The positive feedback loop generator

A lot of the things I call ‘ideas’ seem very obvious to me. The Spotify one below for example. Surely there’s a matching engine for Spotify somewhere. Amazon’s got one, so has iTunes, Netflix and I’m sure countless others. Spotify is the ideal place for a matching engine given the rich data it can mine about collective musical preferences. Nothing unique there surely.

Another one of these is the thought that any company with technical support should have a team dedicated to proactively answering support issues on other people’s forums. These days, first thing I do when I encounter a problem is Google it. If I can find the solution on a forum I feel great. If I can’t, I call support, in what’s often a bad mood.

Not only am I now making the support line’s staff a misery, I’m also needlessly consuming company resources. Wouldn’t it be better all round if the company allocated four or five (or fifty if you’re Google) to looking on forums other than their own, identifying themselves as experts, and walking people through the solution?

The key is other people’s forums because many companies will have staff looking after their own. But not everyone goes to the own-brand forum, many have their own favourite or will go to the first they find. And some forums, yes yours Google, are terrible at allowing you to find the right answer.

A proactive approach to answering known issues in online spaces other than one’s own, would – I’m sure – save a significant amount in phone support costs. It’s so obvious I’m sure every big tech company is doing it. Right?

As an employer I pay HMRC the tax I’ve collect from staff and the National Insurance contributions my organisation makes on their behalf or about the 17th of each month. The month I’m paying for is the calendar month before. So on the 17th February I’m paying my HMRC dues from January, meaning I’ve had that money in my bank account gaining interest for 17 days.

Which, as anyone in credit with the bank will tell you, amounts to not very much at all. My £7k is too small to do anything very profitable with, something the measly interest rate the bank gives me proves. But what if there was a way to combine my £7k with the hundreds of thousands of other employers who also wait until the last minute before paying?

My idea would be for the HMRC to say “Pay us on the first of each month instead of the seventeenth and we’ll invest your money with everyone else who does the same. This rather large sum of money will gain far more interest than you could get on your own and to be fair, we’ll split the profit with you. Half the profit of what we earn from investing your money we’ll give you back. The other half we’ll put into a Sovereign Fund and we’ll use it to fund national projects.”

There’s no major change involved for the organisation. Most payroll is calculated electronically and my guess is it’s about as easy to pay in the 1st as it is any other day. If a company was having cash flow problems they could elect to pay later, all online.

Other organisations outside of HMRC could do the same to encourage early payment. It is, after all, what all businesses want. What consumers want is a fair deal. And the web makes mass aggregation easy.

There are a number of sites that give you access to Spotify playlists but what there doesn’t seem to be is a site that says – if you like that you’ll like this.

What I’d love is to be able to mark a track as a favourite (for some reason I see this different to starring it) and have a matching engine analyse the track and find others like it.  I could then mark the tracks it finds as on the money or off the mark and by so doing, further develop its ability to bring me the music I want to hear.

Tools that help us filter signal from noise are one of the great next developments of the information age. The problem now is too much choice and this is particularly acute when it comes to music. There is so much wonderful music out there I know I would love but I just don’t know how to find it. I know what I like and with Spotify I’ve got a way of listening to it, be great if someone could develop technology to point me to it.

One of the supplementary benefits that could come out of this project is an idea of the steps people have successfully taken to achieve their goal.  I imagine a great many people will share the desire to stop smoking, lose weight, eat more healthily and so on. If users allow me to keep a record of the steps they’ve taken and the success they’ve had (all anonymously of course), it’s possible that over time we could learn that if you want to give up smoking the first best step is X, next comes Y, and then Z.

With more analysis these tips could be broken down further.  For example, if we know the type of person the goal setter is and the obstacles they thought might get in the way of them being successful, we could apply the same steps they took to someone with the same personality type and issues.

The forum could also be a useful source of information and tips about the steps people have taken, the struggles they’ve faced and the approach they took to overcome them.  It’d be great if I could get an active forum going, though experience tells me this is much easier said than done.

I’ve always been interested in collective wisdom and one of my most influential books is the Wisdom of Crowds. I would love it if this idea could in some way contribute to the huge database of learning the internet is allowing be formed.

I’ve been doing more thinking about the previously mentioned example of the dog whose relationship between cause and effect had been broken and who consequently sat whimpering while electronic shocks were administered because he didn’t know he could do something to change the situation.

For many people, myself included, this relationship if not broken is severely damaged.  For me it was being bullied for eight years and having an alcoholic mother.  For others it might be sexual abuse, loss of a loved one or other deeply traumatic event. Either way, we try and change a pretty desperate situation or do something to make sure an event did not recur but with often limited results. It can be easy in these situations to conclude that we too are powerless to change the situation we are in.

Having been in therapy for a number of years I often find myself returning to the same issues over and over. I frequently feel that nothing is changing, that all this work is having no effect and worse, that even when I do try and change some unforeseen element will sweep in and put my best efforts and intentions to waste.  This kind of thinking leads to a what’s-the-point attitude, a feel that it’s all a waste of time.

I believe benchmarking can be used to counter this thinking and to further motivate people to do the difficult work of change. If you know where you were before and compare that to where you are now you can see the effect of your actions and so decide whether to continue them or not.

Again, I don’t yet know how benchmarking can be done.  But I do feel it’s important and worthy of a lot more thought.

One of the things ebay has enabled is the ability to determine how much any particular product depreciates in cost over time. Since everything is resellable we can compare the purchase price against the resell price to get an idea of the ownership cost of the product.

In its simplest form we would simply deduct the cost of sale from the cost of purchase and divide the remainder by the number of days owned.  So if you buy a laptop for £1,500 and sell it one year later for £1,200, the cost of ownership is £300/365 = 82p a day.

Working out the cost of ownership allows you to make comparisons between products – so a laptop that cost £800 to buy but would only sell for £400 a year later would actually cost £1.10 a day. Now you might like the design of the £800 laptop more, or you might only be able to afford £800 now and of course there are other running costs to think about, such as electricity, insurance, whether you’ve already got a laptop case that fits – and so on.

The principle is that an item doesn’t cost you what you pay for it, it costs you what you pay for it minus what you can sell it for.  This extra piece of information could help purchase decisions, or at least in my case would give me the justification I need to go for the next model up.

Either way it shouldn’t be hugely complicated to set up.  If you were to enter a product number into depreciation-calc.com the system would do a lookup on Google Shopping and find the lowest price.  It would also do a lookup on ebay and find the average price for a second-hand machine.  Deducting one from the other gives you the cost of ownership.

Now of course there would be all kinds of issues to work out, one that springs to mind is how do you determine how long someone on ebay has owned the item for.  But I’ll leave them to others, I’m a big picture kinda guy.

I’m also going to use this blog to talk about other ideas I have, mostly because I’ll just forget about them otherwise.

I had an idea this morning for a board game called Political Capital.  All the players would be politicians looking to change the world.  But they’d have to balance their idealistic views with the practicalities of trying to run a country – the conflicting needs that must be met, different interests that must be served and above all, the compromises that must be made.

I’ve got no real idea how it would work except that players would go round a board (part Monopoly, part Snakes and Ladders) and earn political capital for landing on certain squares and lose it on others.  There would be Political Minefield and other luck-of-the-draw type cards to spice things up a little too – possibly by introducing a random event beyond the player’s control that causes them to lose or gain capital.

I’m not sure how the decision making element would be added, though I think such a thing is key.  For the basic principle of this game is that as a politician you have to make some tough choices and that for each one made political capital is lost, so much so that eventually it’s all spent and you are booted unceremoniously from office.  Or perhaps everyone but you is, and that’s how you win.

I’ve just finished Predictable Irrational which makes the very good point that people don’t always behave in the rational ways that traditional economics assumes we will.  The book contains a number of very interesting studies that back up this claim, one of which particularly stood out for me (and not just because I winced at the thought of the suffering).

Scientists took two dogs and exposed them to electric shocks.  They allowed one dog to work out how he could stop the shocks, from memory he pushed a button.  The other dog was not given the same opportunity and the shocks were administered completely at random.  Didn’t matter what that dog did, he got the shocks anyway.

Then they took the same two dogs and put them in a cage where the floor was electrified.  The difference this time is that both were given a way to stop the shocks from happening.  The first dog, the dog who’d worked out the pattern previously, learnt when the bell sounded he could leap into another cage where the floor wasn’t electrified. However, the second dog just sat in the corner whimpering.  This dog had had the fundamental relationship between cause and effect broken and believed there was nothing he could do to stop the pain from happening.

I think a similar effect occurs to a great many of us who are trying to change long-established patterns of behaviour. For various different reasons the link between cause and effect has broken and it can seem like nothing we do will alter this thing we’re trying to change.

I think we need to find a way to allow people to realise that change is happening, that their actions are having an effect.  I believe benchmarking plays a key role in this – if we can measure where we are before we start the action and then measure where we are along the way, we can see if progress is, or isn’t taking place.

This effect was clearly in place when I ran the marathon.  My first run was seven minutes long, a month later I could run for 30 minutes without stopping, then 60 and so on.  Weight loss is another benchmarking tool – or rather the scales are.

So the question is how do we apply the same approach to things such as giving up smoking, finding a partner, eating more healthily, stopping swearing or any of the thousand other things we might want to change?

I don’t have the answer to this by the way.

After feedback from John Williams I’ve decided to change the output for this particular task. Instead of building a web site I’m going to build a Facebook app.  Once I learn how to build apps that is.

There are two reasons this approach is better than my first idea of installing a forum and then adding a badge system to that.  The first is that the people who are most likely to help you define the steps needed to achieve your goal and also to encourage you along the way, are your friends.  Secondly, there’s a great part of me that really loves building stuff and getting things to work.

I’ve always loved the Buddhist phrase “the journey is the destination” but have never got close to living it and until now have even struggled with the idea that the goal of this project must be to have fun whilst doing it.  This shift in focus will help with that, though I’m sure there will be many times I’ll want to throw the keyboard at the wall.  I deal with frustration like a pro.

I used to sneer at joggers, well you don’t get to justify your own hatred of exercise by being jealous of them now do you. I was always skinny, I could eat what I wanted, I didn’t have to do all that running around, sweaty, damn-hard-work stuff. Spreading girth, protruding belly, pah, that’ll go somehow, someday.  So yes, I will have another pint, thank you.

I’m not quite sure who took the photo that changed it all but it wasn’t me, I was asleep. In fact it took me quite a while to even realise that this fat slob was me. Bad picture, bad angle, maybe. But there’s undoubtedly a lot of stomach there, clearly something had to be done.

My first thought is always to technology so I started by buying a WiFit.  Then a friend pointed out that this was a bit rubbish and the best way to get fit was to do something deeply challenging, something that once committed to there was no turning back from, something for which the very training would give me the results I wanted.  Something like the marathon.

The thing that’s so fantastic about the marathon is that most of us recognise it as a challenge that’s very hard to do and at the same time, one anyone can do.  Doesn’t matter where you start out, if you follow the training program you will end up finishing the marathon. The program is the key.

There are three fundamental things that make the marathon program so successful. The first is that I trusted it; hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, a great many of whom were (surely) in worse shape than me had done it; and if it could make a marathon runner out of them it must be able to do the same for me.  All I had to do was follow the steps.  The second key element was that the the steps were challenging enough to feel deeply satisfying when hit.  But not so challenging that you felt discouraged that they couldn’t be.  Lastly, there was a group dynamic involved, I’d told all my friends I was doing this, I was raising money for charity, there was no way I was backing out.

And it worked.  Brilliantly.  I ran the London Marathon in four and a half hours and enjoyed just about every minute of it, save the last hour.  The program took an overweight, middle-aged, exercise hating man and turned him into the Greek Adonis I can’t let you see today. It is for your own good.

My goal with this project is to test if the same approach can be made to work with other areas of personal development.  Can I create a mechanism that allows for challenging goals to be set and met, for feedback to be earned and for group dynamics to be fruitfully employed.  My hope is that if this is a transferable model, then I might be able to help others achieve what can be the most difficult thing in the world: change established patterns of behaviour.