Ossifying Ourselves with Diversity and Variety

Mark McDonald from Accenture used the phrase “ossifying ourselves with diversity and variety“ during his presentation at Fusion2015.

Ossifying: To become set in a rigidly conventional pattern.

I had one of these experiences at the conference. My colleagues Tom Lenz and Clare Jones joined me there. We all bring slightly different perspectives, so there is great shared learning when we can aggregate our thoughts and observations. At this conference, we decided to use OneNote in a shared OneDrive folder so we could each take notes and share them in real time.

Clare mostly typed on an iPad, as Tom did occasionally, too. I used a stylus to test the recently released ability to draw or write within OneNote. I also took pictures of key slides or the speaker with my phone or tablet and added them into the note. This often created a mess—different text boxes, overlapping type with handwriting, misaligned oversized photos, etc.

Mark McDonald is both a passionate speaker and he talks fast. Having difficulty keeping up, I decided to resort to handwritten notes, the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. Then, I had to find a way to get these into our shared folder. Here is the process I developed:

This whole situation was far more complex than anyone had intended. Was our quest for real-time notes and the diversity and variety of methods necessary? No. Perhaps our desire to always use the latest technology has become too rigid of a pattern. Perhaps a simple approach (pen and paper note taking, with everything gathered and shared at the end of the conference) would have been satisfactory. We may have even distributed the notes on paper (gasp!).

In our efforts to leverage technology 24/7/365, we need to be careful what we wish for. The latest and greatest isn’t always the shortest or fastest distance between two points.