BlackBerry and the lizard brain
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Telecoms, Enterprise, Futures, Email, Wireless, Mobile on
What’s the difference between me walking down the hall, head down and totally absorbed in reading email on my BlackBerry because I didn’t stop to do it before I left the hotel room (well, the coffee is downstairs), and Jim Balsillie co-CEO of RIM walking down the hall so absorbed in reading email on his BlackBerry that he doesn’t hear me say good morning? Mainly that he has the good manners to have a member of staff walk with him so he doesn’t walk into anyone; I’ve never noticed anyone leaping out of my way to avoid getting trampled because you simply don’t notice when you’re that absorbed but I have taken some sudden swerves in railway stations to get out of the path of an oncoming commuter with their eyes fixed on their device so I assume it works both ways.
If your users carry BlackBerrys you can give them a little more to get absorbed in by rolling out the new BES 5. you’re going to want to; if the automatic failover for redundancy, manual failover for maintenance and 64-bit support don’t grab you, you’ll like the full Web-based remote admin (although it does need ActiveX in the browser). They’ll like email flags, being able to file messages and manage folders and - if you enable it - better access to fileshares behind your company firewall.
That’s all instant gratification of a sort, which appeals to the lizard brain. After the other CEO of RIM, Mike Laziridis, introduced BES 5 and celebrated ten years of BlackBerry (and 25 years of RIM) and Bob IBM of RIM showed off some very IBM-centric predictions about the evolution of enterprise collaboration based on smartphones and contextual information (which would have been visionary a year ago and now are just documenting established trends), ex-Disney Imagineer and US intelligence service CTO Eric Haseltine talked a lot about the lizard brain and how to take advantage of it to move your company in the right direction, because it isn’t going away any time soon.
Concept cars matter to the car industry because they show you a physical object you can imagine using rather than describing a service you can’t. The concrete, visual, tactile, tangible prototype appeals to the other big part of the brain, the visual and processing area. And given that in every enterprise the urgent trumps the important and most decisions are the emotional lizard brain arguing with the rational brain, you can do with getting more of the brain on your side.
At Disney Haseltine worked on the Park PDA; back in the 90s this was a handheld device that did everything from video conferencing to games. Of course the killer app wasn’t any of the big concept ideas; it was the text message that told you where in the park Mickey Mouse was so you could go get a photo of your kids with the rodent. Your smartphone can do a lot of that today, but Disney still does great business selling the Pal Mickey; a gadget that knows when you’re standing in line for a ride and likely to be bored, buzzes to offer your kids a secret message and uses a proximity sensor so that when they hold it up to their ear it can whisper at them about the ride they’re queuing for.
Haseltine’s point isn’t so much that your big idea is never go to match what users actually want but that the sooner you can give them something to try out, the sooner you’ll find out what they do want - and then you can use that to move a little further in your long-term direction, supported by users who are getting what they want as well. The people who will be most likely to take the time to try your prototype and give you useful reactions are not just the early adopters but the ones who are actually suffering in some way because they can’t do what they need; there’s always more incentive to get out of the discomfort zone.
And for support, don’t turn to executives or the formal development process; he suggested looking to the counterculture, the “underground informal rebel alliance who think the bureaucracy doesn’t get it”. Every company has them, and if you’re in IT you’ll probably have quite a few working with or for you. They’re going to be doing some unapproved skunkworks projects, so they might as well be something that suits your agenda.
His favourite recent example is the billions of dollars that the various US intelligence agencies spent on knowledge management and collaboration tools which had the same success as any other KM project; utter failure. (When we first watched Criminal Minds we assumed the show didn’t want to reveal the sophisticated IT the FBI must be using; I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a technical analyst who could retrieve information from a variety of sources is something most FBI teams only dream of). Over at the CIA, a handful of agents got together and set up a completely unapproved and doubtless career-limiting copy of MediaWiki. Helped by the fact that a third of CIA officers are now what Haseltine calls “the Facebook and MySpace generation” (no figures on how many CIA agents are actually on Facebook), Intellipedia became something of a sleeper hit, delivering the knowledge sharing all the formal systems never managed.
Smartphones came into business the way that PDAs and PCs did; because users who thought they would be useful just started using them and demanding that IT support them; social networking and IM arrived the same way. The best way of getting some control over whatever comes next is to be involved in bringing it into business; your counterculture revolutionaries will be in the thick of that and if you can give them enough rope to drag your agenda along you could kill two birds with one stone.
-Mary
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