I got a lot out of Barry Schwartz’s book, ‘The Paradox of Choice’ which I read a couple of years ago and the phrase has become one of our household’s verbal shortcuts.

He didn’t talk about this research though at TED.  Rather he talked about moral virtue and the need for this to go hand in hand with practical wisdom which is moral will plus moral skill, especially:

• Knowing when and how to make exceptions
• Knowing when and how to improvise
• Knowing how to use moral skills in the service of the right aims

Reassuringly, apparently one doesn’t need to be brilliant to be wise.

The combination of rules and incentives are not enough to get a job done.  Scripts are insurance policies against disaster but they also ensure mediocrity.  Too many rules prevent improvisation.

The keys to remoralising work are to celebrate moral exemplars and to combine will, skill and people knowledge in taking action at work.

Liz Coleman - argued that our eduction system has not been preparing people to be good citizens.  She related this to the increase in specialisation arguing that the value of the educated generalist has declined.  I have considerable self-interested sympathy for her argument.  I often wonder whether, if I had a more specific and technical skillset, I would make more money and increase my work satisfaction…but that’s an aside….

She stated that there is a combination of 5 things that together have not served us well:

• Fragmentation of knowledge
• Technical mastery
• Neutrality of values
• Oversimplification of civic engagement
• Idealisation of the expert.

Instead she advocates an action oriented curriculum that blends disciplines in the service of solving the problems that really matter.  Examples of the disciplines that are required include: rhetoric, design, mediation, improvisation, qualitative reasoning and technology. 

This should be supplemented by practitioners joining the curriculum and students moving outside the classroom.

I hope this talk goes up the site soon as there are a number of people I know who would find it both interesting and challenging.

Nate Silver - what we can predict we can design to influence.  Examples from the U.S. election

Alex Tabarrok - the theme of this one seemed to be ‘all is not lost’.  While the world is currently in financial turmoil we are in a unique position in history because at the start of the 21st Century growth extended to almost all parts of the world.

New ideas drive growth and larger markets save lives as they increase the incentive to product new ideas.  One world market gives us many more idea creators.

Bruce BuenodeMesquita -this talk was all about using game theory to predict how people behave. He gave us predictions for Iran but his insights are applicable to much more than just politics.

Game theory is based on the assumptions that:

• People are rationally self-interested
• People have values and beliefs
• People face limitations

When we are trying to understand and predict decisions we make a mistake if we just pay attention to the person at the top of the power ladder.  There are lots of people shaping decisions.

In order to make predictions we need to ask the following questions:

• Who has a stake in the decision?
• What do they say they want?
• What priority does the issue have for them - how are they on this issue compared to other issues?
• How much influence could they bring to bear.

In making decisions we all care about two things: the outcome and the credit for the outcome. Different people trade these off in different quantities.

Choices, changes, values and beliefs are all we need to know to predict a person’s actions.  When this analysis is created across all influencers in a particular problem them the outcome of most complicated negotiations is predictable.  Situations can then be engineered to get a better result.

I think there are fascinating implications for change management and influence in this paper….especially the information about the particular things to focus on when trying to understand someone elses motivation.

Dan Ariely had several fascinating anecdotes…so much so that I stopped taking notes so my comment on this paper is brief.  I have bought his book though and am very much looking forward to reading it.  The main takeaway for me is the reinforcement of ’social proof’.  Social proof is a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his seminal book ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’ and relates to the fact that we are much more likely to do the things that our peer group is doing,  Dan Ariely demonstrated this with reference to cheating showing that cheating rose or dropped significantly if a group had clear, visible social proof that this was the norm among their peers.

Rosamund Zander was not given long enough - seemed like about 12 minutes, and she took a little while to get going because her chair wasn’t available to start with.  Despite these constraints she gave a good talk which was something of a tease.  I would have loved to have heard what else she had to say.  Her theme was ‘human virtuosity’ and she talked about how the safety instructions that we construct when we are children then impact our behaviour as adults.  Her 5 tips for dealing with this:

• Frame upsetting experiences as memories
• Take responsibility for everything that happens to you
• Seek out help in all directions
• Embrace different patterns - be the person you were called to be.
• Abandon the search for approval - you’ve already made it through

Willie Smit’s talk is one I’m looking forward to hearing again.  Although it was ostensibly about reforestation it encompassed a whole range of different disciplines in order to save forest habitats.  Most important seemed to be listening to the local people and designing interventions that really deliver for them - so the model is not ‘one size fits all’ but really needs to be tuned to the requirement of each unique area and peoples.

This was the top session of the conference so far….

Kicked off by Nina Jablonski we enjoyed a fascinating combo of history and science.  The history of human evolution has been written in our skin and Nina took us through what this astounding assertion really means. 

Next up was Louise Fresco who bravely baked bread while delivering her TED talk. She talked about authenticity in our food and how removed we have become from what our bread really is.  This drives many people to advocate a return to small scale farming and the growing popularity of farmers markets is a part of this.  However, Louise’s argument is that if we embraced a return to this type of farming on a universal scale we would essentially be relegating the third world to poverty.  This is a luxury solution for us but is damaging for them. 

Instead world food production needs to increase rapidly.  And what we need to do this is clever low-key mechanisms.  She urged the audience to lobby government for an integrated food policy and that as individuals we need to understand our own food chain - where our food comes from.  I don’t really understand what an integrated food policy for NZ might look like or whether we have an issue with this in NZ but it has certainly sparked my interest in the role of food in the world economy.

I loved the book Eat, Pray, Love and had high anticipation that Elizabeth Gilbert would be talking about her next book.  Instead she provided a thought provoking discussion of genius and creativity.  She asked ‘Is it rational that anyone should be afraid of the work they feel compelled to do?’  And this is the curse that many creative people are burdened with.  One suggestion is to create a protective emotional construct  - that genius is something we have, not something we are.  And the implication of this is that genius is both on loan and also that we cannot get too attached our marvellous creations because they are not entirely from us.

I don’t feel blessed with genius - I don’t draw or paint; I write a little but only in a purely functional working sort of a way.  But maybe it’s ok to keep playing with some of the things that interest me because it’s my job even though I might not be the most talented person in the world - or even on the second, third, fourth or lower teams.  Great talk!

Jacek Utko, through great design, has revitalised newspapers in eastern europe.  This talk reinforced the utility+significance equation for great products or services.  Jacek extended it further by combining strategy+content+design.

Who would have thought that crocheting could be compelling and scientifically revealing?  Even I enjoyed the maths in this talk and I now understand hyperbolic geometry - present in lettuce, sea slugs and crocheting.  What was extremely cool about this talk wasn’t just that we learnt about how Margaret Wertheim is crocheting coral reefs - quite frankly I think this would have left me cold - but rather the significance that she drew from this.  What’s at stake is:

• the importance and value of embodied knowledge
• the ability to make abstract concepts real
• the use of modes of play to help us deepen our understanding of the world around us.

Seth Godin threw down a leadership challenge to get us started.  There was lots of stuff here from his latest book, Tribes. 

Key questions from Seth were:

• Who are you?
• Who are you connecting?
• Who are you leading?

Interestingly he used the story of Tom’s shoes - with Tom’s shoes, for every pair of shoes a person buys Tom’s gives one to a person in a poor country. What is interesting about this model is how ’sticky’ the story is.  If a person comments on someone else’s Tom’s shoes then quick enough the owner of the shoes is telling the story.  This is a fantastic way to get an idea spreading!

I’m bundling the next two speakers together: moviemakers Jake Ebert and Yann Arthus-Bertrand.  Both showed clips from their forthcoming movies…Oceans and Home.  Nice looking movies…the sessions themselves were not provocative or interesting enough to stop me looking at my watch.

One for the Information Managers first up!

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, presented on linked data.  The useful takeaway on this is that if everyone does their bit we can extend the use of the WWW beyond documents and into a huge resource for discovery and research.  So linked data is not just for scientists and big research labs.

His interesting observation was the lack of interoperability between social networking sites - makes it hard to link data stored in these.

Nandan Nilekani talked about India - what it has been and what it could become and how.

Most useful takeaway:

There are four kinds of ideas:

• Ideas that have arrived
• Ideas in progress - accepted ideas that have not yet been implemented
• Ideas in conflict
• Ideas in anticipation

Pattie Mae gave a part presentation/ part recorded demo of what ubiquitous computing might really be like.  Using a device built for $350 we were shown how an ordinary person can use their hands to interact with information using any surface.  The moment where the penny really dropped for me was when the research drew a circle on his wrist - just a gesture from his other hand - and the time appeared.  Like the Reboot sessions earlier this seemed very sci-fi to me but it’s here - or very close anyway.

The surprise of the session was Ray Anderson.  Ray is a businessman who has built a profitable organisation manufacturing and selling flooring.  His commitment to sustainable business was real, realised and impressive.  And if an industrial manufacturer can do it then that presents a challenge to the rest of us.  A very understated, modest and compelling presentation.

It was a curious start to TED with Juan Enriquez providing humour and provocation in equal measure.  The presentation was very engaging but also a little strange.  He started off with comments about the economic crisis and some interesting stats about mandatory government spending.  He appeared to be calling for smaller government but I’m not sure whether I picked this up correctly or not. Anyway, it would be interesting to see some similar stats for NZ.

Then he moved on to three big ‘reboot’ themes:

• The first fully programmable cell
• Bio parts - this was very freaky … scientists are growing human teeth in petri dishes as well as regrowing windpipes, ears, bladders and presumably all imaginable types of body parts.  It felt a little yuck to be honest.  I can see that if I lost an ear I’d like to grow a new one but it was all very sci fi!
• Robotics - this was also scary.  The footage of the Boston Dynamics ‘Big Dog’ robot was both compelling and repulsive.  This robot really moves like a creature and it was shown in the clip as moving through snow in an extremely lifelike way.

This was a good segue into P.W. Singer’s talk about war and specifically about the use of robots for war.  He had lots of examples of the scary machines that are being built but was most interesting when he talked about the ethical isues:

• Watching more but experiencing less
• Losing the context, strategy and humanity

Most telling was the anecdote about drone pilots.  These guys fly drones in war zones from the U.S. - a bit like playing a video game.  So after an 8 hour day of war they drive home, join the family for dinner and help the kids with their homework.  Apparently their rates of PTSD are higher than for normal soldiers because of the psychological balancing of experiences that has to occur.

Thank goodness for Bill Gates who was the last speaker in the Reboot Sessions.  Bill is not the most engaging speaker but his messages are.  He talked about the work that his foundation is doing in health and in teaching and really only scatched the surfaced.  I could see his passion when he talked about these being interesting problems - especially interesting because they are currently unsolved and complex.  I thought Chris Anderson, the TED curator was a little strange in the Q & A with Bill afterwards, ‘joking’ about Microsoft bugs and asking about epitaphs but maybe they have a different off-screen relationship.

The takeaway from this talk was that while it might appear that by reducing disease in 3rd world countries this contributes to population growth what happens within a generation is that population growth drops as parents no longer need to have lots of kids so that they can be looked after in their old age.  Great information.