Satoru Iwata: GDC 2005 Keynote Speech

[Sorry, this has been sitting in my draft box for over a year…]

Satoru Iwata passed away a week ago on Saturday July 11, 2015. My attention was drawn (specifically by the YouTube video Nintendo President & CEO Satoru Iwata Passes Away – The Know) to the keynote speech he gave at the Game Developers Conference in 2005.

The first 11 minutes or so of this keynote speech lays out Mr Iwata’s personal story. Having been a Nintendo “gamer” for a long time (GameBoy, GameCube and the Wii) as well as long-term video game addict (starting with Pong and now with Clash Royale), I was very interested in Mr Iwata’s personal story. As I listened to his story, I found immense connectedness with the principles we try to share in the YCISL program.

1. In the YCISL workshops, we discuss mindset. From this speech, I discovered that there is something deeper than mindset. Mr. Iwata’s opening lines are (pulling out a business card from his pocket) “On my business card, I am a Corporate President. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.” We know about appearances and labels (i.e., his work title) – much of the time, these are things that others give us. Then he indicates to us that his mind functions in the game developer domain; this is the type of thinking/decision-making he does to fill his title. But there is an emotional (heart) level that provides him with passion, purpose and motivation.
2. He shares several fond memories. Notice how he says “I remember the first video game I ever played…” He pictured himself in several ways including calling himself an “early adopter” and showing a photo of himself from his youth. I have used a photo from my high school days in my workshop opening – but seeing how effective it was in Mr. Iwata’s speech, I will try to more closely weave the photo into my personal story.
3. He notes that having pride was a source of energy and passion. Pride also connects with intrinsic motivation. Pride isn’t something you can incentivize. It is an emotionally positive feeling that energizes the individual.
4. He mentions his parents as an influence. We know influencers and supporters are critical to success as well as our emotional intelligence. Parents should try to brush us their persuasion skills – more intrinsic than extrinsic motivation.
5. He says “…and it was all great fun.” It is great to hear a statement like this which shows that having fun is compatible with leadership. This connects with the Richard St John TED Talk where he uses the term “workafrolics.”
6. Mr. Iwata also reflects on Lessons Learned. One of the lessons is the value of teamwork. Another is the importance of emotional response to success (he is talking about game development but I think this can be considered more widely). This ultimately connects with the idea of gamestorming.

I highly recommend watching the opening to this keynote speech. It is something valuable to think about while we pursue our hopes and dreams.

LinkedIn: Positivity Test

POSITIVE

This entry is about a LinkedIn posting attributed to Pravin Shiv (sorry, I did not save the URL ). Since I am not sure of the copyright behind the graphic that was posted, I will just paraphrase here instead of inserting the graphic.

The graphic is of a “positivity test” and asks you to think of words that start with the letter “P” and end with the letter “E” – and it gives you 10 seconds.

This fits well with the Positive Mindset topic in our YCISL workshops.

It is interesting for several reasons:

• the word “positive” can readily be derived from the word “positivity” on the slide.
• there are actually a quite a few positive words that fit these rules.
• there are relatively few negative words that fit these rules.
• there are several neutral/non-emotional and bi-polar words too.

So it would be interesting to try this positivity test in the YCISL workshops and reflect on the results.

Teaching Tip: How to NOT connect with your students – Caffeinate

If I had a YCISL workshop for teachers, perhaps the first message I would send is to stop using coffee (or any caffeine) as a habitual start to the day.

One vivid memory I have from dropping off my kids in the mornings at elementary and middle schools is the “scooting” of teachers to their classrooms to get ready for the start of the day. But what I really noticed and have kept in mind is that most of the teachers were clutching a cup of coffee. I know lots of people (adults, that is) need a shot of coffee to get started in the morning – or at least they think they do. I wondered whether this morning ritual could affect classroom dynamics.

Let’s first jot down some advisory information from a Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) article titled “Parents & Teachers: Teens & Caffeine.” I trust PAMF as that is where my family and I get our (great) health services.

• “There is no nutritional need for caffeine…”
• “…more and more youth are picking up the bad habit of consuming these products, earlier.”
• “Many youth use stimulants like caffeine to stay up and study or compensate for not getting enough sleep.”
• “The effects of the caffeine stay with us for at least six hours, and caffeine is addictive.”
• “Most people use caffeine as a stimulant, primarily in the morning to increase adrenaline production and help them feel alert during the day.”
• “In the long run, caffeine does the opposite of what people want it to do.”

So, we should not encourage youth to drink coffee for health reasons. We know that youth already have sleep issues (see this other PAMF article “Sleep Needs“) – primarily due to stress, excessive homework and poorly structured school schedules – and caffeine makes it worse. Seeing teachers (or parents either) addicted to a morning coffee in order to get through their day is not a sight students should be exposed to.

But my concern about teachers caffeinating in order to function in front of students is more on the neurological level. For this, we might learn something from the Psychology Today article “Does Coffee Perk Up Your Brain . . . or Not?“:

• “…increases your heart rate and blood pressure.”
• “…studies show that caffeine only increases the output and quality of your work if the work you’re doing doesn’t require nuanced or abstract thinking.”
• “Caffeine seems to speed your thinking processes up a bit, and improve memory creation and retention when it comes to declarative memory, the kind you use when memorizing lists.”
• “It doesn’t seem to help at all when it comes to creative energy, or to thinking beyond basic tasks.”

So any thought that being caffeinated improves teaching is an intrinsic illusion. The teacher may feel more responsive and aware, but they are actually becoming focused on uni-tasking and not dynamically connecting with the class of students. Caffeinated teachers are also unable to involve creativity – which is one of the foundations of the YCISL program. Further, the idea that caffeine “speeds” thinking should be worrisome as the potential for accidents rises – how do you feel about speeders on highways and streets? To have teachers “speed” their teaching to students trying to learn knowledge for the first time (liken to student drivers) is perhaps the one of the most critical reasons education makes students stressed and fatigued.

From a personal observational standpoint, I have also seen university faculty clutching their caffeinated beverages (especially Diet Coke…oh, so sad) to lectures, meetings and other places…and I might guess at a causation-correlation with the heart problems that are commonplace here.

Teachers may be resistant to the idea of giving up caffeine as an artificial teaching aide. As with most beneficial behavioral change, there will be resistive arguments made as to why teachers should not be deprived of this pleasure. Arguments such as social value, long hours grading work, workload management and mental acuity may be voiced…but if we can positively frame, leveraging intrinsic motivation, the benefits of functioning with water or other relatively healthy beverages, then I think we can make a start at alleviating the stress that currently blankets our schools. Ideally, we can use an evidence-based approach to build intrinsic motivation to a sustainable level: give teachers feedback from the students about their performance without caffeine. To use one of our latest YCISL messages: I understand this is Simple, but not Easy.

Mel Robbins: How to stop screwing yourself over (TEDxSF Talk)

This is a two-part entry for two lessons I learned from  the Mel Robbins TEDxSF talk “How to stop screwing yourself over” (you can find it on YouTube).

SIMPLE, BUT NOT EASY
In the Summer 2016 YCISL workshops, I added the message “Simple, but not easy” [SBNE, for short] which I derived from this talk. Robbins’ full message is that “Getting what you want… is SIMPLE (but not easy)” meaning the process to reach a goal usually consists of a few steps but there is a caveat that getting there takes energy, focus, persistence, etc.

In the YCISL workshop, I talk about my desire to lose weight and body fat – to do it, there are only two main steps: eat less and exercise more. But is it easy? Nooooooo!

The same thinking can be applied to the YCISL skills such as creativity, fast-thinking, emotional intelligence, intrinsic motivation, etc. Building up these skills is simple…practice, practice, practice…and you will become more creative, more innovative and a better leader. But I cannot promise that it’s easy.

And it can also be applied to our academic, work and social lives. For example: (i) to be a successful student, study hard and get good grades, (ii) to be successful at work, do good work and be rewarded, and (iii) to be socially active, get out more and make lots of friends.

This is a perfect example of how leadership usually works: here is point A and there is point B. Call me when you get there. [Think of Rory Sutherland’s strategic myth of management and tactical advantage in his TED Talk “Sweat the small stuff”]. However, if I place this in a positive frame, you can think of SBNE as the competitive advantage that we coach in the YCISL elevator pitch, PostIt Brainstorming and Rapid Prototyping exercises. Ideas, solutions and products that are simple may be worth pursuing because many others will find it too difficult to realize.

5-SECOND RULE
In the YCISL workshops, we coach fast-thinking as an essential self-trained skill. The YCISL Photo Essay assignment is an example of a “5-second rule” method…take a photo and capture the emotional thoughts as soon as possible. Most of our YCISL exercises that build fast-thinking involve decisions and actions that take on the order of seconds or even milliseconds.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

In a discussion about a prospective workshop for middle school students, I learned about UDL (Universal Design for Learning) and the implementation at a school in New Hampshire. In a web search, I found the National Center on Universal Design for Learning web site. This approach asks some interesting questions with regards to providing education for a broad range of learners.

In the framework, UDL is represented by:

Recognition Networks: The “what” of learning
Strategic Networks: The “how” of learning
Affective Networks: The “why” of learning

Each one relates to a broad approach including:

Representation – related to delivery
Action & Expression – related to organization and timing
Engagement – related to motivation and mindset

Overall, there is a lot to like about these educational concepts and they do allow an appreciation of how poor US education generally is presently. This relates to the problems highlighted in “Race to Nowhere” and the decay particularly in pre-university education.

 

Exercise: Turning the Donkey

Many of the activities in the YCISL program are derived from existing games – and we connect our topics to them. An example is the Spaghetti Tower-Marshmallow exercise where we demonstrate prototyping and “fail early, fail fast” as well as collaborative teamwork.

Today, I was searching the internet for a puzzle and came across a web site with a collection of matchstick puzzles (http://www.learning-tree.org.uk/stickpuzzles/stick_puzzles.htm). I was looking for something that would require divergent thinking. I didn’t have matchsticks, so I tried the puzzle with some pens. I confess I am bad at these types of puzzles and in the end, snuck a peek at the posted solution. But more importantly, I found that doing such a puzzle connects many of the topics we touch on in the YCISL workshops.

So I created a “Lessons” document which describes the puzzle and asks questions to reflect on. I have posted a link to this document in our LinkedIn Group Discussion and will likely incorporate it or something similar into the workshops.

LESSONS IN YOUTH CREATIVITY, INNOVATION & SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP
TURNING THE DONKEY
Found on http://www.learning-tree.org.uk/stickpuzzles/stick_puzzles.htm

Move 1 pen to turn the donkey.

EQ CHECKLIST:

• Did you see the solution on your first pass? WOW! – if you did.
• Did you sense creative energy well up in you?
• Did you feel (instrinsic) motivation?
• Did you experience divergent fast thinking (iterating over many possible solutions)?
• Did you apply logical deductive reasoning (eliminating non-solutions)?
• Did you experience optimism?
• Did you notice frustration or self-doubt?
• Did you think about giving up?
• Did you second guess what the problem was asking?
• Do you think you accomplished something?

James Veitch: This is what happens when you reply to spam email (TEDTalk)

Watch the video for the humor. Commiserate in the vengeance exacted on an email spammer. But hear what was discovered when someone opted for the “crazy” option. It’s the extraordinary tale that connects yet another dot.

In the PostIt brainstorming exercise we have in YCISL workshops, we position our ideas along a normal to crazy axis. We view the crazy end as the area with the greatest opportunity for creative challenge and outcome.

In his December 2015 TED Talk, James Veitch spins his story about toying with email scammers. It’s a great story but I especially was struck by how this got started – with him almost by instinct tapping the delete button which is conditioned behavior for many of us, but instead deciding to see what would happen if he responded. What seemed to have ensued was highly creative thinking.

“I thought, I could just delete this. Or I could do what I think we’ve all always wanted to do.”

How often has this sort of choice come across our minds? How fast have we been to self-check ourselves and do the thing that we have short-circuited our thinking for the sake of convenience and saving time?

What about when we are shopping in a supermarket? With all the product choices on a shelf (at an instant) and the change in choices (over longer time periods) which we sometimes register – not to mention reshuffling (over medium time periods), have we conditioned ourselves to have “tunnel vision” when selecting products? And when we do notice a new competing product, we ask the “what if?” question to check whether we might be making a mistake.

For YCISL, we should consider our behavior when our our path gives us choices. Are we being “mindful” at these paths or do we become engrossed by the past or future?

What exercise can we conduct to illuminate our tendencies and train our behavior to be more mindful?

TED Radio Hour: The Source Of Creativity

It’s been a while since I have found something from TED provoking enough to comment on in this wiki. To some degree, the WSJ Personal Journal has been publishing articles on topics seemingly more relevant to the YCISL program, but I also feel the TED topics have become un-connectable; they are about personal experiences (yes, a good thing!) but not in a way that leads to connect-the-dots. So to my bemusement I now feel wont to comment here on “The Source of Creativity” which was the topic of the TED Radio Hour on October 3, 2014 (this was the original broadcast date, but it caught my attention now because it was re-broadcast in September 2015 and I happened to look for some podcasts to listen to on a long drive) and hosted by Guy Raz. I am particularly bemused because it refers to a collection of years past TED Talks (including one of my favorites by Ken Robinson) which goes to show how enduringly meaningful the older TED Talks are.

So if this is just a collection of older TED Talks, why not just listen to those TED Talks? It’s because the connections to past TED Talks is selective. These sound bites supported live interviews with those speakers and provided updates on their thoughts – further deepening the significance of the original TED Talks. I especially enjoyed listening to the part with Gillian Lynne which made Ken Robinson’s story about her become even better.

Besides being obviously in the Ken Robinson Fan Club, I would also mention that I found the part of the show with Sting also meaningful. In fact, in the week since listening to this show, I have referred to a point in this interview in two conversations with colleagues and it relates to the YCISL. There is reference to “a deeper place” and “comfort in being who I am” which comes from revisiting youth. This works with the YCISL exercise of “A Message to My Past Self” which is by natural perception deeper and vivid than the future outlook. This is motivating reason to work on reflections on the past – lessons learned and acceptance of paths chosen. For YCISL, KI, EI and LI all come from what Sting talks about in the interview. There is a struggle to maintain creativity, but strength from re-connecting with the past can help reinvigorate that creativity which can be smothered by C-R-A-P (reference to Richard St. John, btw).

Bottom line: yes, I recommend listening to this podcast. I plan to listen to it a few more times because I think I will learn more every time.

The Best in OOBE

My previous entry was about how prototyping can lead to productive failures. There is a lot of prototyping that can go into OOBE (“out of box experience”) design and those who do it well have excellent brand recognition.

Some companies spend a lot of effort on the OOBE where we know a positive impression in the first 15 seconds of sight of the package and the first 15 seconds of opening a package can set 80% of the overall impression of a product. Some products you might be able to relate to include an automobile or a hotel. Those who pride themselves in the customer experience will focus on that initial impression. So too did Apple back in the early Mac days. I spent some time working with product managers at Handspring looking into OOBE as determined by in-box collateral. Apple was the master of OOBE (and UI) until about the last 10 years. The product packaging of my latest iMac as well as the setup experience with my iPad show how off-track Apple has become.

In contrast, I want to share the best experience I have had recently with OOBE. And that’s with my Roku devices – a Roku 1 and a Roku 3 that were installed just this week. The box-opening experience was easy as was set-up. The on-screen directions for wi-fi and programming proceeded with ease. If I had to be critical of anything, I am not a fan of their color scheme.

So, when discussing OOBE in our workshop’s Project Studio, I will point to the Roku as one example of an OOBE to appreciate and use as a role model.

PS. We can also think of OOBE when we introduce ourselves to other people. I know you’re not supposed to “judge a book by its cover” but do you really want to finish a book that is off-putting at the start?

How many bad ideas before you find a good one? Learn to prototype.

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In our YCISL workshops, we run the Spaghetti Tower-Marshmallow exercise as a lesson in prototyping with the message of “fail early, fail fast” [it is also used as a lesson in team dynamics]. In order to encourage fast-thinking, teams initially have 5 minutes to brainstorm the design then 15 minutes to build the tower. Usually, all teams fail because they neglect the marshmallow until the last minute and discover that their towers fall over due to the weight of the marshmallow and flexibility of the tower. We then give teams a second (and sometimes third) chance to build the tower – using lessons learned from their previous attempt. What happens in the second round is very interesting – some build shorter towers while others build wider bases and a few will support the marshmallow on multiple sticks of spaghetti instead of one. This exercise really reinforces the idea of making prototypes without investing too much time and resources – this is a lesson from the story of when Tony Fadell showed Steve Jobs some iPod models made from styrofoam [before reading this story in the biography written by Walter Isaacson, I knew of how Jeff Hawkins worked at his kitchen table with models for a PDA – something that would become the Palm Pilot; he would tell this story periodically during my time at Handspring].

So, it would seem the standard for a good innovator would be to be able to go through numerous prototypes to find showstopper failures and work towards a deliverable product.

And you might think that Stanford University, an oft-named place of innovation would have this prototyping process running smoothly. Not so. How could you explain the traffic circle they built where Campus Drive meets Santa Teresa Street? It’s perhaps the third circle they have built on campus: the first is where Panama Mall meets Lasuen Mall (the way people ride their bicycles at Stanford mixed with the heavy student and tourist foot traffic!?) and the second is where Escondido Campus Drive intersects Campus Drive (one of the busiest thoroughfares with pedestrian, bicycle, auto, campus bus, tour bus, delivery trucks and occasionally golf cart traffic). I am guessing the Stanford people got the idea from UC Davis where there are quite a few traffic circles – but it works at UC Davis because it is a bicycle-friendly campus. Wasted resources at Stanford. Accidents waiting to happen. Learn a little about de minimis risk.

Failures can be found all over Stanford. Stanford parking is one huge mistake that can’t seem to be turned around. It keeps getting worse and diminishes Stanford’s workplace appeal. My building, the Y2E2, is also a failed experiment that doesn’t seem to be able to find recourse. Then there’s the time that Stanford went with Oracle – perpetually compounding stress and waste. Oh and that Solar Charging station on Panama Mall that I have never seen anyone use. And if I want to go back to a Stanford-UC Davis comparison, there’s Stanford Marguerite and UC Davis’ Unitrans (one has lots of riders and the other hardly; guess which is which).

OK, to be fair, I can identify a few outstanding Stanford successes. One is the d.School which serves as a beacon for design thinking in both concept and application. Then there’s the CS 106A Programming Methodology Online Course with Mehran Sahami. Coursework also seems to have had a positive track record (thanks Christine); I recently built a pair of online quizzes in Coursework and it was both easy and a tremendous time-saver.

The idea is that success (as a standalone outcome) cannot be mastered. It is the “learn from failure+success” pairing that can and should be mastered. And from mastering this pairing, one can find the intrinsic motivation that we need to become the future generation of innovators.

Add-on: I just started working on scheduling classes for my summer academic program, and I have found the “New Meeting Pattern Grid” to be at new lows even for Stanford.