Being disruptive is a good thing

Today I was on a roll with the final virtual worlds pitch of the week in the company of two of Hursley’s Distinguished Engineers(DE), Mandy and Andy. Both of them are known for being great innovators and mentors a like and have a proper standing in our technical community based on doing things.
I did my new Virtual Worlds pitch to a very knowlegable audience of visitors. Evangelizing as I do it is good to have a positive discussion rather than having to always convince the odd doubter in the crowd.
On after me was Mandy talking about the problems of free thinkers and innovators within traditional management structures of any organization. Much talk of comfort zones, motivations and measurements.
I twittered a few times that many of the phrases and examples of an attempt to control a free thinker were almost identical to the ones I have heard more than once during my career. The gist of the presentation is that if you do not pay attention to people and their new ideas and merely seek to control and tell them what to do then the true innovators peronality types will either leave, give up or become subversive.
Part of the make up of some of the people that can be regarded as causing trouble/innovators is an apparent lack of attention, as new things come around and they get focus. Which in a traditional task based management structure is obviously hard for some people to manage or deal with.

The irony of that was that Andy and I were at the back of the room trying out something Andy was putting together. So it may have seemed we were not paying attention. In reality we were helping Mandy by demonstrating the very traits that she was discussing. This is very different from people just ignoring the presenter and doing their emails.
So what was Andy SC up to ? He too has got a Nokia n95 recently, though his came with his elevation to DE 🙂 As an inventor and leader in all things pervasive he was exploring the barcode/QR code reader software whilst creating a few messages with some QR code creator software.
He was showing it to me when I decided to flickr it live via the phone in a wheels within wheels type of way.
I should also point out that Andy was introduced to QR codes by Dave Conway-Jones our pervasive guru who has usually seen, implemented and moved on, with most of these things before we have even got to them.
qrcode
I dont think Mandy was too upset as it was a quick burst of energy and as we broke for lunch everyone asked what it was. By that time it was a QR code clock, not unlike his TimeFrame in Second Life
Now, next comes a Second Life implementation, prims or textures?

6 thoughts on “Being disruptive is a good thing

  1. Guilty as charged (sorry Mandy)
    The coolest thing about this is that if you point your camera at that photo, it reads the QRcode – how recursive is that!
    Andy

  2. Excellent post! And to add my own experience with QR codes.

    Having a working prototype of the AR Handheld device from Daniel Wagner. I thought of merging the QR code with my business card to have my SL avatar (or RL avatar) augmented on top of it (with a lot of help from the Daniel).

    Though, my thesis have put that project on hold, so I must accept the default Quake II avatar in stead…

  3. Your post was music to my ears.

    The only way I can ever get anything done, is to have about 10 things I need to do at the same time. The kicker is, even with all of these things if I try and structure how much time I spend on them my first instinct it to rebel! I’ve driven many a PM mad because when they were ask me how far through a list of tasks I was, most of the time all I could tell them was, “don’t worry, it’ll all be done in time”. Amazingly, most of it does get done, probably because I realise I’ll get shot if I don’t get the important things done in time.

    I think Gladiator somes it up well:

    Maximus: Do you find it difficult to do your duty?

    Cicero: Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.

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