XPLANE joins Dachis Group

I have a big announcement to make today.

Effective this morning, XPLANE is joining the Dachis Group, the world’s leading social business consultancy, as a wholly-owned subsidiary. I want to take a moment to share what this means for XPLANE and our customers, and why I am excited about it.

Initially, the only change employees and customers will notice is the Dachis Group logo on our home page. XPLANE will continue to serve customers just as we have for the past 15 years. If you’re a customer, partner or employee, you probably won’t notice any differences at first. But joining the Dachis Group is a strategic move for our company and for our customers. Here’s why I am excited about it:

First, Dachis Group is backed by Austin Ventures to the tune of $50 million. This gives us the financial ability to scale so we can serve a growing and global customer base. The combined Dachis Group now has over 100 employees, with offices in seven cities and five countries.

Second, the Dachis Group is scooping up the best and brightest teams in social technology. Recent acquisitions include Hinchcliffe & Company, headed by Enterprise 2.0 guru Dion Hinchcliffe; Headshift, a social-business technology and strategy consultancy; and the 2.0 Adoption Council, a peer group of managers in large enterprises that are pioneering the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and practices.

Third, the Dachis vision for Social Business Design is a sound and compelling one. They understand that social business is a fundamental shift not only in technology but in society and the fundamental ways that we do our work. Their vision for business transformation involves all aspects of business, from employees to partners to customers, from organizational culture to business systems to technology.

Fourth, CEO Jeff Dachis has a proven track record growing best-of breed internet consultancies. As co-founder of Razorfish, he grew that company into a global firm which successfully navigated the dot-bomb crisis and eventually its parent company sold to Microsoft for $6 billion. Now owned by Publicis, Razorfish is one of the world’s largest interactive agencies, with more than 2,000 employees and offices all over the world.

As a part of the Dachis group, XPLANE will be better financed and more strategically positioned than we have been in the past, so we’ll be able to grow faster and serve our customers better.

This move is also strategic for our offerings: As a visual thinking company, XPLANE has the ability to help our customers transform their businesses. Our customers will attest to that. Like any technology, visual thinking, and the clarity it provides, can accelerate growth and offer strategic advantage. But visual thinking, although powerful, is less imperative than social business.

For the last 15 years, the biggest thing that businesses needed to figure out was how to transition onto the web and into an internet economy. This was a disruptive change, a huge shift. Many companies perished and many fortunes were made. The risks and rewards were, and will continue to be, great.

In the next 15 years, the most significant change that business will undertake is the transition to social technologies. In ten years you’ll be a social business, or you’ll be out of business.

Why do I say that? It's pretty simple. All you need to do is ask yourself one question: Is word-of-mouth important to your business success? If so, you need to begin the transformation to being a social business.

There are a few things I can say confidently; things in business we can be certain about:

1. Business success has always relied heavily on social networks and networking. Always has, always will.
2. If you are early to recognize the potential of new technologies and build them into your business, you will gain competitive advantage and potentially claim new markets .
3. The core of social technologies is that they make word-of-mouth conversations tangible, sharable and trackable. Do you think this kind of technology might drive real business results? I do. Word-of-mouth is the most trusted source of information, wisdom, references and referrals.
4. You can’t opt out of social business, any more than you could opt out of the internet. You are part of the word-of-mouth conversation whether you participate or not. This means the transition to social is imperative.

New technologies bring change and disrupt markets. The more transformational the technology, the more massive the change and disruption. And social media has transformed life as we know it. Facebook has more users than the USA has people, and it’s growing at a rate of more than half a million people per day.

We have seen over and over that when it comes to disruptive technologies, the initial trends are set by individuals and small teams, and are later adopted by the bigger companies. Microcomputers, blogs, email, file-sharing, web services and voice-over-IP were all pioneered by small teams. Today, Twitter and Facebook are setting the trends. Individuals and small teams are using these tools now, and the corporate world is certain to follow.

But adoption of new technologies is not simple or easy, and the bigger the enterprise the harder it gets. Here are a few of the opportunities and threats you will have to navigate if you want to socially calibrate your business:

Customer service
Opportunity: If you’re a social business, you will respond faster to customer issues and thereby improve your customer relationships. You’ll have better product and service quality because you’ll have better feedback loops. You will simply understand your customers better.

Threat: If you opt out of social business, your competition will know more about your customer’s complaints than you do. They will swoop in and steal your customers before you know what hit you. They’ll be in a position to steer the all-important word-of-mouth conversation away from you and toward themselves. You’ll respond to customer concerns too slowly or too late.

Public relations
Opportunity: You’ll be continuously aware of the word-of-mouth conversation and how it affects you. Your social channels will serve as an early-warning system, enabling you to be more proactive and put out more fires before they start.

Threat: You’ll be surprised by a new trend because you’re not monitoring the social sphere. By the time you notice a PR fire it’ll be raging out of control and you’ll be operating in crisis mode.

Markets and marketing
Opportunity: You’ll be tracking the trend-setters and influencers and you’ll know how their ideas spread through the social network. You’ll know who generates recommendations and referrals – who drives the real growth in emerging markets – and you’ll know how they do it.

Threat: You’ll watch competitors or new entrants steal away your customers, and by the time you figure out what’s going on it’ll be too late.

Intellectual capital
Opportunity: Finally there’s a way to deliver on the promise of knowledge management – a way to capture the wisdom, ideas and genius of your employees – the information that’s contained in the heads of the people who walk out the door every day. I’m talking about the information that makes your business effective, even though it’s not written down in any book, manual or report. If you opt in to social business you’ll know who the experts are, and their peers will know how to find them and tap their expertise. You’ll know how information really flows through your organization – not the fiction of the org chart but the real social network that keeps things going. You’ll be able to cut meeting time in half by sharing routine information more effectively.

Threat: Your best and most brilliant employees will walk out the door and you won’t even know the value that you are losing. They will want to further their careers, so they’ll head for a more networked company where they can be more effective.

Is social media a fad? I’ll let this video answer that question:


Social business is like the internet or any other disruptive technology. The question isn't whether to do it or not: the question is whether you're going to be early or late. We decided to be early, and there's no turning back.

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Knowledge Games talk from the Interaction 10 conference

Dave Gray-Knowledge Games:  A Grammar for Creativity and Innovation from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

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The design philosophy of the AK-47

The design philosophy of the AK-47, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

In a recent roundup of thoughts from the Interaction 10 conference, Jan-Cristoph Zoels wrote:

"Unfortunately [Dave Gray] illustrated his engaging talk with a glorification of the AK47 as a ‘powerful tool of change’. His agnostic design philosophy hides an ethical ambivalence and repositions designers as hired hands of industry who do whatever is needed – even weapons of mass destruction. Can’t we find ethical examples which enable people, but don’t kill?"

Jan missed the point of my AK-47 example. There's nothing agnostic about my design philosophy -- a philosophy I share with Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47. The design philosophy is this:

Don't design for a perfect world, because the world isn't perfect. Design simple things that are rugged, reliable, simple and easy to use; things that work even when conditions are chaotic; things that work even when they are mostly broken.

The AK-47 is a successful weapon because it was designed to work when the world is falling apart around you. When an AK-47 is wet, when it is clogged with mud, sand or snow, it will still work, in conditions where many more precise and accurate weapons will fail.

That's not an agnostic design philosophy, it's a philosophy that is deeply rooted in fundamentals. It's a philosophy that requires a designer to prize simplicity and exhibit strength of purpose; that emphasizes ease-of-use and reliability over feature-richness and perfection.

Now, we can also argue about ethical ambivalence -- whether it's ethical to design a weapon. This is an age-old and probably unresolvable argument. The intent of my talk was to demonstrate the design philosophy in a memorable and dramatic way by telling the true story of one designer.

Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 because his homeland had been invaded by an enemy with superior weapons. He wasn't a "hired hand of an industry, doing whatever was needed." He was a tank mechanic who saw fellow soldiers and civilians gunned down and wanted to ensure that it would never happen again.

If Kalashnikov had lived in the west he would be a rich man today (Yes, he’s still alive, about 90 years old). But he grew up in a communist state, so he’s now a national hero who lives on a government pension.

Mikhail Kalashnikov is on record as saying that he would have preferred to have designed something more useful, for example, a lawn mower. But his country was invaded, he was severely wounded and in his hospital bed, his thoughts turned to weaponry. Can we really blame him? It's hard to see him as a profit-seeker or a "hired hand of industry."

He designed a weapon with the intention of repelling invaders, and in fact the AK-47 has to be seen as one of the most successful weapons of all time in this regard. Since he designed it in 1947, Kalashnikov’s weapon has enabled other people to defend their homelands from invaders, even superpowers: It helped the Vietcong drive American troops out of Vietnam, and it helped the Mujahideen drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.

Are there other examples I could have used to make my point? I am sure there are. But as a person who has spoken at many conferences, and also as a person who has sat through many polite-but-boring talks, I choose to make my points as dramatically, engagingly and entertainingly as possible. As a history buff, the story of Mikhail Kalashnikov captivated me, and I was sure it would do the same for others if I could tell it compellingly. When I want to make an important point, I do it with drama, because that’s what people remember. There’s a reason that war movies are more popular than design documentaries.

I would rather stir up a bit of controversy than subject an audience to slow, agonizing death with PowerPoint bullet points. And if you are speaking and I am in the audience, I hope you will do the same for me.

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Values, motivation and business

I got these questions in an email interview by Garrick Gibson recently, and, since I get asked these things fairly often, I thought I would post my answers here.

1) What do you value most about what you are doing in your profession?

2) Name 3 of the most important actions taken to start your business?

3) How much of your personal values played a role in starting and operating your business?
How do these values show up in your business?

Here are the answers I gave Garrick:

Q: What do you value most about what you are doing in your profession?

I love that I can walk into a chaotic situation and help people make sense of it so they can make better decisions. It makes me feel useful and appreciated when people recognize and reward that.

Q: Name 3 of the most important actions taken to start your business?

1. When I quit smoking it made me realize that I could do anything when I set my mind to it, no matter how difficult it might seem. So, strange as it may sound, the first and most important step was quitting smoking -- it had nothing to do with business and everything to do with building my confidence.

2. Quitting my journalism job to take a much lower-paying job as a university professor. The importance of that step was that I was walking into a position with a definite end point. The position was a one-year contract, renewable up to a maximum of three years, so just as if I were an elected official, my job had a term limit. This set the clock ticking. It gave me a deadline, so to speak.

3. Expanding my world view. I felt strongly that to be successful in business I needed to understand all aspects, so I read voraciously about marketing, sales, strategy and finance. I also asked people who I deemed successful what drove their success. One of them once said to me "Nothing happens till somebody sells something." I took that to heart.

An understanding of sales was key to the success of my business. Turns out the biggest secrets of successful selling are great listening skills and an ability to turn understanding and empathy into action and results. These are great skills for anybody to learn, no matter what they plan to do.

Q: How much of your personal values plays a role in starting & operating of your business?

Personal values are huge. I believe that better clarity and understanding, in the long run, is better for the world. I feel that at XPLANE we are doing something good.

Q: How do these values show up in your business?

I felt strongly enough about company values that I worked with the team to create a culture map which we use to remain focused on who we want to be. You can see the culture map here.

We use this map as a compass to guide our actions and decisions. It turns out to be most useful with the more difficult decisions, not because it gives the answers but because it helps us ask the right questions.

Thanks Garrick, for asking the thoughtful questions that generated this post. thanks to you, reader, for reading it. I'd be very interested to hear how you would answer these questions.

Please leave a comment and answer Garrick's three questions, or just tell us about your values. How do they motivate you in your business endeavors?

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Excerpt, OSS SabotageManual

ExcerptOSSSabotageManual, originally uploaded by @bfchirpy.

Thanks @bfchirpy for this little gem. How many of us have engaged in one or another of these activities over the years, without thinking of the long-term damage we were causing to the health of an organization we probably joined voluntarily?

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Complicated vs. complex

When you make the complicated simple, you make it better. But when you make the complex simple, you make it wrong.

Read more: how games can help your business engage meaningfully with complexity.

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Empathy mapping

Empathy map, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Just posted over on the Knowledge Games blog about Empathy mapping. Enjoy!

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Mr. Fixit and the power of packaging

Mr. Fixit, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Reason is a dangerous, two-edged sword. It can be seen as Newtonian thinking in a quantum world; a cause-and-effect approach in a world that's more complex than that. In relation to that concept I'd like to make two points, one about humanity and the other about reason.

First, humanity:

The idea that we are somehow logical, rational or reasonable creatures is a broadly accepted one, yet under close examination it appears completely ridiculous. Yes we are capable of using reason as a tool, but more often than not we ignore what reason tells us and tend to favor other biases, especially cognitive biases. We forget that we are not designed for reason so much as propagation and survival. Take a look at classical game theory, which presupposes that people will act in their own rational self-interest. Turns out that predictions you make based on this assumption go radically wrong. We make decisions based on other factors such as fear, doubt, paranoia, desire, greed, even altruism. Any sales or marketing person can tell you as much from personal experience. The best products don't win: Coke failed the taste test and Microsoft isn't the best operating system. This is not a bad thing -- our non-rational decision-making processes tend to work very well and protect us from harm in a lot of cases. It's just that there are deep blind spots that may actually drive us to extinction, which I think is what concerns many of us.

Now, reason:

Reason is the best tool that we know of for overcoming our blind spots. I use the word tool for a reason here: A tool is something that's designed for a specific purpose and has certain ideas (about its use) built into it. A hammer sees everything as a nail, a saw wants to cut, etc. Reason, and the empirical method, can be seen as a set of tools based on a theory about the world: that everything is, or potentially can be, understood in rational terms. Yes, the current state of the tool is primitive when it comes to understanding complex relationships and ecosystems, but we are making progress. The quantum world, to make an example, was not discovered by mystics, it was discovered by physicists using empirical techniques. Complexity theory is making great strides toward understanding how nonlinear systems and complex interactions work. Brain science is advancing rapidly these days and helping us make similar strides toward understanding the fallibilities of our senses and cognitive functions. So let's not give up on reason.

At the same time let's be sure to understand its limitations. Philosopher of Science Paul Feyerabend advocated a separation of science and state to parallel the separation of church and state. Science, he thought, has enough power, pride and hubris to rival any social structure, religion or philosophy that opposes it. I might not go so far but I do think we need to remember that reason and empiricism are tools, and like any tools, they have their limitations. Reason cannot tell the carpenter what to build or what not to build, or why. Science and technology may influence destiny but they cannot tell us who we are or where we need to go. They cannot shape a vision or offer moral guidance. Reason can't keep a family together or avoid conflict within a community.

This gets to my main thesis here, which is that reason must be understood in context. I happen to like simple rules such as

First do no harm.
Seek to first to understand, then to be understood.
Leave no trace.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; and its corrollary: only if they want that!

Etc.

Reason is super-effective but also alien to many people who are following the powerful survival-cues of their biological brains, and one thing that seems to be true over time is that the simple memes like those above appeal to the intuitive common sense of the common mind. To be clear: I'm not arguing against reason but for better marketing of it!

Can we package the idea of a rational world in simple terms? Can we employ the simplicity of Haiku for example?

The great philosophical and religious leaders were able to convey their messages in short simple stories and sayings. Why not reason?

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Designing a narrative with index cards

Working on the workshop, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

I recently got an email from a teacher who wanted to know how she could help her students develop better presentations. I've been meaning to write down my method for awhile now and rather than write one email I thought I'd put it into a blog post.

When I develop presentations I like to use index cards to sort through ideas. Sometimes I use a bottom-up approach, sorting and sifting through myriad ideas until the best ones float to the top. Other times I use a top-down approach, starting with the audience and their interests, and building a structure underneath that. More often it’s a combination of the two approaches – I start top-down, with an audience and what I think will interest them. Then I start to develop ideas, but those ideas lead to other ideas and soon I have too many thoughts, after which I need to do some bottom-up sifting to let the best ideas emerge.

The image above is the sorting exercise I went through to develop a workshop I gave in Toronto in 2006. The approach borrows heavily from the card sorting method used in software design.

TOP-DOWN APPROACH

This is best when you know who you’re presenting to and what they want to know. If you don’t know where to start this is probably the best way to begin.

1. Start by thinking about your target audience and what they are interested in. It helps to imagine a real person that you know that fits the profile.

2. Now, brainstorm a list of questions that you think they might be likely to ask you about the topic in question. Write down one question per index card.

3. Now, try to sort the questions into a sequence that makes sense. Probably this means the most basic questions (such as “What is it?”) at the beginning, and the more action-oriented questions (Such as “how can I apply it?”) toward the end. Now you can look at the questions and see if they form a meaningful sequence that, say, introduces a topic, develops it, and reaches a conclusion. At this point you should have a sequence of cards running from left to right.

4. Now, under each question card, you can start to develop your “answer” cards – slides that will answer the question.

BOTTOM-UP APPROACH

This is best when you have a lot of ideas to sort through but don’t know how to weave them together yet. If you know what you want to talk about you might want to start here.

1. Write down as many ideas on a topic as you can – all the elements that might be useful as part of a presentation. Write down one thought or idea per index card. I often like to sketch on the card as well, thinking about how I might illustrate the concept.

2. Sort the cards into piles that represent ideas that “feel like they belong together.”

3. Name each pile and create a “title card” for each group. Each title card now represents a group of related ideas that might form a section of your presentation.

4. Now, try to arrange the title cards into a meaningful sequence – put the cards into a row. This forms the basis of the narrative thread.

5. Under each title card, you can now create a “column” of index cards with the ideas that form the main points for each section.

6. Now, identify gaps in the story, eliminate redundancies and irrelevant information, and go from there.

As I said, usually I work with a hybrid of the two approaches. It’s much like a conversation, where one person’s thoughts influence the next person’s ideas. Moving back and forth between what the audience wants to hear (the “top”) and what I want to say (the “bottom”) helps me develop a synthesis that integrates my most valuable knowledge with what people are really interested in hearing.

I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts on this approach, and I’d love to hear about your experiences using this or similar approaches in your work. So be a mensch and leave a comment!

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Bitching about work means you like it the way it is

Bitching about work means you like it the way it is, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

It sounds counterintuitive, but when you bitch about work you are only feeding the problems you talk about.

Bitching about work is like scratching an itch -- it may make you feel better in the short run, but in the long term you are only making it worse.

When you bitch about work you keep your issues and concerns in the dark, as far as your organization is concerned. You also feed negative feelings, divisiveness and cliquishness in your workplace, which makes the office unpleasant and generally brings everybody down.

By raising your issues appropriately, in a public forum, you bring them to light, which allows them to be discussed and addressed. Even if you don't agree with the outcome, at least you have been heard and your opinion is known.

There are two ways to solve a work situation you don't like: Change the situation or find another job. By bitching in private you're not doing anything to change the situation, and in addition you're making the workplace less fun for everybody.

By making your concerns public you have a chance to address them, and even if you don't get what you want, you can make the decision to live with it or move to another job.

The third alternative, staying in a job you hate, is like staying in an abusive relationship. It only reinforces negative behavior all around.

Your relationship with your co-workers is like any other social relationship. It's not likely to ever be perfect, but focusing on the positive will generate more positive feelings and results, while focusing on the negative will only make things worse.

So next time you have the urge to scratch that itch, don't tell yourself it's okay because you're "only venting." Ask yourself if it's worth the damage you'll cause.

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Toward a theory of information relativity

Visual thinking, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

People often ask me how to visualize information. They ask things like “How can I visualize my industry ecosystem?” or “How can I visualize how my product works.” My first instinct is to try and back them up a bit. This is because they are already defining their project in terms of an answer or solution, and before you can deliver an answer you need to know the question. Getting the question right is the most important component in information design, and it’s the most common point where information design goes wrong.

This is because information is always relative. Always. Before you can undertake any kind of visualization exercise, you need to know what question you want to answer, and for whom. A look at the history of information will confirm this point.

Science is a process by which we attempt to compare our perceptions with something we call “reality” but in fact reality is something we can never really know for sure. Like the flickering shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, reality is something we can only see dimly, because it’s distorted by our perceptions and beliefs. Every observation and fact has a margin of error, which is directly related to the observer’s background, beliefs, culture and limitations. It is written in the Talmud, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”¹

By beginning with an audience and a question you give yourself a focusing device. Like a flashlight, the audience and question will illuminate the information that’s relevant to your goal, while leaving the rest in the dark. Good information design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

What to put in: Information that’s relevant to your target audience, and that answers a real question that they have. What to leave out: Everything else. The best rule of thumb is “When in doubt, leave it out.”

So if you want to create a visual in order to explain something, ask yourself the following questions first:

“Who am I explaining it to?”
“What do I want them to do?”

At XPLANE we call this the WHODO, and it’s a required input to any project we undertake. Once you understand the WHO (your audience) you will have a sense of their level of existing knowledge of the subject.

For example if you are explaining scientific or technical information to engineers or scientists you can assume a high level of sophistication and readiness. Based on the cultural expectations in science and engineering fields, you can also assume a high level of skepticism and a need for evidence and proof.

Explaining the same information to a group of executives, or salespeople, would be a completely different exercise. You can expect that they will have a different set of questions and probably will be more focused on practical applications and will get impatient with scientific or technical explanations.

Thus, the same information will need to be presented very differently based on the audience that you are talking to.

Understanding the audience is only part of the equation. The other half of the WHODO is DO. Before you can undertake any explanatory task you need to know what outcome you expect. Describing this as a change in understanding is not enough. Understanding is difficult to observe. People often will say they understand something just to get you out of their hair.

People will also believe that they understand something when they don’t really understand it. Have you ever left a meeting where everyone seemed to be in agreement, yet their later actions made it clear that they didn’t agree after all? It’s common to see nodding heads in a room when people don’t agree – they think they agree but in reality they don’t. This is because when an explanation is sufficiently vague, people are free to believe what they want to believe. Politicians often use this rhetorical principle to great effect. Words like “freedom, justice and fairness” mean different things to different people. Vague explanations are common in business, and they can give the illusion of agreement. But they don’t get results.

Here’s the key: When people understand things differently, they do things differently. What they say is less revelatory than what they do. So if you want to build a rock-solid explanation, focus on what you want people to do. If they understand what you are saying, what changes in behavior would you expect to see?

Once you have defined your WHODO, next you need to anticipate the questions they will ask. This again will depend on your audience and the information they will need to make a decision. Part of this is also cultural. Scientists will want to see scientific evidence. They will want technical explanations and probably a lot of detailed analysis. Busy executives may want different kinds of proof, such as what customers are buying and what competitors are doing. They will also be less generous with their time and expect you to get quickly to the point.

But you don’t have to go in cold. If you understand the mind of your audience, you will be able to generate a list of questions that they are likely to ask.

Once you have defined your WHODO and generated a list of questions, you can start thinking about how to visualize the information. Will they need a broad overview or detailed charts and specifications? Will they need to see the value to the customer, or the technical operational details?

In the fields of information science and knowledge management there is a model known as the Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Hierarchy, or DIKW for short. This has become a standard for defining the terms and how they relate to each other.² Here’s how defines the hierarchy:

Data has no particular significance beyond representation. It consists of symbols that stand for objects, events or their properties. Data is a collection of facts³ – also called “know-nothing”⁴ to reinforce the point that data, by itself is dumb; it has no meaning.

Information is data that has been organized so that it is useful, usually because of relational connections – also called “know-what.” Information answers questions like who, what, where, when and how many.

Knowledge is information that has been integrated into the mind, memory and body, such that it can be applied to doing and making things, also called “know-how.” Knowledge is usually acquired through experience, or through stories about other people’s experiences.

Wisdom is the ability to perceive value, make judgments, and evaluate long-term consequences. Russell Ackoff describes the difference between knowledge and wisdom as the difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Wisdom requires values, and values are perhaps the most relative thing of all.

So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity:

1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next.

2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation.

3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.

At its heart, information design is about change. It’s about increasing the amount of useful information in the world. Good information design should result in changes to understanding – increases in knowledge and wisdom – which can be directly measured by observable changes in human behavior.

Notes:

1. Also attributed to John Milton, H.M. Tomlinson, Anais Nin and others.

2. Harlan Cleveland first wrote about the DIKW hierarchy in a December, 1982 article “Information as Resource” in The Futurist, citing inspiration from the following lines written by T.S. Eliot:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

~T.S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934

3. Even the things we think of as facts are relative to the observer and a particular point of view. The problem of facts is as old as science itself and is still unresolved. See “Free the Facts” by Dave Gray, 2009.

4. Milan Zeleny, “Management Support Systems: Toward Integrated Knowledge Management,” Human Systems Management 7, no 1, 1987.

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Yuri Engelhardt's notebook

Yuri Engelhardt's notebook, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Yuri Engelhardt's notes, taken when he was working on The Language of Graphics. Click here for a closer look.

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Reader interaction with Marks and Meaning

Opa!, originally uploaded by Edward Vielmetti.

Marks and Meaning is designed to encourage readers to interact with the book in various ways, and I have been thrilled to see the various ways people have chosen to do that. Ed Vielmetti has peppered his copy with sticky notes. The image above is from his copy of version zero.

For more images like this check out the Marks and Meaning photo pool.

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Visual note-taking workshop

visual note-taking conference call notes, originally uploaded by Austin Kleon.

I'm very excited to announce that three of my favorite visual thinkers -- Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde and Austin Kleon -- will be delivering a workshop on visual note-taking on Tuesday, May 12.

The image above are some visual notes that Austin Kleon took during one of the conference calls as we planned the workshop. This is a chance to learn from some people who are truly masters at what they do. Your notes and whiteboard scrawls will never be the same!

More about the workshop:

Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Read more.

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Guiding principles for VizThink

Guiding principles for VizThink, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Some of you may have noticed that I have been knocking on a lot of doors lately, asking people to participate in the future of VizThink in one way or another.

One of the questions I have heard pretty frequently is "What are Vizthink's guiding principles?" and "What is the vision/mission for VizThink?'

To try to answer these questions we have created a draft document with the help of some of our members. I have posted the current draft on the VizThink forums, here.

There is no charge to participate in the forums, although you must register to post.

Thanks in advance for your feedback -- and please, share your thoughts!

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