Not too long ago I was an emcee at a conference in Florida and it was great. There were three interesting speakers—Craig Groeschel, who founded Lifechurch.tv, Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church near Atlanta, and then we had the famous author Patrick Lencioni. I learned a lot from these guys. It was so interesting - all three of them talked about ego issues. *   Craig talked about how a lot of people have fear and let that fear stop them. He said you need to push through the pain and do what’s right. *   Patrick Lencioni has a new book called "Getting Naked," which is all about being vulnerable. He thinks people in business shouldn’t try to act as if they’re perfect - people will really admire that. Colleen Barrett from Southwest Airlines has also said that people admire your strengths, but they love your vulnerability. *   And then Andy Stanley talked about how if you do less and delegate more, you are going to get a lot more accomplished. A lot of times people try to achieve things beyond their abilities because they are afraid to delegate to other people. That’s when you end up trying to do everything—and of course you’re going to fall short. Then you’re in trouble. That sounds like the fear of false pride - where you think more of yourself than you should, and you don’t want to appear vulnerable. The other fear is where you have self doubt - and think less of yourself than you should. This really reinforces the importance of our whole self leadership program—really effective leadership starts from the inside. It starts with you, whether you’re trying to influence kids at home, or coworkers, or as a manager with your people, or what have you. It’s so important that you know who you are, and that you realize that you are NOT your performance or the opinion of others. You can do what’s right. You can also share and be vulnerable. When you make a mistake, you can push through fear. I just love learning. Make sure this week to learn a lot. Maybe there’s still time today to learn something!

Next week Discovery Machine will be attending the 2011 Defense GameTech User Conference in Orlando, FL.  This year’s event has a focus on artificial intelligence and highlights how video games can be used to enhance military training.  Video games are no longer simply for entertainment, but embraced and deployed in practice for training all over the world.  The most obvious reason for this is the fact that video games are engaging.  Since new trainees have been brought up playing video games many of them have a "play until you win" mentality.  Therefore, they are engaged in the game the entire time they play, they pay attention so they can win, and will play time and time again until they master that game.  No matter what their motivation, the students learn their mission objectives due to repetition and they enjoy it. Among other practical benefits are substantial cost savings, increased exposure to trainees, enhanced training with top military expertise, increased documentation of performance metrics, and more.  Discovery Machine is equipped to tackle all of these issues and more.  In the forthcoming GameTech show Discovery Machine will be highlighting how we can address these concerns by showcasing our enhancements to various military training simulations. 1. Substantial Cost Savings - Discovery Machine created a series of basic level actions (BLAs) which can be strung together rapidly to create missions.  These BLAs can be used time and time again WITHOUT COMPUTER CODING, eliminating the expensive script development process of more traditional programming techniques.  New BLAs can be created in less than a day and be deployed in a matter of minutes, again shortening development time and reducing costs drastically. 2. Increased Exposure to Trainees - Live training is very effective and all trainees should go through it at some point.  Discovery Machine’s mission is not to eliminate that live training.  The simple truth is that live training is very expensive and budgets do not allow all trainees to go through every live training event.  With a videogame enhanced by artificial intelligence ALL students can train prior to their live training events.  This increases the effectiveness of the live event because basic skills are mastered prior to the live event.  Ultimately, this increased exposure allows all students to have equivalent training, not just the elite. 3. Enhanced Training with Top Military Expertise - Discovery Machine has a proven methodology to document the skills and experience of the military’s top experts.  By documenting that knowledge and deploying it as artificial intelligence to control avatars in simulation, Discovery Machine allows individuals to train against the best knowledge available.  Experts are not always available to act as enemies in live events, but if their knowledge is represented in a videogame, their experiences can still be leveraged. 4. Increased Documentation of Performance Metrics - The power of video games as a training device is not only for the trainee, there are also many enhancements for the instructor.  Discovery Machine enables the ability to monitor all of a student’s actions throughout game play.  Every interaction can be recorded and the time it occurred can be documented down to the millisecond.  In conjunction with our partner, Advanced Brain Monitoring, we are even able to log brain activity and synchronize it with individual actions.  This can be used to create powerful analyses on what caused heightened stress levels or adverse reactions to the trainee. Discovery Machine also equips instructors with the ability to monitor the game itself.  All characters controlled with our software have their own hierarchy which can be monitored while it executes.  This allows the instructor to understand why the AI is performing the way it is.  Artificial intelligence is not new but understandable artificial intelligence is a relatively new concept that Discovery Machine has embraced and made possible. If you will be attending GameTech this year, come check out our demonstration at Booth TA and check out our exciting enhancements to the world of video games for training powered by artificial intelligence.

At our recent Client Conference, Garry Ridge, the President of WD-40 and my coauthor on the book How to Win at Work, was one of the keynote speakers. He was just marvelous. The concept he talked about, which is in our book, was alarm bells. He told how he was in a hotel room in London one evening and was getting ready to watch an English comedy and have a couple of beers when he heard an alarm start ringing. He didn’t pay any attention to it—like we sometimes do with alarms because they often go off by mistake. But all of a sudden, someone was banging on the door and telling him to get outside. So he found himself outside wearing just his shorts and T-shirt and those slippers you get at hotels. He ended up out there for a couple of hours, on a cool London evening.  If he had responded to the alarm right away, he might have had time to put on warmer clothing and maybe a jacket. Later, as he was flying home, he started thinking about that incident and about what alarm bells he may have in his personal and professional life that he may not be paying attention to. Garry asked himself what alarms were going off personally—"Well, I’m overweight and not exercising enough." And in business—"Am I telling people who really work hard that I care about them enough?" I think an interesting thing for us all to do is get out a sheet of paper, divide it in half—personal and business—and just think about those alarm bells. Is there anything that’s happening that you aren’t paying attention to because of the noise of life, the busy-ness of life, that maybe could be an alarm bell that, if you really paid attention it, you could be better prepared? I just think it’s a wonderful exercise, both personally and in business. Take a look at those alarm bells. I’m going to do some thinking about this myself—what are the things I’m ignoring, and what am I really paying attention to? Have a great day. Watch out for those alarm bells—they could be there for a reason and might help you more than you think.

Many organizations have invested significant resource into lessons learned systems, but have yet to see the return on investment that these systems promise.   Often lessons learned become lessons stored, which defeats the purpose of capturing the lesson.   Discovery Machine has developed a process and software for capturing, deploying and evolving deployable best practices. The body of knowledge represented by best practices and lessons learned is not readily available to practitioners during problem solving.  In today’s environment, professionals frequently have neither the specialized expertise needed, nor the time and resources necessary, to identify the best solution to address the objective. The lack of true best-practices capture prevents organizations from both identifying many useful standard processes but also from improving upon them over time.    The problem is that bringing best practices to practitioners requires the capture of real expertise.   The tacit knowledge or key person know-how found in the heads of experienced individuals.   Best practices should embody the expertise acquired through years of experience, and the decision-making and problem solving knowledge evolved from of years of action.  To capture this expertise requires a methodology and technology based in cognition.   It requires an organization to reexamine what knowledge is and how to make it an asset. Best practices are activities that are carried out by people to achieve goals.   Documents and diagrams can describe general processes, but nearly always fail in capturing the decision making and problem solving that exists between the lines in the document and within each box in the diagram.    Decisions are tied directly to specific situations that experts encounter and those situations quickly diverge from the documented steps.   Lessons learned and best practices efforts to date are broad and shallow.  They touch the surface of deep problems but do not address the core.   They fail to decompose knowledge to a granularity that is useful and thus fail to capture the important aspects of key knowledge assets. Discovery Machine has an approach for turning each best practice into job aid that can continue to evolve with your organization.

In the book Everyone’s a Coach that I wrote with Don Shula, we came up with an acronym that may really help you think about  how you’re doing as parents and managers and volunteers in the community. You can use this in just about any area of your life. C stands for Conviction-Driven: Do people understand what your values are and where you’re going? Because leadership is about going somewhere. Lead with conviction. O stands for Overlearning: There’s no such thing as teaching a good thing too much. You want to prepare your people so much that they really know their responsibilities and they can make something good happen. It’s important to keep telling your people and your kids and anyone else you may have influence over:  If you’re going to do something, do your best. A stands for Audible-Ready: Don’t get stuck with a plan if for some reason it’s not working. Let people bring their brains to work; let your kids use their brains, too. Be open to the thoughts of others. Be ready to change your mind if a new and better idea comes along. C stands for Consistency: This isn’t about behaving in the same way all the time; it’s about behaving the same way in similar circumstances. Be consistent. Praise progress and cheer people on when they’re doing well. If there’s a problem, you can redirect them and get them back to their goals. If it’s somebody who’s dragging their feet who knows better, give them a little one-minute reprimand that will get their attention. But always end it with a reaffirmation that you know they’re better than that. H stands for Honesty-Based: This one is all about walking your values. Act with integrity at all times. This is a wonderful little checklist for all of us in terms of: Are we leading with conviction? Are we really trying to always do our best? Are we adaptable and innovative and ready to change? Are we consistent in  our behavior and are we walking our talk?  Something to think about this week.

The Christian Science Monitors’ headlines: "Government shutdown 2011 avoided with 11th-hour budget deal Approaching a midnight deadline Friday night, House, Senate, and Obama administration came to agreement on a budget, avoiding a government shutdown. But tough political fights remain…..", and about every other news media avenue in the US and around the world, heralded the last second shutdown compromise. At Discovery Machine, Inc. (DMI) we never thought of shutting down nor had any of our partners in the US Army, Navy and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). It turns out that all our projects are viewed as "essential" by the Department of Defense (DoD). Surely we agree! With all the political wrangling it’s important that we all stay focused on our objectives and exceeding our partners’ expectations. Maybe that ability to focus is one of the reasons Discovery Machine is an award winning Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) success story.

Some of you might know that I’m good friends with Colleen Barrett, who stepped down as President of Southwest Airlines two years ago.  It’s interesting - at Southwest Airlines, they say that all of their people are leaders, including those who don’t have management positions. It’s because they think everyone can have a positive impact on others. That’s consistent with the way we at Blanchard define leadership—it’s an influence process. Anytime you’re trying to influence the thinking, beliefs, or development of someone else, you’re engaging in leadership. I think the reason people like the title of The One Minute Manager better than if it had been called The One Minute Leader was that a lot of people don’t think of themselves as leaders. When I do sessions, sometimes I’ll ask big groups of managers, "How many of you think of yourself as a leader?" and less than one-third of them raise their hands. Somehow they think the word leader is reserved for high-level positions like Presidents and CEOs. In reality, when I ask folks to list influential people in their lives who have impacted them the most, they very seldom mention managers or supervisors at work. They usually talk about parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, coaches, or teachers. So there are life-role leadership roles as well as organizational leadership roles. It’s an interesting thing. So I want every one of you to remember that you are a leader. Each of you has the ability to influence other people, whether it’s a coworker, a kid at home, a spouse, or a friend. Because anytime you attempt to influence the thinking, beliefs, or development of someone else, you are engaging in leadership. So we’re all leaders. It’s just a challenge to get people to think that way. So be good to yourself. Be a good leader this week. Impact people in a positive way for the greater good!

I find this both irritating and encouraging at the same time.   It is irritating because, as a researcher,  I like to think of IBM’s and Discovery Machine’s accomplishments under the banner of Artificial Intelligence.   The models of human behavior that Discovery Machine produces are intelligent by almost any definition.   They communicate with human’s and react in nuanced ways to changes in their environment.    The problem, however, from the perspective of some reviewers is that they are also understandable.   It is this understanding that negates their appeal to some science and technology reviewers.   Ironically, it is this same quality of understandability that provides these models with their ultimate utility in operational environments, which I find very encouraging. As I have mentioned in a prior blog posting the Watson system competed in Jeopardy! against all-time top-ranking human opponents following all of the rules of the game and bested those opponents.  The unstructured nature of the topics and the variety of the strategies employed are in my estimation clear demonstrations of intelligence.   And to those observing Watson on television they certainly appear intelligent.   To science and technology reviewers, however, who open the black box and have an understanding of the processes in use, the intelligence seems to magically disappear.   "Ah! It’s not really AI, it’s just (put processes here)." Discovery Machine takes the view that understanding of the process does not negate its intelligence but rather makes it more useful.   In the explicit understanding of the intelligence and the processes we gain utility.   In fact, if one were to happen upon a process that showed intelligence but was not understandable, it could be interesting but would ultimately be far less useful.  In a world of verification and validation, who would use such a process?   How would they verify that it would perform consistently, safely, or even ethically?   These concerns take the fanciful notions of non-understandable Artificial Intelligence off the table for practical purposes. Discovery Machine continues to believe that only by opening the black box of intelligence will AI ever meet its true practical potential in the commercial world.

In San Diego we’re in the middle of a six-month "Season of Service" movement with businesses, civic agencies, and churches all pitching in with community volunteers to serve others. For years I’ve been dreaming about how we can make San Diego a servant leadership town - how in the near future people will come here and say, "What an amazing place to live—just look at the way government and business and education and neighborhoods interact - everyone seems to be out to serve each other and solve problems, not to be self serving." My larger dream is that leadership throughout the world will be composed of people who lead at a higher level and, in the process, serve first and lead second. That’s a really tall order, and I might sound like a dreamer. But read this wonderful quote from Harriet Tubman: "Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." Why not? What do you want to do to change the world? Remember, you can do it by the moment-to-moment interactions with your family, your friends, your colleagues, and everyone you meet. What’s your dream for changing the world? Go ahead, be a dreamer!

Recently I spent some time with Tom Crum and his daughter, Alia. Tom’s a good buddy of ours and is an Aikido expert. He wrote a wonderful book called Three Deep Breaths. I think I probably have shared these at some point but they are worth repeating… You know, as you head off any day in the car - I think the car is a wonderful place to quiet yourself if you don’t listen to the radio. The first breath is the Centering Breath - you just breathe in, into your center right below your belly button. Just center yourself and feel your breath. Once you have really centered yourself, then the next breath is your Visionary Breath. The vision is the best you that you can possibly be for that day, no matter what you’re doing at work or at home or in the neighborhood or the community—what’s the best you that you can possibly be? After you do that, then take what Tom calls a Discovery Breath, which means to be open to learning. Be open to getting new information, don’t be defensive. Make the day a challenging and wonderful day. So what a wonderful three breaths - the Centering Breath, the Visioning Breath, and the Discovery Breath. That can settle you before a meeting - do those three deep breaths - or before anything that you’re going to do. So center yourself and then be open towards things. Take time to breathe and get yourself centered and visioned and discovered. Have a great week!