Crowding Out

Children's lives are highly scheduled, with school and extra-curricular activities dictating where they need to be and what they need to be doing at pretty much any given moment in time.

The amount of homework a child has each week is, not surprisingly, directly proportional to the amount of programmed activities in which they participate. In an effort to get parents more involved, just about everything children are involved with involves some form of homework.

All this homework is well intentioned. It's too easy to put a kid in a bunch of extra-curricular activities to make them "somebody else's problem" for a few hours each day so a parent can pursue some other interest. And it's fair to say that many parents are practicing a form of "outsourcing," expecting that their child's education, spiritual development, or musical training is fully the responsibility of a contracted party. Clearly, that is an irresponsible expectation, and homework helps to reset the balance.

All told, when we sign our children up for things, we're committing them for both time they'll spend in an activity, and time they'll spend on the activity.

Independently of this, the days are short in the winter months, so there's only small windows of time each day to enjoy the season.

The net effect is that spontaneity is crowded out. The ability to do something like ski or sled is constrained by the need to keep pace with everything else they're signed up to do. What initially seemed a sustainable pace of activities quickly becomes what runners call fartlek training: sudden sprints in the middle of a sustained run.

In a highly scheduled life, the conspiracy of convergence is inevitable. The rescheduled music lesson, the irregularly scheduled basketball game, the religious education study, the choir lesson, a birthday party and a school project will all need to fit in the same weekend. Add to this a travel schedule that has you away from home several days a week, and you soon discover that your interactions with your child are substantially framed, if not outright dictated, by somebody else.

Compound this with extraordinarily beautiful weather for ice skating, and the sense of constraint is overwhelming. You're left lamenting the lost opportunity to do something unique during the season, more than feeling a sense of accomplishment for having executed so many things in a pre-programmed schedule.

A profound sense of loss may be merited. Harry Eyres, writing in the Weekend FT, commented on how his earliest memories of winter shaped his expectation for what winter is like. As Mr. Eyres points out, the experiences of the season are critical moments of our experience of life, be it walking on a frozen river Thames, moving about in snow as deep as you are tall, or self- and community-reliance to share food and shelter when transportation and technology fail in the face of the elements.

These experiences are, in a highly-programmed world, exception to the rule. Indeed, a significant cold snap or heavy snowfall is seen more as an encumbrance than a reason for celebration. But just as banking had rules that mattered not when the governing principles no longer held true with the onset of the credit crunch, so, too, is the fragility of this programmed existence exposed in the face of a hostile yet still curiously sustaining world. Our programming functions only in this bubble, and the bubble doesn't provide for our needs.

The more we program our lives, the further and fewer between the opportunities to connect with and embrace the world outside our bubbles. We have to always remember that our children may not truly fathom the fundamental subservience we have to the Earth. The Earth sustains us far more than we impose any form of management over it. Helping our children develop that appreciation - even at the expense of their programming - is an obligation we have as parents.

And on perfect winter days, it's a highly liberating one at that.

Frequently Flying

I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to travel with my family from time to time. Travel opens up new horizons for a child. They get direct exposure to different cultures, and places of historical significance are brought to life. And there's nothing like first hand experience of different languages, diets, climates and so forth to realize how big and diverse the world really is. Having been to 15 countries (and counting), my daughter has some appreciation for this.

But travel quickly goes from "opportunity" to "burden" when I go without them. The phone call where she relays the daily digest of her life's events is nice, but being apart means I'm not able to share in those events with her. And while we can innovate our way through this to some extent - it was fun to watch The Grinch together while on speakerphone last month - it's still low-bandwidth interaction. And all-in-all, these work-arounds introduce their own set of disruptions on all of our lives.

It's great being a dad who can introduce his daughter to vastly different parts of the world. But at the moment that's the exception, not the rule. There's little consolation in being a dad who delivers trinkets of travel: they don't replace what was missed, the joy of receiving is short lived, and they're just reminders of time spent apart. Besides, how many city-themed t-shirts from airport shops can one little girl have?

I'd rather just be the dad who is there.

Missing a First

There are a lot of firsts that you want to be there for as a parent, such as your child's first word and first step. My daughter just ran her first 5k, and unfortunately I wasn't there to run with her or cheer her on.

She didn't run to be competitive. She didn't run to get a time. She just wanted to run a race.

With things like television and video games competing for our time and attention, it takes a lot of motivation to start exercising. But as hard as it is to get started, it takes a lot of will power to sustain an exercise program.

So while I'm disappointed to have missed her first, I'll be there to encourage and remind, run and ride wtih her.

Perspective and Exclusion Bias

I heard my colleague Martin Fowler present a keynote the other day where he called attention to the severe under-representation of different groups of people in the IT industry. As one example, he pointed out that it's odd that although women are 50% of the general population, they're nowhere near 50% of the population of technology professionals. Among other things, this means that the IT profession suffers from an extraordinarily narrow range of focus. IT solutions, by definition, suffer an acute exclusion bias.

We see exclusion bias in many different ways in technology. Consider smartphones. The bias of each of the leading smartphone firms - Nokia, Blackberry and Apple - comes through loud and clear in their products. Nokia is a mobile phone and network company. They make a fantastic phone that also happens to have mobile e-mail and PDA capabilities. Blackberry is a mobile e-mail company. They make an amazing mobile e-mail device that happens to be a phone and also has PDA capabilities. Apple is a computer company. The iPhone is an outstanding PDA (it vindicates the Newton) that happens to have phone and support mobile e-mail.

There's no doubt that, in general, IT solutions have a predominantly male bias, a result of the fact that IT is a male dominated industry. But the fact that it is male dominated isn't a result of innocuous gender preference. If anything, it's self-inflicted: we do things that perpetuate this bias. Intentional or otherwise, the introduction, education and work patterns of IT are probably geared toward how the male mind works. By definition, this excludes women.

Consider how we teach music. Teaching rhythm by counting off integers (1-2-3-4) is probably more effective for a boy than a girl. A girl may very well respond more to patterns (ta-ta-tiki-tiki-ta). The absence of a pattern aligned with how girls learn creates a barrier and, by extension, an automatic exclusion.

After hearing Martin speak the other day, I am more acutely aware that I am very likely contributing to that exclusion bias in how I communicate and collaborate. As another colleague, David Leigh-Fellows put it, we must "understand before being understood." I need to externalize more.

As an IT professional, I do want IT to be a destination career for people. I don't want IT to be unappealing to top talent because we have institutionalized behaviours that turn people away. I also want the profession to be as robust as possible, and therefore inclusive of as much experience and perspective as there is in the general population.

As father of a little girl, I am highly sensitive to this. I don't want my daughter to be excluded from pursuing something for which she may have aptitude just because she processes information differently.

Ideas for Rent

The migration of video, music and books to electronic format will create sweeping changes. Music and video retail stores are in significant decline, and newsprint is on the decline. In addition to now having excess commercial real estate, we may yet see the day when we no longer have bookshelves holding our personal libraries or when our children no longer know the back-breaking pain of hauling textbooks to and from school.

The drive toward digital media shifts our consumption model from “own” toward “rent.” With physical media, we buy an album or a book and the medium was ours to do with as we would: let it sit idly on the shelf, loan it out to our friends or reference it to a state where it wears down. We didn’t have the right to copy the media (because we never held the rights to the intellectual property itself) but possession granted greater – indeed, for all practical purposes permanent – ownership rights to the media itself.

Digital media is an exercise of content licensing. Instead of owning a copy of the book, I now have the right to read the book. Very often, that right granted is specific to a device or platform: for example, my right to read the Wall Street Journal is not transferrable from Kindle to laptop to a printed edition.

The devices themselves are increasingly complex ecosystems, with library management and content acquisition tools such as iTunes, as well as wireless networks through which we connect our devices to management tools and storage. While I may own the media playing device, it’s about all that I do own: I’m renting the means by which to keep the device current and useful, and even the devices are restricted (e.g., “locked”) against use in a competing infrastructure.

This creates a high cost of change for the consumer. The further you make use of one particular ecosystem, the greater the dependency you have on it, the more difficult it becomes to change to another. Because I’m renting both the intellectual property and the medium through which I can enjoy it, I stand to lose all of my investment (e.g., sacrifice the right to enjoy the intellectual property to which I’m subscribed) if I elect to change. That isn’t trivial: technology is still evolving at a blistering pace. It’s a bit premature to take a “long” position in an ecosystem that will have a “short” shelf life. That, or I have to accept that I will renew subscription to – and acquire updated hardware – in a particular ecosystem into perpetuity.

It remains to be seen whether intellectual property increases or decreases in value. Intuitively it would appear that the shift from owning to renting the media would make content king. But that isn’t necessarily true. For one thing, people tend to regard things they own with far more respect than things they borrow. For another, electronic distribution gives content a disposable characteristic it didn’t previously have. A person is less likely to associate permanency with electronic possession. Although people have paid for the same piece of recorded music in multiple formats – LP record, cassette and CD – the media was perceived to be considerably different than one would have of changing electronic ecosystem. It seems somewhat incongruous to constantly acquire a short-term right to a timeless piece of music or work of literature. To drive people to acquire more content (and therefore build dependency on an ecosystem), there may be consequences to the quality of intellectual property churned out.

If content is more temporary in a digital world, are we moving into a state where we’re renting ideas and influences? Are they more transitory than consistent?

What we read, listen to and watch contributes to our evolving knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom isn’t something that we want merely to accumulate, it’s something we as parents want to pass along to our children. One way we do that is to share our journey by exposing them to the influencing factors in our lives. This we do over time – and at appropriate times – in our children’s lives so they are prepared to consume and draw their own conclusions. Does “personal digital consumption” create an obstacle to that? Does “idea rental” put us at risk of generational loss or continuity?

Individual philosophy and understanding of the world evolves, giving it a temporary quality. But while temporary, it follows a consistent path. It’s not something that we rent, it’s a store of intellectual wealth that we build. Is it harder to do that through content we never fully internalize and “make our own” because we never feel a sense of ownership of it in the first place?

Flower Power

It's interesting to watch the changes a 7 year old goes through in the course of being a flower girl.

She's confident during rehersals and pictures and all business during her walks up and down the aisle. She's intrigued (if a bit distracted at times) during the ceremony. She's overjoyed to be riding in the limo with the wedding party, devastated not to be sitting at the head table with them, assertive at including herself as a member of the receiving line.


And of course, she's the Energizer Bunny on the dance floor at the reception.


Through all the changes, one thing stayed constant: she made me a proud papa the entire time.

Best summer ever!

Bike rides, swimming, playing catch, playing soccer, monkey bars, field hockey games, Ravinia, frogs, lightning bugs, new & old books, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Tchaikovsky with cannons, parents night at camp, Istanbul, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, and a teddy bear picnic.

And we still have a month yet to go.

Best summer ever.