It is hard to control the human brain

Sometimes it is hard to keep your brain under control. Because a lot of things are processed more or less automatically without requiring your attention. Which is good and probably even vital to survive.

I became aware of this fact this morning when listening to one of our radio stations here in Germany during breakfast. They have a little game running during which one candidate is asked tricky questions for 30 seconds and all he or she has to do is to respond and avoid three words: “Ja” (“yes”), “nein” (“no”) and “Bonn” ( the former capital of Germany ).

You would think this is easy to achieve. You have to concentrate for just 30 seconds and you have to apply a very simple rule: avoiding those three words. I tell you: most of the candidates fail. Because when asked a question – and of course the questioner knows how to do this the tricky way – those words simply flow into your response automatically and suddenly you lost. The point is you have to communicate in a very different way. Instead of letting your brain fire pre-defined response phrases you have to slow down and review each phrase before your allow your mouth to send it out. It is unbelievable how hard it is to do this, and even you do this your checking might be incomplete and you have escapes.

The rule looks simple at the beginning, but may be is a bit harder. The German word “ja” is part of other words like “jawohl” and often also used as a filler word, thus there are so many opportunities that you use it even you did not want to use it.

People are forced into a very unnatural communication mode to do this checking of phrases before releasing. It is not the way we communicate. If you get a question and you would like to answer “ja!” but then have to find an alternate response it is very hard to generate one, it takes time and the new response somehow will sound weird and artificial.

"Reigh’s Brain rlwat" by Reigh LeBlanc.

A nice example of how tasks are automated in our brain. Think about how many things you do when driving a car without even realizing. You know how difficult it is when learning how to drive a car: you have to think through every task you perform. The automatic execution of tasks later on is a true indicator that finally you really learned how to drive a car. The stopping of thinking as a true indicator of maturity, experience, skill, professionalism ? Interesting thought.

Does it sometimes happen to you that during a meeting or phone call you say something which a moment later falls into the category of things better not said ? Blame your brain for this ! It has been doing too much in automatic mode instead of consulting your conscious.

While with some discipline you might learn how to control your language it becomes much much harder to control your body language. Not a big point currently in the world of web conferences and phone calls, but in a meeting your brain might generate a lot of messages through your body you actually don’t want to send out. But – why not ? Your brain may be less of a liar than your conscious, those automated responses may make you appear more natural and frank than your artificial responses and finally foster truth, openness and trust. Another interesting thought, don’t you think ?

Communication options and The Tower of Babel

Before we developed our capability to use languages – to talk and listen by using an agreed upon vocabulary – there was probably no way to have some form of complex communication. Before paper and writing had been discovered there was simply one option: talk to someone face-to-face. After that one could decide whether to write a letter or meet someone to talk to probably after a multi day or week travel. And we rarely had the idea to communicate with people on a different continent.

"Tower of Babel" by ThomasThomas.

The phone invented more than 100 years ago opened up a third option and a real revolutionary one. Ten years ago many options had been added meanwhile, according to this 10-year-old article: audio tapes, video tapes, CD-ROMs, radio, fax, internet, e-mail, TV, video conferencing. What is meant by “internet” ? Well, remember, that was the Web 1.0 era, where a few could publish their messages through internet sites. Instant messaging and newsgroups are not mentioned as well but I guess have been available already to some extent, may be still too exotic in these days.

While reading through this list I realize how many options have been added meanwhile in the Web 2.0 era: blogs, wikis, photo and video and audio ( podcasts ) sharing sites, profile and social networking sites, bookmark sharing and survey sites, twitter, Q&A tools and collaborative document sharing sites. I believe: we experience a sort of exponential growth in the number of communication options.

This means that we have to invest some of our time in finding the right communication tool for a given purpose. Face-to-face, instant message, e-mail, comment on a profile page, blog post, wiki page, a document sent via e-mail or shared in any other way, a tweet, a  phone call, a video conference, a meeting in a virtual world ? And for each option we have to find out: company internal or public ? Within the boundaries of an intranet or going out into the wild wild web ?

Businesses are constantly adding new communication options, but they very rarely take any away. It’s also rare for them to provide any guidance to their employees to help them sort through the options.

found in Assessing your communication options by Clive Shepher

Will this actually lead to a smarter society, will this increase the body of knowledge of the human race or a particular community or enterprise, or are we more and more running into confusion how to use all these options right, how to communicate efficiently ? Are we encountering a new Tower of Babel phenomenon ?

Instead of becoming smarter, don’t we spent much time on trying to consolidate all these sources of information and to worry about how to use what communication vehicle efficiently ? Is there any value add in developing tools to feed or integrate multiple communication tools ? Is it good to have multiple social networks which are different ? Isn’t it more good luck than intention to find some useful information ? How much time do we spend each day to learn new communication tools and communicate about communication tools instead of focusing on something more important ? is there anything more important ? Why do we fail to take options away, to consolidate and to reduce complexity ? Is the human race or an enterprise as a collective unit intelligent, are its individuals, and where are we heading with this ? What dominates in our life: competition or collaboration ?

Am I getting too far with my questions ? Definitely yes. I will need to write some more postings to really sort out this brain dump.

Different kinds of humor

Every year on New Year’s Eve we do it: we watch “Dinner For One” in TV – sometimes even several times that evening since it is shown on several channels at different times. It has become kind of a tradition already. Again and again we find it funny. It is a kind of humor based on repetitions: the more often the butler stumbles upon this tiger fur the better we laugh.

You don’t know what it is all about ? Well, it is about Miss Sophie celebrating her 90th anniversary with 6 friends who unfortunately all passed away meanwhile. Her butler is arranging a dinner table laid out with 6 + 1 dishes and he has to play the role of the 6 who can’t make it anymore to this event. And of course he has to drink for all of them. Very well played by Freddie Frinton and always an enjoyment for me, my wife and many other Germans to watch this.

But not for everyone. This time we spent New Year’s Eve with my sister in law in Regensburg and her daughter has been there as well, coming from Abu Dhabi with her new Sudanese husband. Of course he had to watch the show with us – and he did not find it funny at all. My wife later on told me that some of her friends have friends in UK and one evening when they watched the show together those folks could not laugh either about this. Come on, this is supposed to be British humor, isn’t it ? May be I am wrong, may be it is just a kind of humor we Germans think is British humor.

This comedy sketch has been written by an English writer but the TV show is a German production – delivered in English language. You can watch it here on youtube or here on Google; the latter one is the version with a German introduction.

As I mentioned British humor or what I believe British humor is supposed to be: something I can not laugh about is Monthy Python. I hate their shows and also this famous movie Life Of Brian many would rate as the most funny movie ever. I admit: I never watched it entirely.

Anyway, time to draw a conclusion out of this: humor is very subjective. Whether you find something funny depends on your character, your culture, your background, your current mood. Because of this it is always risky to tell a joke during a meeting or conference call – you can’t foresee how everyone else will perceive it. It might happen that something you find real funny other’s don’t find funny at all – of even worse.

The same applies to blog postings to some extent. Good grief, I hope I have not offended too many people with my blog so far when posting things I find funny like for instance comic strips. Nevertheless, in case of a blog posting or a book or any other piece of writing the reader can opt out any time – which might be more difficult in a meeting.

Language and technology

Sometimes it is amazing to see how language is influenced by technology.

Yesterday I was watching the episode “Cover Story” from the TV show Navy CIS. In this episode Abby, the weird girl from the crime lab, has to analyze three letters sent by a stalker to the publisher of a novel obviously used by someone to determine victims to kill.

“Abby” in the TV show “Navy CIS”

As she reports results of her findings she uses an interesting term: “See what I have found out about the n-Mail … “. As everyone looks very puzzled at her she explains: “n-Mail stands for normal mail, just to distinguish this from e-Mail …”

Thus she calls those paper letters “n-Mail”. Isn’t that funny ? Originally in our language we used “mail” for mail and later on “e-mail” for a special type of mail introduced through the internet.

Ah! I am using muscles I didn’t even know I had! No wonder you’re stuck at chapter six

Tony DiNozzo in “Navy CIS, episode “Cover Story”, while using McGee’s mechanical typewriter. ~

My favorite magazine “bild der wissenschaft” always publishes some letters to the editor every month and they either mention the name of the writer and his/her city, in case the letter was sent by regular mail, or the name and the addendum “per mail”. In a letter I was writing to them I mentioned that “per mail” is not really accurate since everyone is writing to them per mail; what they probably mean is “e-mail”. In their response they stated that “mail” nowadays means “e-mail” ( when used in Germany, I guess ). Anyway, some weeks later they changed it and use the term “per e-mail” now. Probably others have complained about this as well.

This episode from this TV show made me think about what actually is “n-Mail” nowadays ? I actually would think that “n-Mail” is equivalent to “e-Mail” since “e-Mail” has become our normal way to communicate in written form and using paper letters starts to become the exception, the antiquated way to communicate. Check yourself: how many paper letters do you write and send out per week, and how many e-mails do you send out per week ?

May be “p-Mail” would be a better term because it accurately describes the medium ( “paper” vs. “electronic” ) used for that type of mail.

Simplification

Some days ago I had a discussion at night with my wife who just returned from a two day conference about legal bank matters which reminded me that “Simplification” of course is not a subject only in my profession where I deal a lot with project management, software development, product design and IT architectures, it is a topic to be extended to every other discipline and our own life. And I think some things are much more unnecessarily complicated than IT solutions: take laws for instance.

My wife started our discussion with mentioning that during some times during that conference her thoughts started wandering away and she started asking herself: “What the hell I am actually doing here at this conference ?”
Laws are getting so complicated that usually hundreds of books are written how to interpret and how to deal with them. My wife’s job together with hundreds of other experts in German banks is to worry about procedures and formalism how to implement those legal regulations into banking business processes. Whenever she has to do this she wonders why things have to be too complicated. And she certainly gets the feeling that by spending all that time to deal with that complexity she does not really contribute to a value add in our society. It just seems to be so senseless.
She started to explain details about those regulations and procedures but I gave up after a while to understand; this was not the right stuff to discuss in the evening after a long working day.

Take tax regulations as an example. How many are there, how many exceptions are there ? How many different taxes do we have and how much options you have at the end of the year to get a few dollars back ? How much time you spend on this to understand the laws and prepare your tax declaration ?

If I would write tax laws they would consist of two sentences may be – and thousands of tax experts and lawyers would become unemployed right away. The law would read probably like this: “Every one pays xx % of his income as income tax. Every one pays yy % of what he buys as sales tax.” End of law, that’s it. No extra taxes to invent if more money is needed, no regulations for anyone to have some benefits. The xx and yy would have to be determined based on what is needed and the public is capable to pay – and might have to be re-negotiated every year.

Do I really think that would work ? Can I be so idealistic ? Nop, of course. 10 minutes after having published this new revolutionary tax law the first group of people would show up asking for exceptions, followed by one group after the other.

“Our income is only that low, we need to pay less !”
“There should be higher sales tax on fuel to protect our environment !”
“In our profession we have to spend so much money on …., thus we need a refund.“
…

You get the point. Thousands of “requirements” would very soon create a new tax monster law with hundred of paragraphs and thousands of exceptions trying to please everyone but bottom line implement what most of the people don’t like: taxes.

When you buy a new software, do you really read all the text in the license agreement ? And if you are one of the very few people who would do that: do you understand what you read ?
Lawyers have their own language. When I start reading a text a lawyer has written I usually give up after the first sentence. It is not something a regular human being can understand.
It is damned complex, but this subject matter experts usually don’t do anything to  reduce complexity a little bit by at least explaining well the content of such an agreement or law.

Isn’t that the same said about IT geeks ? Some of them  might be able to deal with the complexity they create, but even fewer are able to explain this in a language an average person would understand.

Explaining well is the path to understanding. And understanding is the path to reduce complexity and to simplify.

Phone terror

Since I am working most of my time from home I realize how many spam phone calls we are getting. Well, not that many, but I guess almost one per day. Most of them actually start with a computer talking to me.
“Congratulations. You have won …”
Latest at that point I have hung up already.
Or the call starts: “You have ended up in our waiting queue …”. Come on, how silly is that ? Some stupid machine calls me to tell me I am in a waiting loop ? I didn’t call, they called me !

They are getting smarter meanwhile.
“Hello, my name is Barbara Mayer …”. I already hung up because I realized it is still a computer voice and by adding some name to what the machine tries to tell me the message does not really get personal nor important.

Today during my lunch break there was another phone call. This time a real lady from one company who call quiet often to contact my wife. It’s always a different lady of course – but the same company. Its actually the company which once tried to sell me an internet connection without ever delivering anything. They simply waste my time !

“Can I talk to Alexandra Magard, please ?”
I right away started ( and was surprised about how aggressive I was getting ): “I told you a hundred times already that my wife is not at home at this time.”
“Can you talk to me in a normal way ?”, she replied. “I am talking to you the first time.”
“That might be true”, I said. “And it’s not your personal fault, but I told your company already a hundred times that my wife is not at home weekdays during noon time. Please simply pass it on.”
“OK, I will”. End of phone call.

I started wondering why I have been so aggressive.  It is actually no wonder taking into account all these time wasting spam and sales phone calls I am getting.

I also noticed that obviously this company does not manage to acquire, store and  share with all its selling people this little piece of information: the time frame during which they can not reach my wife at home. This is a little example how a little failure in proper knowledge management can make a customer unhappy. ( Well, I am not really their customer, my wife is, but I think you get the point ).

I don’t like having phone calls.

Phones always have been my least favorite communication vehicle. When time came that managers started handing out mobiles to their people I told my manager: “I don’t need one.” After a while he insisted getting me one ( because he needed me to have one ). It took another year until he could convince me to enable my mailbox.

Most of the time I don’t take it with me. Most of the time I even don’t check whether it is still turned on or need a recharge. I don’t answer calls in my car nor when having lunch or dinner. If you are lucky to catch me on the phone you will notice that I try to get my conversation done with a few short sentences.
Sorry folks, I simply don’t like having phone calls. I am better in writing. I  prefer the thoughtful communication rather than improvisation ( without any documentation afterwards ).