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I’m hoping this is some sort of joke.

I feel like a roving reporter! I’m here in Hong Kong with a brief moment between conference speaking, tutorials and taking photos. So, dear reader, thought I’d report in! Thanks for the wonderful comments to my “brand slave” post of the other day. I met someone yesterday at the HK conference who told me they read the ThinkingShift blog every day but never comment. I asked why and the response was they just wished to learn. Okay by me! I suspect I have a number of readers just like this lady.

So…how am I going in Hong Kong? Well, the day before the conference, I took myself off to Harbour City - gigantic mall of nothing but designer brands. I thought this would be a very good test for me in my new guise as anti-brand Kim. It was tough, let me tell you. I was either going to hyperventilate at the sight of all the luxury goods we don’t get in Australia or faint from the pressure of it all!

I checked out a few handbags; looked at some designer fashions and then……something happened that really propelled me run out of the mall. In came a gaggle of American tourists (would that be a gaggle, a hoard, a bunch??). Women with husbands in tow. Ooohing and aahing over a particular brand pair of jeans and how they simply MUST be seen in those back in the good old US of A. One of the women said “Oh Jean will be SO jealous that we have the very latest look”. Gasp! I threw them a look - they didn’t notice!

Then in tottered some Japanese tourists. They had been to the Hello Kitty! shop and were laden down with goods. They also oohed and aahed. Time for me to high tail it out of the shopping mall as I could feel the pressure mounting. So….I took off outside and…was met with the most glorious view of the Star Ferry terminal against a backdrop of glittering skycrapers towering up towards the clouds. Photos, photos and more photos! Within 5 minutes, I was feeling so much better.

Yesterday, was the all-day conference, so that kept me out of the shops. I had the pleasure of hearing Dave Snowden talk about Web 2.0 - he was his usual engaging and articulate self. And I met Leif Edvinsson for the first time and will help him set up his own blog.

So tomorrow and Sunday are my big tests. Two days free. I have planned a photographic expedition and will try to take shots of people. Still reluctant to do this (yep, privacy issues) but I’m going to look at this place through a different lens.

Will report in again soon!

A post or two ago, I talked about photography and poems. If you missed it (where were you!!), go here. I’m in Hong Kong this week.

Meanwhile, here is Urban Fragment 2.

The winter sun sets the city in lemon marmalade
Light buttered buildings buttress the sky
Standing proud in a rack of urban guilt
I’ll crunch on the toasts of winning speculators
And pick the concrete flecks of their failed brethen
From between my incisors

Photo by me. Poem by Matt Moore.

I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with “brands”. Everywhere you go these days, you see people sporting the latest designer shirts or sunglasses; ladies toting around huge designer bags and “the look” of the season or teetering down the street wearing ridiculous sky-high designer heels. I’ve been a brand slave, no doubt about it. But frankly, there’s an insidious thing happening to us all: we’re beginning to look alike.

It’s true that when I was working for a global company as their Australian CKO, I fell into the brand trap. I did a lot of travel for global KM meetings - Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, London, the US and so on. So I bought (gasp) a Louis Vuitton handbag. That was about 7 years ago. I still have it and use it, so I guess it was a reasonable investment. I was caught up in the “I’m travelling, so I must make some duty free purchases”; or “I’m in Paris, so I must have the latest French designer costume jewellery”; or “I’m in New York: quick, where’s Tiffanys?”.

But I’m sure we’ve all read about how children in developing countries toil in designer brand “sweat shops” to make the goods you and I covet so we can be thought of as hip, cool, funky - whatever the word is these days. I admit that in the past, I’ve rarely given a thought to where my clothes or accessories might be made or the context in which they were manufactured.

I’m now hearing the term “ethical luxury” - goods which badge their owners as people who are environmentally or socially aware. Organic supermarkets, organic brands and fair trade goods are popping up all over the retail landscape. Buy organic and it does make you feel a tad better I suppose.

As I was growing up, you didn’t hear of brand names. Clothes were made in Australia as far as I recall. You went to the local cake shop and bought a hefty apple turnover with real cream (not that mock shock stuff). You heard more about a Holden Monaro than you did about a BMW or Audi. But now we seem to covet what everyone else covets or what Hollywood celebs wear. There are so many brands now that I get confused!

So I am making a vow to myself (and to you dear reader!) that from now on I will buy no more brands. This winter, I am off to the vintage clothing shop to buy my new (recycled) winter coat. I recently bought a handbag from the early 1950s. No designer name, no idea where it’s made. Next summer, I am buying silk georgette blouses from the 1940s and 50s from another vintage shop I know of. I have a passion for anything from the 1940s and 1950s, so it makes sense for me to buy from that period.

New shoes? off to the vintage shop. A new bracelet or necklace? Make my own. I designed a necklace for a great friend of mine and we were at dinner recently when she wore it. The other person joining us asked my friend “wow, great necklace, where did you get it?”. We joked and said it was a Versace original. I have a jeweller friend who I have commissioned pieces from - so if it’s beyond me, then she’ll make my stuff. Hand make it. When was the last time, in our throw away society, that we lovingly touched something handcrafted and wore it with pride?

So instead of being a brand slave, I will now be an anti-brand slave. This week’s trip to Hong Kong will be my first big test. Normally, I would go on the prowl for that fake handbag (ethical issues in the making of the fake I know) or comb the shops for brand designs. This time, I’m taking my camera and I’m going to try to capture the street scenes and night life of Hong Kong. This should be a good ploy to keep me out of the shops. I’ll try to really look at people and context rather than looking for the nearest shopping mall. I’ll stop and look at how other cultures live instead of rushing off to the modern glistening skyscraper that houses a huge shopping mall.

Why don’t you do the same? Give up the brands and go anti-brand. Or have you already? Tell me more if you have.

A slight change of pace over the next week. I’ll be in Hong Kong speaking at KM2.0: Knowledge Management in a Wiki World, so posts will be shorter (maybe!). But a while ago, I took up Matt Moore’s offer because I’ve taken up (well, really re-taken up) photography.

When I was young, way back in 1000 BC, I used to take heaps of photos with my dad. My dad was an avid photographer. He was a fighter pilot in WWII for the Royal NZ Air Force and I still have his flying logs that are chock full of black and white shots of pilots in the desert; pilots on R&R; pilots in dog fights and so on. As a teenager, I used to scare the unsuspecting by taking candid shots of them.

So…December last year, for no particular reason, I decided to take up photography again. It was an urge I couldn’t ignore. I bought myself a camera and a fancy lens. Hang the expense I told myself. I post my photos on Flickr but under a different name. Why? Because it’s another “Kim”: a part of my life that I’m keeping a bit secret just now. How typical I hear you say given my fierce protection of privacy!

I am drawn to decaying stuff: peeling posters, abandoned buildings, flowers in their dying moments, the detritus of a city, the negative spaces. Make what you will out of this! But I am coming out of the photography closet (temporarily) and will post 3 photos over the next week for which Matt Moore has penned a poem (thx Matt!). Unlike when I was young(er), I’m now very reluctant to take photos of people - I know I wouldn’t like Google Street View or some photographer snapping me. But occasionally, when I find an intriguing person, I’ll take a shot. Upcoming posts will be 2 photos of people.

I have my own story behind this photo but I will leave the photo and the poem to you to interpret, to ponder over, to react to.

listen carefully through your lens
the city’s concrete parapraxes
its slips of a rusty tongue
its sly evasions when put to the question

you can’t get a straight answer out of the city
you read its map statement again
combing over the misremembered debris
until you find a path through the rubble

a lead in the case
some lead from the windows
are you hungry?
in need of entertainment?

then follow the corroded path
up through the air vents
past the fire escape and insulation
into the tainted daylight

the city won’t budge

First of all, if you celebrate Easter, happy Easter to all ThinkingShift readers. To make us smile, here is a photo I took of Max, the wonder collie, who has found considerable fame on Flickr. He is in his “ain’t I just too cute!” pose and I’ve turned him into a LOLDog (yep, there’s LOLDogs as well as LOLCats).

But on another note, here’s a couple of very different photos I took a few weeks ago.

I was out in Sydney looking for photo opportunities - I usually take photos of old buildings, abandoned stuff, decaying stuff - stuff you wouldn’t normally like to take a photo of. But on this day, I spotted this old woman with “her children”. The sight of her has made an enormous impact on me - who is she? is she homeless? what has been her life story? what is her current story? Very clearly, she loves pigeons. I understand that she feeds them every day in a major urban park.

As we all tuck into chocolate bunnies and eggs over Easter, I wonder what this woman will be doing and what her life is like.

Remind me not to be at the mercy of these two nurses. A robotic patient at Florida State’s Human Performance Laboratory, lay idly by whilst two nurses, one with solid experience and the other with less nursing experience, handled a medical emergency - the plummeting blood pressure of the patient.

Stan D. Ardman (robotic patient) was in trouble. He was having difficulty breathing and his heart monitor was going berserk. Thomas, a nurse in his mid-20s, rushed in to the hospital room and flipped through the patient’s chart. He was uncertain. The patient reported feeling nauseous and dizzy. The chart told Thomas that Ardman was already receiving a drip of dopamine, a compound that treats low blood pressure. Increasing the dosage of dopamine would raise the blood pressure and relieve the nausea and dizziness. This would have been the solution, but Thomas was unsettled by inexperience and the sounds of the heart monitor squealing, which signalled that blood pressure was plummeting further.

In a state of uncertainty in crisis, Thomas decided to give Ardman epinephrine. This drug would raise the patient’s blood pressure but, in combination with the dopamine, would also spike his heart rate and possibly kill him. Ardman drifted off into unconsciousness and just before dying….the simulation ended. Thomas had killed the patient.

Okay so Thomas was just out of nursing school and didn’t have the medical knowledge or intuition that years of nursing experience can give. So in came Monica with over 25 years’ nursing experience. Same robotic patient; same scenario. As the monitor showed a drop in blood pressure, within seconds Monica spotted the dopamine drip and identified it as a possible answer. Cool, calm and experienced.

But….Monica needed to know Ardman’s weight to administer the right dosage of dopamine. As she picked up his chart to establish his weight, the monitor began squealing dramatically and….. Monica made the same mistake as Thomas, she went for the epinephrine. Ardman went into tachycardia. Monica at least knew to shock him with the defibrillator but too late…..Monica had killed off her patient just as surely and swiftly as Thomas had. Both novice and experienced nurse had made the same error and taken the same decision to act in a certain way in crisis.

Knowledge management is about understanding experience and improving performance through learning from experience. So you would think that Monica would have it over Thomas. According to Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, the number of years of experience a person has does not guarantee success or outstanding performance. Grand masters at chess can recall intricate and complex layouts of 25 pieces from their games but when the chess pieces are randomly arranged, they can recall the positions of about 6 pieces - not much better than a novice chess player.

Expert performers possess experience plus superior skill, which is gained by deliberate practice that involves the risk of failure. In a study of figure skaters and their skating practice habits, elite skaters spent 68% of their time practicing jumps; whilst skaters with similar years’ experience, but considered second tier skaters, spent only 48% of their practice time on jumps. So if we merely practice what is in our “comfort zone” repertoire without stretching our skills through learning and practicing new or complex tasks and receiving accurate feedback, then we may make the same mistake as Monica.

I remember working with a lawyer who had over 20 years’ experience. All “baby” lawyers were in awe and wanted to work with him in order to learn from his experience. But it turned out that vast experience got in his way. He made mistakes that even a baby lawyer would be prone to making. As Ericsson points out, experience often means we execute routine tasks almost unconsciously. We retrieve information but we don’t worry about the rules. The free space that’s left in our minds by knowing how to perform a task may mean that we get distracted by thinking about what’s for dinner. And so experience can lead to smugness or overconfidence. It can lead to a Monica-type decision in a time of crisis.

Source: Time

For those of you who don’t know Dave Snowden, shame! Check out his great blog. But this is a gift for Dave from LOLCats :)- Apparently, we scared him with all the ways the world could be kaput in our last post. And yep, a surveillance system is needed!!

I reckon when your number is up, you should aim to go in a spectacular fashion. Nothing as mundane as carking it in your sleep. Far preferable to snuff it a dramatic moment that will go down in history. So if you spend your time wondering about how you’ll go, perhaps one of the following will happen to you (or all of us):

An Australian astronomer is giving us dire warnings about a beautiful star that could send us all kaput. WR104 is an elegant rotating pinwheel system located in the Sagittarius constellation. Discovered 8 years ago, the system contains a very unstable star (mmm…think I work with a few of them!) named Wolf-Rayet, which is known to star-gazing types as a ticking time bomb. The hot dust and gas that is the swirling star is getting ready to explode and is really just down the road from Earth - a mere 8000 light years away. And should it explode, Earth is in the line of fire. A destructive gamma-ray radiation burst would come our way and zap. Earlier fossil extinctions are said to have been caused by gamma-ray bursts from supernovas having hissy fits. Dr Tuthill, the astronomer who first clamped eyes on WR104 says:

“I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can’t help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel“. Okay, well when you gotta go, snuffing it along with all of humanity in a spectacular explosion and death rays caused by an adolescent star having a melt down could count as pretty memorable, not that we’d be around to remember!

Should you be contemplating just how long you can hang around and avoid that final moment, you might want to consider leaving out the protein. Protein can apparently hasten your exit from this world, but the good news is protein can lead to more children. Eating less protein, not just fewer calories, is the (new) key to longevity. The balance of protein to carbohydrate in the diet is critical scientists are saying. In experiments with fruit flies, scientists are showing that eating less protein may extend life; but protein is needed for the reproductive system, so cutting down on protein will lead to having fewer children.

Okay, so a bit of a dilemma here: eat less protein, maybe delay the inevitable but be pretty lonely when you have no kids to look after you in your dotage; or scoff a lot of protein and have kids, but maybe not live long enough to have them look after you in your dotage.

But then we may not even have to worry about protein or death stars, because something else may be capable of snuffing us out in one blaze of glory. The plague. It’s here again. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classified the plague as ‘re-emerging’. Did you know that WHO records a few thousand cases of the plague each year around the world? Scared the bejesus out of me when I read that! Since the early 1990s, the plague has returned to places like Mozambique (gulp: I’ve been there), India, Zambia (been there too), Algeria and parts of China. In the 1970s, the plague mostly existed in Asia; but now it’s zeroing in on Africa where more than 90% of cases are reported.

You probably were taught in Modern History that the worst manifestation of the plague happened during the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 14th Century. And you probably found out that this creature and its fleas was to blame - the rodent:

Mind you, the Medieval plague rodent probably didn’t look as cute as this fellow because it was busy living in the garbage of medieval European towns. But scientists are now beginning to understand the dynamics of plague infection. It’s not just the Yersinia pestis bacteria, which animal populations can carry, that is the problem. The spread of the bacteria is dependent on interactions between rodents AND contact between humans and wildlife. Rodents are now being displaced by deforestation and sprawling human populations are now reaching areas where black rats live.And global warming could accelerate the whole thing. Following a 50 year study, scientists from the former Soviet Union noted that human plague in Kazakhstan occurs only when the local gerbil population reaches a certain threshold in winter. Warmer winters mean more gerbils. A warmer world could mean the unleashing of this virulent pathogen. And given the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, don’t count on drugs to save us from a rerun of the 14th Century.

So…let me count the ways: a Death Star, too much protein, the plague, terrorists, ebola, bird flu, George Bush….

Sources: University of Sydney; University of Sydney News; Time.

Regular ThinkingShift readers will know of my dislike for surveillance of any sort, but particularly CCTV. So I am intrigued by these surveillance lamps being exhibited at the Stockholm Furniture Fair 2008:

From the press release:

“Blending the typical appearance of a surveillance camera with a standing lamp is an ambiguous refection of our thoughts about the political future” says the creators of surveillance light for HDK the school of design and crafts that exhibits at Stockholm Furniture Fair, February 6-10.

Source: Surveillance Light