On being a geek

I went to a geeky event this weekend. It was fun, but it's left me in a reflective mood. It's one of those scales-from-the-eyes moments. I know that I'm geeky. But I also know now that that's not such a good thing.

The problem, I think, is intelligence. For too long, I've bought the popular (and blue-collar) line that to be seen as being geeky is to be seen as being bright. I'm wrong.

As always, it took two events. One, me upsetting one of the other girls by getting over-passionate about an image processing technique, then not being able to explain why to her as I apologised the next morning. And listening to an old fart (there's nothing wrong with being old; it's the fart part that I had problems with) rattle on around midnight about some subject that I knew he was right about but desperately wanted to tell him to shut the f up. I heard him, I agreed with him, but something about his delivery just made me want to shove in some earplugs and pretend I wasn't there. Which was a deeply uncharitable reaction, even for 1am at the Guardian. So I thought about why.

Being geeky is not a state of mind - it's a signal. It says "I believe you should hear my thoughts and enthusiasm about this technology". Like prayer, and religion, it assumes an interaction from the listener, an acknowledgement of involvement regardless of the listener's state or status. And that's not really fair. Unless the person you're talking to is also a geek, and one interested in the same things that you are. But I'm also driven by a fear - that if I think about something and don't say what I think, I'll lose those thoughts and they'll have no validity without a listener.

I need to work on this. It's not going to be easy. I need to gauge who I am talking to, to test and read their responses. I need to manage my enthusiasm, to find other ways of recording and testing my thoughts (like carrying around an ipod or notebook everywhere with me).

I also need to think carefully about the value of my thoughts - especially following an honest conversation with Hwsgo about just how bright/ capable I am.

Sometimes there are no winners...

Today, things started to unravel for some of the people who have made my life difficult for the last few years (which can be a bit of an occupational hazard for someone doing the new and different). At the height of the trouble, I just wanted to be believed, for someone with enough authority to see and recognise what was going on. But now, as it starts to happen, I just feel a bit sad. I've lost, and I've won in all this: had a difficult 2 years followed by a terrible 5 months, but found a strength and a perspective on life, and dare I possibly say even a wisdom that I didn't realise was possible. The others have both won and lost: they've won a great deal over the past couple of years, but are starting to lose the things they've won, with only the faint hope that wisdom, perspective and strength might eventually come from that loss.

It takes a lot of courage to reach down into yourself and face exactly who you are with neither praise nor prejudice. And it takes some very special people to stand by you because of who you are, not what you may or may not have done. To my one reader, who has stuck with me throughout this terrible time, I say thank you. And there are still 6 beers left in the cupboard.

Don't neglect the simple things

A lot of innovation is about showmanship. It's not enough to have a great idea and develop it, to understand how it fits into the world and how to make money from it: you have to sell it. And one of the easiest ways to sell something is with simple, pretty demonstrations. If they can see it and play with it, then people (and by this I mean the people with the real money) are more likely to buy into it. And that includes innovations groups too: doing great things will not be as crucial to survival sometimes as being seen to do small but visible things. So today I did some small things, like linking all our company webmasters together. And a lot of people are happier for it.

Transparency

During A levels, we were set logic problems, of the type that went ‘reduce not(a and b or c) and not(c) to its simplest form’. I did these in my head, writing down the (always correct) answer without the apparently trivial calculations. And got marked down for not showing how I got to the answer. So I had a choice: do the thing right and quickly (I always cross-checked in my head as well), or do it visibly and slowly.

Again, two things have brought this topic to mind. Being forced to work with someone whose view of my personality and work is wildly different from my own, and a rather explosive exchange of assumptions about an Istanbul ferry. I know what I mean and what I’m doing, but how important is it to communicate that, and equally importantly, how can I do that without interrupting or slowing myself down?

Selection for selection criteria

The problem with measuring everything is that you usually get what you measure for rather than what you actually want. Two things triggered this thought this week: one a conversation with a female surgeon and another a decision about a website.

The surgeon found herself amongst a bunch of girl geeks and talked a little about the way that surgeons are selected now. Or perhaps always have been - I don't know much about surgeons. But the basic problem that she had was that despite several higher degrees, she probably has to now get an MBA because the people who choose surgeons take stock of how many different degrees each one has before they look at the person themselves (this is partly caused because there are currently too many junior surgeons chasing too few higher places).

The other decision was mine: I was going to bound upstairs at work and try to start rehabilitating someone by asking them to look over a researcher website that I'd just fixed up. I didn't because I was asking for a favour (part of the rehab) but thought they might reinterpret it as a work order, so I asked a nearby friend to look for me instead. And had a quick lunchtime chat about it, which in summary was being told that the person involved was most likely to have seen my request as demeaning and an attempt to assert dominance over them. I would say that some people are wierd, but on reflection I think I can understand where this is coming from. If you live in a world that does not assume that altruism or societal impulses exist, then what you do will be informed by what you want entirely for yourself. So someone asking for a favour could only be doing this to further themselves, presumably in some way at your expense.

It wouldn't be so bad if this thinking was confined entirely to individuals, but we appear to have an entire society worth of thought like this. We are so used now to being measured as individuals against individual quantitative standards that we are losing the ability to measure ourselves qualitatively as a crowd. And that's the real shame.

Honesty

Well, we've done openness - now for honesty. Today I spent a while talking to the person who gave a copy of a personal conversation to HR. And listening too. And whilst I still cannot condone the degree of action that he took (a simple private message would have been much more effective than going straight to putting something on our records without even passing go), I strongly appreciate the degree of honesty that he had about it. We had already guessed who had done this, but he made sure through a third friend that I knew that it was him, and his reasons for doing it - basically the "protecting the company against negative comments" thing. Odd in a restricted-access place, but since he believes - probably correctly - that FaceBook is easily cracked, and the comments could have been construed as negative in the wrong light, and the person who made the misinterpreted comment listed their place of work on their profile, I can at least see where he was coming from. So we sat and talked about it, and what the limits on publication for employees were and should be, and we came to an understanding that we understood each other but both had very different points of view. Which is exactly how conflict should be. None of this "I'll say this now, but you'll hear something different later", just an honest exchange of views and an agreement to differ. Now only if some world leaders could manage that...

Privacy

Two things today made me think about how much we need to hide or show of innovations: my openly publishing the company's innovations processes across the whole company, and a private facebook comment that I wrote (in response to a friend's frustration) being reported to, and put on my file by, the company.

There are some obvious things that should be hidden: ideas that attract a high security classification, and ideas that are unprotected by innovations disclosures or patents, but on the whole there seems little else that would not be beneficial to an innovations scheme if it were openly available. Which ideas exist, who had them, comments on them, what got funded: the publication of all these can only help to create a culture of openness and psychological safety (apparently one of the greatest measures of the innovativeness of a company) across a company. Sadly, not all companies believe in fostering psychological safety, but we persist. We persist.