Why Wilfing is good for you

The recent survey commissioned by Britain’s YouGov for moneysupermarkets.com  about wilfing was widely reported and threw a lot of people into soul-searching about what appears to be a national pastime.   More than two-thirds of the 33.7 million internet users in the UK admit to at least the occasional “wilf” while browsing the internet.  Thousands of valuable working days are being lost as a direct result.

For the uninitiated – ‘Wilfing’ is short for ‘What Was I Looking For’ – synonymous with ’surfing the web without any real purpose’.

Here’s the anecdotal checklist of Wilfing symptoms:

• You’re easily distracted when you’re online.
• You hop from the site you intended to look at, to a link in an article, to an unrelated site, to a YouTube video, to a Google search, to a blog, to a comment that triggers a visit to another site with a flashing advert in a pop-up window – by which time you’ve forgotten what you were supposed to be looking for in the first place
• You spend 30% or more of your Internet time wilfing – that’s the equivalent of an entire working day every fortnight pointlessly jumping between random pages.
• You’re hooked on shopping sites, but you’re also likely to regularly browse aimlessly through news, music and travel websites.  And the ubiquitous ‘adult entertainment’ site which means that your marriage may well be in ‘danger’
• You’re likely to be ‘reasonably young’ - people aged 55 or over are three times less likely to browse absent-mindedly than those under 25.
• You’re probably male 
• You’re not as ‘productive’ as you should be – at work, or at home, or wherever it is you get your wilfing fix.

In Britain the Priory Clinic said that increasing numbers were suffering addictions to eBay.   Some spent thousands on the auction website and said that they would rather be bidding than dating.    A 12-step recovery programme, mimicking that set up by Alcoholics Anonymous, has been drawn up for e-mail addicts.

It’s not just a British phenomenon.  Up to 10 million people are addicted to the internet in China.   The Government has banned under 18’s from internet cafés and no new ones may open this year.  Internet addicts in China face drug therapy, acupuncture and mild electric shocks when treated at a military-style boot camp clinic that costs about £650 a month.

I would like to offer an alternative interpretation to wilfing:

• If you weren’t wifling, you’d be switching TV channels, arguing over the kids, browsing in a book store.  The medium has changed, the symptom has changed, the attention disorder was always there.
• Wilfing means you are likely to learn something new every day.  You now have access to an unparalleled database of knowledge.   Wilfing is inevitably linked to informal learning.  Our subconscious yearning to stay in touch, keep informed on our pet areas of interest. 
• Wilfing is good for business.  Why has eBay acquired StumbleUpon, and why does the Google toolbar now include a dice icon, which you click to be taken to a ‘new website that Google thinks you will find interesting based on your previous search queries?’ 
• Think social networks – think LinkedIn, Ecademy, Xing.  Is this wilfing?
• We are naturally curious creatures.  The Internet gives us a channel for that curiosity. 
• Wilfing is the anthedote to our restlessness. 
• Many of the meaningful things in life happen while you were planning to do something else.   Wilfing is no different.

Far from being tantamount to abnormal behaviour, I think that wilfing is about the joy of the web, where we are free to explore links, ideas, and our own untapped creativity – where five minutes can often take us on a journey of discovery of new things, mundane and sublime.

Wilfing is just another way of us being who we are.

Human. 

It’s not about the code

London always gets me to do some soul-searching.  There are days when I wonder why I turned my back on it, in the nineties.  Whenever I am in the city, I guess I reconnect with the part of me I leave behind – and my old ghosts. 

I moved to London in 1985.  Costa Coffee and Bar Italia were the closest to a real cappuccino.  Ken Livingstone was about to be kicked out of the Greater London Council.  The Brixton Riots designated chunks of South London as a no-go zone.  The Who were planning a 25^th Anniversary concert.  Music was just plain horrible.  It was the first time I had seen a PC, one of those first IBM ‘portables’ with a screen built into the case and a keyboard dangling out of a socket.    Six months after my arrival, I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and my boss told me that now I had a licence to make money.  The statement was not exactly prophetic.  Eighties London was rubber-stamped by bean counters, Margaret Thatcher and Loadsamoney.  I wasn’t particularly taken by the concept of making money, but I knew I wanted to travel and that something in strategy was probably more life-rewarding than accountancy.  So my natural habitat became multinationals.  On the day I was interviewed for a European controller job with IP Sharp (IPSA), a Canadian computer timesharing and consulting Group, I was informed that Reuters were close to a takeover.  In other words, the risk of LIFO loomed over any eventual appointment.

As it happened, I spent two years immersed in restructuring and change management – and understanding the promise and limitations of technology.  At face value, the IPSA / Reuters deal was a marriage made in heaven.  IPSA specialised in data warehousing, yesterday’s information, Reuters in today’s, the Reuters screen.  Reuters decided early on to integrate the IPSA product into its core service offering, believing it could corner the market.  What Reuters failed to understand was that Sharp’s product had been developed by a network of brilliant, but highly ‘un-corporate’ APL software developers.  People who worked weird hours, often from home, and in many cases were accountable to nobody other than their own whims.  The clash with Reuters’ blue-chip corporate culture where information was transient, and nobody was indispensable, was immediate.  Reuters’s frustration grew by the day as the Special projects team charged with the integration realised that:  the APL developers were indispensable; that IPSA was a ‘people’ business as opposed to a technology platform; and that there the company they had purchased was worthless without some major culture changes in both organisations – and a leap of faith from both camps to try and get the deal to work.  Being the new kid on the block, my job quickly evolved into working with IPSA country managers to prepare people and systems for the inevitable integration and determine who could make the transition.  I also became a conduit to the Reuters guys whose job was on the line to ‘complete integration’ within two years.  By the time this period had flashed by, I had worked in many countries in Continental Europe, learnt about the idiosyncrasies of multinationals, saw some people resist and others thrive on change.  There are always winners and losers in acquisitions and mergers.  Some of IPSA’s best people could not accept the new suits and moved – in some cases, with crippling consequences on the core product.  The more political elements (sic. sales and marketing) were in a rush to move their desks to Fleet Street from Victoria.  And in typical fashion, having got through my two-year project and being told to ‘cruise and wait for the new dream position in Reuters Special Projects Department to be approved ‘ – I decided life was short, and moved on to Hitachi Data Systems.   

This week, in London, I ran a Forum for key users of a legacy business support system, built over some eight years by a Delphi developer.   I had to use whatever powers of persuasion I have to convince my client that it was worth the investment to get people round a table to take stock of developments over the past 12 months and address the thorny issues of standardisation.  This in an environment where customisation was the name of the game, where system changes were made ‘on the run’ and in many cases undocumented, and where the developer and his team were in a never-ending spiral of design, build, customise, support, design.  User training was sporadic and had to be fitted around the developers’ support time.  User and technical documentation was virtually non-existent.  Twelve months ago, the CEO lived in perpetual fear that the developers would move and leave the company stranded without the backbone of its successful business model.   Which was why I was called in.

The situation with the legacy system twelve months ago reminded me of the scenario Reuters inherited when it bought IP Sharp.  The mistake Reuters made then was to ignore the people side of things (‘soft’ was the buzz word then) and try and rail-road the solution by focusing on getting the technologies to talk to each other.  I decided the only way round the undocumented legacy system was to engage with the people behind it and get into their headspace – before developing a strategy to get out of the never-ending spiral of customisation and ‘software development on demand.’  I made mistakes, tried to move things too quickly, retrenched, did the drinking / listening / bonding bit.. whatever it took.  Ultimately, developers demand respect, like anybody else working for a living.  In this case, these guys had just barricaded themselves in.  Slowly, I gained some level of trust.  To enable us to get out of crisis management mode into starting to establish clear arms-length relationships with the non ICT literate users of the system.  In 12 months, the system was documented, users were forced to stop bickering and request changes via formal channels – significantly reducing the number of changes until they trickled into nothing.  We focused on user interfaces as opposed to more development changes.  I engaged a process specialist to map out the company’s core business processes as I was convinced that the system had simply evolved to support the whims of the more vociferous elements of management instead of what core business required.  We made some major changes within the organisational framework of the system to mirror the real life processes.  We did some stuff like relabelling and designing new icons to help navigation.  And on a particularly inspired evening, we branded the system Elvis, to send a playful signal to the rest of the organisation that the system had a life of its own, and was no longer the domain of a particular developer.

I guess sitting with ten people in London with people who caught trains and planes to engage in a discussion on an IT system they loved to hate was a bit of a coup.

Sometimes I wonder whether middle age is when déjà vu really kicks in.  Sometimes I feel l can see the movie of my life flash past.  When mainframes ruled at IPSA and we shared files over our global networks and used email many years before the Internet made it all pervasive .

Then I see my four year-old, clicking a mouse and laughing at the clips I have uploaded on Google Video and realise how we all have to relearn what we thought we knew.  Every day. 

The Knowledge Game is only just starting

When you find yourself one of over 2,000 participants from 93 countries packing Online Educa in Berlin, the first sensation is one of chaos and deja’ vu.  People rushing from one forum to another, crowds around the exhibitor stands, the usual mobile phone brigade and smiling girls clutching brochures and freebies.  But after a while, your brain kicks into overdrive and you retune yourself to conversations.  Or, in this particular case, conversations about learning, knowledge, technology and the connected world we live in. The range of topics covered in the plenary sessions and workshops was staggering – the downside being, of course, that you just cannot get to different venues at the same time. 

Two speakers struck a chord – both of them at the cutting edge in the debate of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning’ in the 21st century.  George Siemens is the rising ‘commercial academic’ star of new paradigms of knowledge – at the Conference, he focused on the ‘changing nature and context of learning’.  Jay Cross  has published a book called Informal Learning.  Both men are compelling performers, using a fair amount of stand-up theatre plus podcasts, animated presentations, wikis, blogs, video.. the entire raft of social networking tools to turn all of us into instant publishers and messiahs.  It is no accident that they are also admirers of each other’s work.  They are both convinced that something fundamental is changing in the way we are learning – and in how knowledge is created and distributed.  What was charming is that although both gentlemen had been in regular contact with each other for some five years, and even shared podcasts together – this was the first time that they actually met and could ’share a beer’.  Judging by the state of both guys in the plenary session, it had been a long night for both.

In true collaboration style, Mr Siemens developed his presentation for OLEB on a wiki - and even included a discussion board duly pillaged by both fans and someone calling it all ‘gobbledeegook’.  You can even download his new book.  Mr Cross, challenged by a participant to ‘get down to specifics’ reverted to a PowerPoint with numbers that linked to ’specific examples of informal learning’.  It was all great fun, and has already made me scamper to various blogs and papers since I’ve returned to Malta.

In a way, what is happening is that we are trying to find a new language to explain what has changed, what is still changing, because of the new, ever-pervasive technology that is being used by everyone.  From my seventy six year-old father in-law running U3A courses in Alton to my son Jacob, aged 4, discovering the new games on CeeBeebies. I guess I came back from Berlin experiencing an adrenalin rush of learning.    Except this time, knowledge is not the exclusive domain of the academic – but available to anyone with an Internet connection and who can browse his way to a search engine.  There is something wonderfully anarchic in this.   “Those, like Francis Bacon, who equate knowledge with power, find that the masses are flooding the pools and reservoirs of the elite,” says Mr Siemens.  “I am suggesting that knowledge (as a power base) is increasingly accessible by “the many”.  Tools like blogs, vlogs, podcasts, give amateurs a voice previously held by broadcasters/newspapers, etc.  Growing movements of open education are allowing individuals in developing countries access to the educational content (though not the conversation or accreditation) of Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, etc.  Knowledge that has been held in pay-only journals or the courses of elite journals, is becoming more accessible”.

Mr Cross spends more time working in the business world.  He believes that executives don’t want learning.  “They want execution; they want performance.  Companies are using informal learning to:

• Improve knowledge worker productivity by 20% – 30%
• Increase sales by Google-izing product knowledge
• Generate fresh ideas and increase innovation
• Transform an organization from disaster to record profits
• Reduce stress, absenteeism, and healthcare costs
• Invest development resources for maximum impact impact
• Increase professionalism and professional growth
• Cut costs and improve responsiveness with self-service learning

Training is something that’s pushed on you; learning is something you choose to do. Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Knowledge workers thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do. They rise or fall to meet expectations.  Informal Learning is about challenging workers (and executives) to be all they can be”.

I know that these gentlemen ’get it’.  There is precious, unique knowledge in the head of most people within an organisation.  In many cases, it is the guys and girls on the customer service desk who know more about what is going on than the sharp suits in marketing.  Knowledge in the head of the few should now be a redundant concept.  Corporations now have the technology at their disposal – in wikis, blogs, podcasts… – to get their most valuable resources – their brilliant people – to share knowledge and connect with others within their organisations, and beyond.  Daily, unstructured, tagged.. whichever way works for the individual.

Both Mr Siemens and Mr Cross believe they are in the vanguard of a knowledge revolution.  My challenge is to convince the CEOs I work with, that the old paradigm of ‘information is power’ is now not only redundant – it is potentially damaging to the organisations they lead, and a major rock in the path of the growth they aspire to.