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"Because, what they are looking for, from Sliced Bread, might not be, what he thinks is important in Sliced Bread. Maybe, they want it to be cheap or convenient or delivered with a Smile. maybe, they want it delivered to their home. Maybe, they want to go the store, where buying in that store, makes them feel special, maybe they want it to be organic or available at the Whole Foods Market. I mean, there are million reasons, people buy bread and the best one period is not one of them."
- Seth Godin
My expectations from an online service, is more than free nowadays. A cleverly designed tool that nudges me out of their service, so that I don't use it for procrastination. It is not only about one's self-control.
There are a number of external factors in the physical world, which come to the rescue of the individual in exercising self-control. The law of the Land and Social Norms are two of the principal aids.
Social norms function as guardrails, so that one wouldn't cross the proverbial line. ... and then there are "drinking and driving" laws that would function as an effective impediment, for an individual not to drink excessively.
No such natural deterrent seem to exist in the online world. Hence the need to design a "nudge" in your online service.
Of course, kicking users out of your service would cause losses in the short-term. But, instead of users avoiding your farmville after they recognize how great a timesink it has become, these constraints will help retain users in the long-term. ...and is the only effective solution to addiction in the online world, for the individual.
Unless, of course, if you ask the creative Dan Ariely who would illustrate the clever "granny's underwear" technique.
One of my buddies called me, on reading my previous post and recollected how he encountered several brilliant doctors growing up. He asks, "Where are they now?".
I recollect visiting a particular dentist growing up, who had a roaring practice. My friend's dad (who was a good friend of the dentist) and I were waiting in the waiting room, when the dentist arrived. He waved at us from a distance and we waited for our turn.
As we entered his office, the dentist greeted my friend's dad and says to him, "Looks like the boy has a problem with the third teeth on the upper right row."
I remember gaping with awe, "That's impossible, how did he know it? I don't even recollect him looking at me before. Yet he seems to have noticed the way I clenched my teeth, in the nanosecond, that he walked into the office, amidst the sea of faces".
Let's face it. The intelligence that we created to handle the grand scale and scope of health care, with its accompaniments of the insurers and lawyers, have swept away the wizards and replaced their brilliance with mediocrity.
No point in being a luddite or being nostalgic about the past. Instead the mighty task that we have is to, bring back the wizards, by connecting their intelligence to the intelligence that we created. ...and such a Connected Intelligence is the alternative future, I dearly envision to Ray Kurzweil's.
In Massachusetts,the answer is 12. Your actual mileage may vary.
Yup. It took 12 doctors, 8 agonizing days of blood work,Chest X-Ray,a 911 ambulance visit to the E.R., 106 F temp. on few nights and an overnight hospital stay to fix the problem.
Finally, it took a doctor who said, "Wait a moment, first let me remove the ear wax and then worry about root cause". It turned out to be a simple ear infection.
Granted our child did not complain of ear pain, nor was the wax apparently outside, but all the doctors who took a peek with an otoscope, never bothered to remove the wax.
Technology not only makes us stupid but lazy as well. We defer to the intelligence, that we created, for things that require a little effort from our end. We have a litany of tools to choose from for doing this 'pro-technication'.
More than procrastination, 'pro-technication' is a lot harder to identify and fix. One way to fix 'pro-technication', is to design systems that defers tasks and responsibilities back to the human user.
In Corporate 2.0, Systems will start to behave like human beings by participating in 'passing the buck' ritual. I think that is a welcome role reversal and bound to make us more effective, for it is a sign of the existence of the "connected intelligence".
