I never said I was a hero.
You believe you are not worthy…
…but Fate does not make mistakes.
I never said I was a hero.
You believe you are not worthy…
…but Fate does not make mistakes.
We can only understand what we are shown
How was I supposed to know our love would grow?
The other day while fooling around with WordPress, I started realizing that while it was getting better and better in some areas, other areas still need to be radically reinvented, such as the concept of a Featured Image for posts.
How I came to this conclusion, was that I was remembering people in the past indicating how when Gutenberg and Blocks become mainstream, there would no longer be a need for Post Formats at all. However, when I started browsing some masonry grid themes over on Tumblr and pondered how I could replicate them on WordPress, even if I just used a non-Masonry layout, I realized I couldn’t.
Why? Because WordPress only allows for Featured Images, which are the only visual object to be displayed in the blog list view. Post Formats previously allowed you to have different visual objects in in the blog list view but they’ve been pretty much phased out now in WordPress 6. So the only way to emulate these Post Formats in WordPress currently is if they added functionality that made it possible to “feature” any block, not just an “image”.
In doing some searching, I found one person suggesting just such a thing on the WordPress forums but they got little to no feedback. Digging deeper, I then found a GitHub WordPress Gutenberg thread entitled Rethink “Featured Image” In The Context of Blocks which touched upon it more so but without really any visual action, other than to possibly see about switching the Feature Image option to an Image/Cover Block.
Hopefully if the do decide to do that, it’ll become self-evident in developing it to make many different other blocks have the option of being “featured” in the blog list view as well. Let’s hope! Maybe by next year, we could see at least a few blocks beside an image block have this capability.
While skimming through the latest WordPress 6.1 Product Walk-Through Recap, I noticed some really amazing features finally being added to WordPress.
I actually remember manually coding some of these features myself on Movable Type many, many years ago when that web platform used to be all the rage. Specifically the ability to customize the template for a specific category (8:55) or even a specific post (8:35) is pretty amazing.
I was also highly interested in hearing what Nicholas Diego (37:00) had to say as the Editor Triage Lead for WordPress 6.1. The reason for this is that I find the usability experience for Editor user interface to be severely lacking still, with the key issue being they are overloading the non-techie end user (but even the techie designers & developers as well) with too much functionality at once in the same place. Instead they should be creating different focused context modes that the end user can switch to (similar to Squarespace Version 5 over a decade ago), so they don’t get confused and overwhelmed.
At the very least, if they don’t do this, they should make specific areas of the interface context specific, similar to how they are almost doing it now. For example, the Structure mode area is primarily on the left side of the interface, showing the nested layout of the blocks, whereas the Style mode area is on the right hand side of the interface.
But they need to go beyond this and make the interface function much more consistently within the different modes. For example, right now when you’re using the left hand Structure area and you press a block on the page, the corresponding block within the left nested layout of blocks gets highlighted as well which is nice.
The same thing should happen with the right hand Style area as well though (when it’s open) in that when you press on a block on the page, the corresponding style editing settings for that block should automatically be shown, so you can adjust it immediately. Again because there are no focused contextual modes but rather just these panels, it can become overwhelming for the end user to figure out where to look, especially when playing with the Editor for the first time.
But as it stands right now, the specific block style areas are buried under a couple of submenus which is just crazy. Instead all block styles options should be shown by default when you open the Style panel, yet the default Body and Heading settings for the entire site should be listed at the top of the entire Style list. Then below that, each specific block type should be linked by default to either the Body or Heading style setting but with the option to specifically customize it further if the end user so wishes. This would make the Style area far more user friendly for the new user, creating a cascading style logic that they can understand.
All said and done, I’m still excited and interested in trying out WordPress 6.1 when it’s released. Oh and for those who want to see more of Nicholas Diego’s work on the Editor (aka Full Site Editing), he has a bunch of videos on WordPress.TV you can check out as well.
I’ve previously indicated that Mark Zuckerberg has everything backwards. Instead of mining people’s data and using it against them, he should be charging people to mine their own social media data to help them understand themselves better.
It looks like a company called Augment AI Corp is kind of taking a step towards this in creating an AI assistant called Augment that “learns your needs” and “supports” you with your productivity.
Augment is a first-of-its-kind context-aware AI, dedicated to helping you excel through your hectic work day, freeing up time for you to do the things you love. It learns your needs and provides you with the type of support that we used to only dream about.
No more being caught off guard by another calendar alert because of back-to-back meetings, wasting time trying to dig for context, or struggling to take notes. Your Augment tells you everything you need to know about the meeting, including what led up to it; takes notes; captures the presentation materials, and summarizes it all for you afterward. It’s AI that actually works for you as a true ear-whispering, task-doing assistant.
In my opinion, the real potential of AI technology will be when it can analyze what your interests are in terms of the personal knowledge management flows that you’re aggregating (i.e. reading, watching, etc) and then analyze the patterns and relationships within it to provide insights on understanding who you are on a deeper level.
In effect, there’s a lot of hype these days about understanding your passion and purpose, with a lot of people misunderstanding what that actually means. It’s not surface things (i.e. job, interests, etc) but rather the patterns and relationships between everything you do that’s often hidden below the surface of your life but which unifies your life as a whole. I honestly believe the right AI technology that’s optimized for this, could actually help a person to reflectively become aware and “know thyself” on a deeper level.
Watching the Queen’s funeral procession a bit the other day, I was reminded that our own “royalty” is nearing his time of passing soon.
Considering his age, Sam actually looks amazingly well for a cat of 18 years. While he has lost a lot of weight the last six months or so, he’s still eating and drinking ferociously, not to mention he’s as vocal as he’s ever been.
More than anything lately though, it’s his vocal need for fresh food and water at all times of the day and night that is becoming exhausting. Because of this, we’re lucky if we can get an entire nights sleep in without being woken up before 7 AM in the morning. Usually if he does wake us up, I try to get up and close the door to the bedroom so my wife can continue sleeping, while I attend to his needs and then crash on the sofa.
Once his food and water needs are met, he usually joins me on the sofa and starts snoozing while cuddling on my chest. While he’s always been one for being physically affectionate, he’s definitely seems more so lately. All said and done though, he’s had a pretty amazing life, considering one of our other previous cats had his life cut short due to a tumour.
Always looking handsome and regal, we started calling him “Prince” because of his vocal demands beginning at an early age. His more common affectionate nickname though is “Monkey Boy” which is of Buckaroo Bonzai origins. He got that name because he literally races around the house like a monkey boy, leaping from furniture to furniture, almost flying at times like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.
My conventional work from the past used to focus on simplifying technology for people, which included everything from computer hardware and software, home electronics, to everything related to Web development.
Today while I still somewhat stay on top of all of these things, I’m primarily just interested in mobile computing technologies (i.e. iPhone, iPad), smart home technology (including voice assistants), and Web platform technologies (i.e. WordPress).
One company that I love using their products at home and have been tracking them for some time is Sonos. The main reason for this is that I typically dislike the hard-coded functionality in most products today (and hard-coded behaviours in companies) but Sonos products actually allow for a lot of decently flexibility in terms of the different music services and different voice assistants you can use with them but also third party services like IFTTT that can be connected with them for more advanced home automation.
Recently with many companies preparing to transition their products to the Matter smart home protocol, allowing their products to interconnect and interoperate with other company’s products, I’ve been wondering if Sonos was going to make a larger move in the smart home space due to previous technologies they’ve acquired over the last couple of years, specifically their voice assistant technologies which were released this year.
In a recent interview on Yahoo Finance (shown above), it seems as though the CEO of Sonos specifically stated that they are “working on more new categories than ever before”, so it will be interesting to see if anything new is released by Christmas of this year. Strongly rumoured is the introduction of wireless headphones with the ability to listen to music at extremely high quality levels, thus far superior to typical Bluetooth connections. I also hope they figure out some way of integrating Apple Siri voice assistant support in their products without requiring an Apple HomePod Mini device (which is ludicrous that Apple would require that for the integration).
Working for social change at work using the liminal space between MMORPGs and The Future of Work
In rewatching this video below with John Seely Brown, in which he discusses how World of Warcraft players are innovating on a level that most businesses can’t imagine or even achieve, I’ve come to the realization that this is pretty much the essence of what I want to be doing with my life’s work.
But it gets back to this notion of passion, it gets back to this notion of curiosity, and it gets back to this notion that this is an interest-driven phenomenon that unleashes exponential learning of a dimension that’s almost unimaginable any other way.
John Seely Brown
The primary difference between John and myself though is that he’s mainly focused on the innovation occurring within the social organizations (aka guilds) around the game. What I want to do is even go beyond this and utilize the game elements themselves as metaphors to not only help people make sense of how The Future of Work will work but how we will achieve the necessary social innovation via creativity to actually get there in the first place.
For example, in massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), players level up their character within the game, thus gaining new capabilities that enable them to take on challenges of increasing complexity. For society to reach the The Future of Work, we also need people to level up their consciousness, thus gaining new capabilities that enable them to take on challenges of increasing complexity as well. That’s because The Future of Work is effectively “a whole new game” that’s paradigmatically different from our conventional World of Work, thus requiring people to change the way they perceive their world and themselves as well.
A new paradigm, informing a different way of experiencing and working in the world, will require the development of different capabilities than most of us have now. These capabilities are difficult to acquire or sustain outside of a community and culture within which mutual support and learning can occur. The trick is to build or evolve culture at a level that doesn’t simply reproduce old patterns of thought, and this requires the development of consciousness. Consciousness, in this context, refers to the ability to recognize different levels or orders of world.
Carol Sanford, Indirect Work
However while our approaches might differ, I think the primary method that John Seely Brown is so effortlessly using is one that I’ve been struggling to find and replicate myself, that being lightly touching on the game elements as an opener but then deeply describing their translated meaning afterwards. For example, he talked about a typical “guild” doing a “raid” within World of Warcraft but then translated what that means for innovation within the workplace, describing how the self-organizing social structures of these online communities are allowing them to do unprecedented things compared to the conventional World of Work.
All said and done though, if you had told me a little over two decades ago that today I was going to be standing within this liminal space between MMORPGs and The Future of Work, I probably would have said you were crazy. That’s because at the time, while initially building online communities around video games personally on my own, I had successfully made the jump to professional work as a Senior Web Development building online community hubs around video games for some of the largest video game publishers, such as Sierra, Activision, and Konami. So my life looked like it was perfectly on track and going in the right direction, with nothing to stop me.
But when the Dot-Com Bubble burst shortly afterwards in 2001, imploding my entire life and work, that’s when I began questioning the way that work worked altogether, leading me on a quest of researching The Future of Work, social innovation, creativity, and vertical development which strangely enough over two decades lead me full circle back to the innovations I had previously experienced within these video game communities. Like John Seely Brown said, “there is something going on here” in these spaces with people playing in these “complex worlds” and I hope to reveal just that in the days ahead.
I just realized something else with regards to letting go of control. It’s not just about letting go of controlling others but of yourself as well. In effect, our outward expectations of others are often entwined with our inward expectations of ourselves.
So this “radical openness” that I’m looking for applies not just to others but even more so to myself. That’s because by transforming my perspective of myself, I can in turn transform my perspective of others.
And strangely enough, I have been thinking about this the last few days, as I’ve been reflecting upon my life over the past couple of decades. When I do so, I see two aspects of myself. One aspect is the guy who was active in developing communities online around video games but was intuitively practicing Future of Work principles before I even understood what they were years later. The other aspects is a of guy who now understands many of these Future of Work practices but can’t find the right type of people to put them into practice.
In effect, as I said back around 2015 on Google+, I don’t feel like I’m meant to be helping organizations to transform. Instead I’m realizing I’m supposed to help people transform and they in turn will create new organizations. So kind of a bottom up approach rather than a top down one.
All said and done though, I still feel like I am putting this ingrained expectation upon myself to be something that I’m not which is why I’m still hanging out with people who are focused on organizational transformation.
The key thing that is making me realize I don’t have to “play the same game” as others is Carol Sanford’s foundational story within her book Indirect Work of how Phil Jackson transformed the Chicago Bulls. The emphasis being that he was able to transform the level of consciousness of a bunch of people who were playing a game.In effect, what’s stopping me from doing the same thing within the gaming environments I’ve been playing within most of my life already? In other words, why force myself to change and act in a way that feels alien to me, when I’m obviously more optimally suited for these gaming environments which to me already have an embedded space and mindset for “playing” in the first place.
For example, the other day I joking said on Twitter that maybe I should create tours into games like World of Warcraft to show business people how The Future of Work will work by immersing them in a guild setting and helping them to translate the meaning of what they’re seeing, so that can put these principles into practice in their own businesses. So instead of me going into businesses and meeting people there, I instead invite business people into gaming environments and show them people playing, learning, and working on a higher “level” there.
Actually, I don’t even need to target business people. I can just target gamers who are frustrated with the way that work works in their own lives which is probably why a lot of gamers are gaming more because gaming environments are helping them to meet their psychological needs that they may not be getting in their work environments. So it’s almost like I’m showing gamers how they can start a work (ad)venture with a company of people and emulate an entirely new way of working using practices similar to what they used to using in MMORPGs (which people like John Seely Brown have already proven are innovative).
All said and done, it is something I should explore and play with more as a potential possibility. In other words, I don’t have to follow the forced societal expectations I seem to be automatically putting upon myself. I can instead choose a different path of my own choosing. One that’s more aligned with who I truly am.
In closing, I’m reminded of an awesome paper by Daryl Conner from Conner Partners entitled A Hero’s Journey for the Practitioner (which unfortunately appears to be gone now due them updating their entire web site platform).
Although Campbell’s storyline depicts a single movement from naiveté to wisdom, the same stream of events is replicated repeatedly for those on a mastery path. The heroic emergence from one set of challenges is the entry point for a new level of innocence and pursuit of the next Journey. Mastery calls for taking part in as many of these heroic cycles as is possible, related to a particular domain of knowledge, skill, or beingness. For those of us seeking mastery in the change field, this means repeating the heroic saga as frequently as circumstances and our courage and tenacity will allow.
In closing, I’d like to offer my bias about what is the most important lesson to be learned during these epic periods of professional/personal growth. All the illumination that takes place during these developmental leaps contributes to the wisdom we strive for but, in my view, there is one awareness that stands above all the rest in its creation of value for us and those we serve.
The profound awakening I’m referring to is the same one that unfolded for Sara—at a certain point during the Return phase of her Journey, she could see that all the hard lessons learned during her odyssey weren’t where her hero status proved its real value. Being worthy of the hero’s title isn’t demonstrated through endurance, dedication to a mission, or even slaying dragons, and certainly not by imposing “right solutions” on others. Ultimately, true heroes legitimize themselves, not by anything they do, but by being who they are. They come home from their trials and tribulations simply to live a different life. In doing so, they open the possibility of deeply affecting a relatively few people who, in turn, go on their own Hero’s Journey and return to impact a few more who are ready to learn.
As change professionals, the greatest leverage we have for affecting people is just to be who we are. Methodologies, concepts, and techniques are what we use when “exposing” large numbers to the technical aspects of how change can be orchestrated, but when deep impact within individuals is the agenda, there is nothing that comes close to the influence of a practitioner’s genuine authenticity on a small number of people. For Sara, this meant that the constituency she came back to serve was actually a relatively small number of her contemporaries who were already predisposed to grow in her direction and who naturally resonated with the full expression of who she is.
Daryl Conner, A Hero’s Journey for the Practitioner
Simply put, I think the issue here isn’t that I’ve been communicating over the years, it’s that I’ve been communicating it to the wrong people. I need to find my “tribe”, if you will. So I need to find my “constituency” of “a relatively small number of contemporaries” who are “already predisposed to growth in my direction” and who “naturally resonate with the full expression of who I am” (which sounds remarkable close to Carol Sanford’s description of “essence”).
Thinking about my last couple of weeks being on Twitter has made me realize and see another common pattern of mine that has probably existed for at least five years or more.
Basically whenever I join a new community or work environment, I’m initially trying to find a connection between myself and other people, which seems typically normal for most people to do. What happens next though is where my wanting to control others kicks in. As soon as a connection has been made with others, I suddenly have this expectation for others to begin to grasp what I’m communicating and begin to evolve to my level of consciousness. What then follows when this doesn’t happen is an increased expectation and an increased attempt to disrupt and thus control them, thus almost forcibly wanting them to change.
In a sense, I’m initially working indirectly and lightly, with almost no expectations, but when I see people connecting to what I’m saying, I suddenly shift into a more directand forcible approach.
This reminded me about a quote below from the book The Tao of Power by R.L. Wing which is a translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.
Use attitude instead of action, and lead others by guiding rather than ruling. Manage people by letting them act on you, and not the other way around. In this way, your subjects will develop a sense of self-government, and you as their guide, will be rewarded with their loyalty and cooperation.
R.L Wing, The Tao of Power
Obviously people on Twitter are not my “subjects” but the emphasis here is still poignant. I’m definitely starting by letting people act on me but then later I shift to start acting off them more and more, due to my increased expectations that they should be changing, evolving, and grasping what I’m understanding at my level. In other words, the typical mindset of expecting others to “conform to our worldview,” regardless of it potentially being a more evolved one.
All said and done, this ability to step back and reflect on yourself is interesting and most definitely useful, especially when you can quickly get over the hump of beating yourself up over your actions by realizing that your actions are often ingrained and automatic. That’s the whole point. You’re trying to become more consciously aware of the invisible, automatic actions occurring below the surface of the simplest of things in your daily life, so that you can consciously choose to act in a more creative way, benefitting not just for yourself but for the other people you’re interacting with as well.
BTW I just realized something else in relation to this. I think there is need to get others to evolve and grow because I myself feel like I’m not evolving and growing. In effect, while I feel I am making headway, it feels like I’ve hit a wall of sorts. And that wall is obviously an existing paradigm that defines my current worldview which means I need a larger one which redefines my own identity to step beyond it.