Majestic plural, be banned

Using passive voice versus active voice. It’s a problem in writing, but also in speaking. It doesn’t always play out in the same way (in writing, the trouble is usually a missing verb; in speaking, an incorrect pronoun is committing the crime), but it’s similarly heinous.

I don’t have many pet peeves but this one is particularly burdensome. Someone suggesting that “we” should do something is pretty much nails on a chalkboard for me. Typically the person making the request is not, in fact, including him or herself in the requested action. The result is degrading, or, at the very least just a bit nauseating.

Yes, I’m speaking of the “royal we”, luralis majestatis, or the “majestic plural”.

The most unfortunate manifestation of the “royal we” is in the workplace. A manager telling a direct report that “we should have caught that typo before it went to print” or “we should have known the client would react that way” is twisty and creates confusion. It diffuses blame, but more than likely there is still blame being laid in the masked comment. The person laying the blame just doesn’t have the conviction to be direct about it.

Perhaps it’s a consequence of more offices working in an open, team environment that’s not conducive to confrontation. Perhaps it’s the litigious culture we’ve created, where people don’t feel able to call individuals out when they deserve to be. Maybe this is a purely Canadian plague and a side effect of our compulsion to be nice all the time.

Case in point – I’ve met some people who’ve moved here from other regions and cultures and they didn’t have this problem. However, some times their tone and body language comes across as too harsh or direct, even downright mean. I worked with several wonderful and extremely bright people from several eastern European countries who’ve initially scared the crap out of me but after a while I adjusted to their approach. Once I did it became really refreshing to work with them, because a new level of honesty flourished and everyone felt much more comfortable that they were getting sincere, candid feedback.

I think we all appreciate working with direct individuals who express responsibility and accountability through their words and actions. I think work would be a bit less stressful in this environment, which means we’d all be a little more productive.

I strive to be very purposeful about my language, especially in the workplace, to ensure that I’m being inclusive, supportive and encouraging of my colleagues and direct reports. It’s very easy to become busy, get caught up in the minutiae and slip into passive aggressive mode. I can be accused of writing too long, run-on sentences. I’m also an adjective junkie. I’m a compulsive synonym searcher. But, I hope never to have the ‘royal we’ finger pointed at me, ever. Why, I’d just as soon speak in the third person. Julessea thinks this is is good advice for everyone.

Shifting, in Retrospect

I briefly referred to the presentation, Shift Happens, in last week’s post. I didn’t want to reflect on it at the time because I had just seen it. I find that when I see something so thought provoking for the first time, I get overwhelmed. I have to let the feeling pass for a few days before I can make sense of it all.

So, a week has passed and the video has since received about 1.7 million views and counting (note that I count for at least five of those views). What you would have thought if you saw a presentation given 15 years ago, in 1992? The presentation tells you that in 15 years, something called the “information superhighway” was going to revolutionize…

• The way you read newspapers.
• The way you post classified ads.
• The way you meet new singles.
• The way you keep in touch with friends and family.
• The way you browse for and buy books, clothes, and one-of-a-kind stuff.
• The way you calculate your taxes.
• The way you pay your monthly mortgage fees and conduct all of your banking.
• The way you apply for a job or a position in university.
• The way you draw, with a stylus pad instead of a pencil and paper.
• The way you develop photographs.
• The way you share photographs.
• The way you store photographs.
• The way you shell out your parking tickets.
• The way you watch TV.
• The way you listen to music.
• The way you give presentations.

Statistics unto themselves are powerfully suggestive. But statistics about technology and the rate of change we anticipate to come are even more evocative. Why? Maybe because technology is an area we feel we have little control – political, legislative or othewise. The idea of the internet and its ramifications, of globalization and its sociological, psychological, geographical, political implications should be nothing new for a civilization that’s voyaged every corner of earth and a bit of space. I think we’ve proven adaptable.

Using Google for good (not evil).

I used Google between 30 and 60 times yesterday. That’s a rough approximation, but it’s a task so seamlessly integrated into my 10 hour-a-day computer habit that I hardly notice when I’m going to the site or the toolbar I have installed. Without thinking, each time I’m spending a few seconds searching, refining my search with Boolean terms, grabbing what I need and closing the browser tab to move on to another task. That means I could use Google upwards of 21,600 times (60 x 360ish days) a year (give or take).

I’m also an avid Gmail fan, although for the first year or so after I switched I was really uncomfortable with the lack of folder structure and frustrated because I couldn’t organize my messages the exact way I wanted to. What I’ve learned as I’ve acclimatized to this new paradigm is how to unclench a bit (thanks Google!). I’m adjusting to not having everything exactly the way I want it, and I’m okay with it because I realized that Google has actually re-trained me how to be more effective at what I do. I’m saving time by not organizing each of the 500 or so messages I receive each week into folders that I have to create, group together into subfolders, and sort regularly. More time freed up for Google searches!

The next step in the Google love-in came about a year or so ago, when my company’s intranet became a cliché, a vapid hole of unorganized, un-findable and out-of-date documentation (for example, I had been promoted twice in the time I was there, managing a team of 10 people, but the company’s phone list still insisted I was a junior coordinator. I digress.) My solution was Google Desktop. Now, I could abandon any semblance of organization in my documents folder as well, because I could instead search my local files, applications, web history and email files at once. Again, it took some time to get used to but instead of mousing over my C:/ drive and exploring its folder contents, I moved in the other direction on my screen and immediately typed in a keyword or two in the system tray search field and scrolled among the (quickly) populated results.

I could go on about any number of tools and applications that have revolutionized the way I do basic daily stuff – search for directions (Google Maps! Google Earth!); scan the morning papers for client news (Google Alerts! Google News!); baking a pie (Google Calculator! Google Conversions!). In using all of these really simple tools, they seem to get better with time. Most are in some sort of perpetual beta testing, which means that any one can comment, complain, refine, suggest improvements.

I wonder how they all came to be. Under what circumstance, around what boardroom table in what kind of brainstorm session did these tools get formulated as a viable idea? I’m not sure of the answer yet, but in the meantime Google Labs is giving me a view into what I can expect next to get me ready for the inveitable change.

Over the coming weeks my posts will be diving more deeply into what people are calling Web 2.0 technologies, their impact and the effect on social networks, businesses, and the ‘interweb’ as a whole.

Craigslist Zen

I’ve just spent the better part of three weeks organizing the more tangible, mundane details of my life, using Craigslist for every single detail.

Since we got here about a month ago from Toronto, I’ve used the site to research the city’s neighbourhoods and narrow down potential living areas. I scanned and found an apartment around Commercial Drive. Since we left most of our things in Toronto, I diligently sifted through the hundreds of pieces posted daily and picked up all of my new-to-me furniture from a wide variety of friendly souls, everywhere between Richmond and Langley, thankful that their old stuff is going to a good home and they got a few bucks in the exchange. I found an almost-new set of skis, and the guy who’s moving back to Korea and had to get rid of them threw in a ski bag and some gloves for free. Woohoo! We hired a ‘man with truck’ who’d posted his phone number on Craigslist to move all our new things; I met him a couple hours after I called on Saturday and he helped us move our stuff and unload some boxes into our new place.

I asked him how his experience with the site has been and he said he posted his services simply because he has a pickup truck, has some free time on the weekends, and likes meeting people. He says that now it keeps him so busy and with enough tax-free cash in his pocket that it’s supporting all of his home renovations and a few leisure activities (the ones he’s got time for when he’s not responding to calls for help to move oversize furniture).

So, at some point this site, and my interactions with it, has moved beyond a merely interesting (and some times perverse) classifieds site and into an online utopia, worth reflecting and emulating. To note:

No listing fees for individuals. No finders fees. No taxes. No logins. No passwords. No promotional emails. No advertisements. No CSS. No cookies. There may be a few pervs and roguish types lurking about, but again the user experience is simplistically brilliant – ignore them, and click away (or delete the message out of your inbox). Even the error message is sweetly simple and cute.

Consumers aren’t really used to getting things for free. We expect a hitch. We’re suspiciously pessimistic. Except on Craigslist. On Craigslist, I’ve fairly assured that Craig (or the 21 or so other employees there) will probably never decide to charge me for posting my used coffee table or for finding Mr. Right, given they’re already leaving millions on the table as it is. It’s one of the few true caveat venditor experiences we can have these days (the seller being Craig and his list, not necessarily the 17 million people posting ads each month).

So, some more takeaways to consider. They demonstrate consistency. Responsiveness. Understatement and modesty. If we applied these pillar Craigslist virtues to, say:

- the Department of Motor Vehicles, where people who line up and wait patiently for a license could instead prepare their own photos and fill out their own forms online at home instead of standing in line for a really long time. Then, we’d email the Department and let them know when we’d be dropping by to pick our new license up, and maybe share a coffee with the person when we got there.

- A computer manufacturer could offer the most compelling features and system configurations because the million or so people who ordered a machine before you would’ve commented and edited the services to the point of perfection. Then, the company would willingly buy used parts back from us when we’re done (they’d have to pick them up, too).

- A university could offer free courses to all students just out of high school, and then charge corporations for retraining their staff (which, since Shift is Happening, we’re apparently going to have to bet retrained with greater frequency anyway).

The world would be a better place.  And on an aside, I’ve now got a new site to distract me from Facebook. Join me.

About a blog

When deciding what to blog about on a regular basis I was a bit intimidated to come up with a unique slice of the “ideasphere” that hasn’t already been exhausted with multiple bloggers. I don’t think I’ve come up with a perfect solution yet, but it got me thinking…

In the midst of running a busy life (it seems that these days running a life is akin to running a multinational organization) it is easy to forget that there’s more than work-school-bills-TV and pre-cooked, frozen low-fat something-or-other for supper. If the modern-day survivor could manage to tear eyeballs away from screen long enough to consider and appreciate that neighbours on the other side of your fence can be friends and the vast majority of humankind sustains themselves on less than what we westerners spend on coffee (yet likely enjoys a much higher quality of life), maybe we’ll have a fighting chance. Whew.

That was a run-on sentence but I felt it was necessary because it leads me to wonder what (we already know who: Al Gore) will save the world? What tools and ideas are at our disposal to begin to undo life’s disarray? It’s said that civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos. Maybe we can apply the popular long tail theory to micro ideas (instead of products) – the small but brilliant thoughts generated by unpretentious and conscientious common folk – that when all put together make this place a bit more habitable.

I’ll be looking to some esteemed aha!-provoking bloggers for help, but if you have available to share a small moment or idea of cleverness, please let me know.