remember to blink their eyes or wipe the drool off their bib.

O'Reilly

• I don't understand what his plan is (despite the fact that he opened the press conference by saying the plan is still being debated)
• I don't want the government aggregating rates of medical conditions (despite the fact there is no reason names need to be attached to conditions)

Maybe it's me...but O'Reilly always claims to adore Obama...while always coming up with a reason to hate everything Obama does. In this case he was very clear on two points: that he couldn't understand what Obama was saying and that he went to college so he totally should have been able to. Then he brought in some dude to talk about how healthcare reform is actually really simple, and all the possible changes (all 2 of them) must inevitably lead to a zombie apocalypse.

He'll be standing between you and your healthcare.

AC360

• Tough to make a hard sell for a proposal that's still evolving
• Republicans don't have an alternative, just objections

I think it's the hair. Anderson Cooper, like Superman, realies on his super-powered hair to save mankind once a week. Just imagine the desperate straits we'd be in if his hair was more like this:

Definition of Leadership (3 of 3)

Leadership is pretty difficult to define. A few years back I made a bet that I could produce 10 different legitimate definitions of leadership, but delivered an even dozen without any difficulty. The word "leadership" is searched an average of four million times a month and produces more than one hundred million pages. (For comparison, "American Idol" is searched an average of 14 million times a month and produces two hundred million pages)

The Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't even have an entry on the subject, and has very little to say about "leader." The Random House Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary can't seem to define it without using the word "lead."

Congratulations must be given to the American Heritage Dictionary for providing "guidance and direction" instead of just "the act of leading."

There is a particular trend in the introductions of attempts to define leadership, as illustrated by the Business Dictionary, About.com, and even Wikipedia that is best summarized as "no one's really sure but here's what the consensus seems to be." People and organizations are usually careful to state that they are providing their view on leadership, which they might be quite confident in, but which they will not claim is The Definition of the word.

I think that leadership is, quite simply, the act of dealing with change. I think this is The Definition, and that it has been missed, because there isn't much more one can say about it. The general consensus definition of leadership is usually something along the lines of "inspiring a group to action." However, this is almost always qualified with a list of additional actions that should be included, and a caveat that even then the definition is probably incomplete (and even when the definition is complete it shouldn't be taken strictly literally).



Working from that definition, then, it makes sense that it would be misunderstood. Because leadership is dealing with change, unlike management which is dealing with complexity, the act of leading is basically just guesswork. There isn't much more you can say about it. Take what you know about a situation and try to predict the future; you'll be wrong sometimes and right sometimes and hopefully you'll get better. Now, the position labeled "leader" does require an array of skills like management, communication, character, etc because once the guess is made it becomes a mere comlexity challenge, which can be managed. Management can be explained, so that is what gets explained, because the leadership part of it actually takes very little explanation.

I went into more detail in this post.

What Leadership and Management Really Are

Everyone has their own way of defining leadership. Here's mine.

I think that leadership, as a concept, should be compared to management. Management is performed whenever someone deals with complexity and leadership is performed whenever someone deals with change. They can be performed at the same time, and usually are in some proportion, but this distinction makes them easier to think about. They are not concepts which can be separated; they are two sides of the same coin.

Okay, so technically coins have three sides. I'm not changing the metaphor.

If we think of actions like they were all mixed up together and baked into a brownie, then we will have a very strange mental image. However, we will also have a useful image. The center, the majority, of the brownie is the same soft consistency. This majority would represent how most of the things we do are only in response to complexity. The edges of the brownie, which are harder and chewier, are the minority of actions which are in response to change. It's not such a metaphorical leap to imagine the inside of a brownie as all being the same and the edge of a brownie being the part that has to "deal" with the change from brownie to non-brownie, which is why it's a little bit different from the rest of the brownie raw materiel.

Pictured: The weirdest metaphor you've seen today.

The proportion of soft brownie to chewy brownie varies from situation to situation. Some jobs are characterized as "Leadership" jobs because one tends to either seek out or be confronted with more change than usual. This idea could be represented like so:

Pictured: The most delicious leadership lesson ever.

The reason this metaphor is useful is that it illustrates a principle of the relationship between management and leadership. They really cannot be found in isolation from each other. You can't bake a brownie that has no edges and you can't bake an edge that has no brownie. Additionally, the center and the edge of a brownie are made of the same stuff (actions in case the metaphor is still too vague). We tend to label a job as either management or leadership because of the relative proportion of edge to area. So, a marble would be an example of a "management" job because it maximizes management decisions and minimizes leadership decisions.

As little surface area as possible.

This could be compared to a radiator which maximizes surface area vs volume, just like a "leadership" job would maximize leadership decisions and minimize management decisions.

As much surface area as possible.

So, when people try to describe leadership as fundamentally different from anything else they are forgetting that leadership is just the edge of the brownie that ran interference between the brownie and the outside world. It is still the same stuff, it has only acquired a different consistency due to its being exposed to change. Management and leadership always exist together, but the proportion sometimes changes.

Management, then, is when someone is dealing with something that is well understood. We like to keep things the same for as long as possible because we need to be able to rely on something. That means that after a while the thing that has always been the same is so well understood that every problem has a documented solution. A person only needs access to this accumulated knowledge and they can maintain the status quo indefinitely. Leadership, however, is when someone is on the leading edge dealing with change. To maintain an area in which things do not change, someone has to be out on the edge figuring out how to deal with the inevitable new problems.

There is no documentation which allows someone to deal with a new situation because nothing can be documented until it has first been dealt with. So, leaders have to basically guess the future, which is why leadership is so hard to understand. People keep trying to approach leadership the same way they approach management, as a complexity problem instead of a change problem. Another way to think about it is that there is a fundamental difference between dealing with something you can see and something you can't.

Complicated, but at least you know what you're dealing with.

That could be anything. We should form a committee to discuss it.

The latter picture, of the shadow, is what leaders are expected to focus their attention on. They are supposed to learn how to interpret things with no context and no support. Is it any wonder people are so confused about what they're supposed to do? On the one hand leaders are supposed to inspire confidence. On the other hand their job is basically voodoo, and their success is largely dependent on luck, which does not inspire confidence.

This brings me to a key point, which is what leadership is not. Leadership is not management. A manager who delicately applies some creativity to deal with some workplace drama exercised leadership. A leader who carefully practiced his speech and incited the masses to follow him exercised management. The methods for inspiring people to do things is relatively well documented and is becoming more so every day. Therefore, inspiring people should be characterized by the preponderance of management inherent in the action. Leadership, on the other hand, is dealing with a situation without any supporting information. It is inherently impossible to define HOW to 'do' leadership, then, because every situation is different.