Metaverse U: VWs and future of work

Virtual environments and the future of work (I missed the intro, so don;t know the actual title here… rapid notes, forgive the typos!)

Christian Renaud – Cisco
Byron Reeves – Seriosity & Stanford
Reuben Steiger – founder & CEO of Millions of Us

Byron: We need a shoe metaphor for this session. Reuben’s shoes (very colorful sneakers) represent how much fun it is, emotional arousal, meet new people, go new places. Enthusiasm. These others (Christian’s) are work: sophisticated, sleek, serious. And mine… well.

I think the potential, opportunity, for these environments to be important in work is huge. The potential in entertainment, etc, pales in comparison to their potential for use in work. If we can figure out how to entertain a few thousand call center representatives as they worked, and got them to stay longer than the average 9 month tenure in that job, we would have a $100m dollar business.

Reuben: we are sitting here with possibly the dullest topic in an interesting field. But it’s very tempting to look at virtual worlds in the enterprise and assume that there is a huge 800 ton train of inevitability coming downhill, that this will happen and it’s a question of when. But from where I sit, “arms merchants to the virtual world,” evaluating all platforms and projects… and I think it will be an interesting challenge today to hammer through whether it IS going to happen.

We talk about features like “we need whiteboards” and such, but when you talk to the people who make corporate IT decisions, they cannot see the marginal utility. “We started using WebeX last year, how does this compare?”

Christian: I guess I am the formal, soulless corporate shill representative here! I suppose that you wouldn’t be here today unless you planned to make revenue in this space. There is opportunity, lots of unique opportunities. It really resonates. There is something unique above webex, teleconference, etc. I can bump into people in VWs, not in teleconference. And if you think about how business works, you have serependipitous bumping into people in the watercooler that is more important than the meeting in conference room G. Informal meetings is how business gets done, and we haven’t really grokked that. So we need tools that do that.

So if I go to my corporate masters and tell them that we need a virtual Cisco, they chuckle, because nobody has demonstrated the profound why. We have a lot of proving to do in this industry, what is it that makes this unique and makes it an inevitability.

Not to go into this too much, but the industry needs to understand to put themselves in their customer’s shoes. These firms have a lot of risk. They are looking at this and wondering how to justify $10m to their boss. We need to do a better job of working together to turn this into a win-win rather than a crappy marketing lose-lose. Making this an affirming cycle. The net of all that is we have work to do to distill creative energy and excitement into a profound and tangible “why” we do this. Not be a downer, but those are my shoes.

Reuben: as the guy in the clown shoes, let me say…

Christian: Jerry (Paffendorf, show us your shoes!)

Reuben: look at Second Life, look at how it is or isn’t being used, and why. I don’t speak on behalf, but my guyt feeling about it: it is being used a lot for work. But it is being used by small businesses, virtual in nature, employees that are all over the place, that do not have to adhere to corporate IT policy. One of the catalysts for effectiveness has been voice. Thousand sof businesses are used it, would speak evanglically about how transofmrative it is.

Byron: Do you mean businesses selling thigns within the platform?

Reuben: professional services, academic teams, anyone who collaborates. I wouldn’t draw the line too sharply about whether they make money selling virtual shirts.

Where it falls down is, why wont this cross into the enterprise? One aspect is that it is not a 2.5m buying decision. It’s like baseCamp, you can do it adhoc, upscale over time. I htink a big problem is that there is no hosted solution, does not work behind the firewall, and a big on, it’s really hard to have an avatar that looks like you. And that is fundamental for business, a trusted relationship: that I am not buying from a bunny.

Christian: You are ot going to close a million dolalr deal with a bunny.

Reuben: depends on what you are selling.

Christian: I think it was a surprise to see the in-world economy and the large scale of business in there, and then for Linden to get beat up for not having secure enough transactions, etc. In their defense, here we are saying why didn’t you anticipate these needs? but now that we know there is a market, we should address it. There should be a hosted solution, and firewalls — yes, annoying, yes we sell them– they do provide useful function. So this isn’t a bash on SL, there is no one platform that has been built to satisfy these usecases. Nobody is 100% with any of the platforms out there for any given usecase.

My own team, every single person is in a different state. W ehave been doing one on ones weekly in SL, but we still need to do face to face meetings for trust, new hire orientation, etc, and I don’t know why that is. Why did I have to get on a plane to come here to talk with you folks about virtual meetings?

Byron: This is important. If you look oj the literate on the future of work, like Tom Malone, etc, he’ll say that we are enabling incredible decentralization via email… it’s democratized, choice of teams, you need to engage people more than command them, coordination and collaboration are more important than command and control. All very defensible conclusions.

So then you say, sure, 1/2 of the people at IBM and Sun were not in the office today, they were traveling, working at home, etc. But it’s just hard to get the juices flowing that are part of innovation.

One of the ways to think abou the future of work, is if work is decntralized, if you have a choice of teams, if you can choose tasks, and your boss commands less and has to engage you more, then all of the fun stuff that these world offers, occasionally being a bunny or lighting yourself on fire, thestuff in games, may actually have a positive influence on productivity. And i think that this is the history of all media. In TV it was 1951 “provide info and teach about the world” — but no, it became about having fun.

So I look for that in this context as well., I don’t know how heavy the train is or how far out of the station it is, but the reason to get on is that there’s a level of engagement that really may be influential for the bottom lines of companies.

Reuben: malone’s book “thye Future of Work” — very compelling rhetorically, a lot of it sounds right. But I run a company that is all about virtual worlds, and over the last year and a half, we discovered that our employees who didn’t work in an office with the culture and the other people that they could scream at or have a coffee, the remote employees, were appreciably less happy. They would melt down at a frequency that was unbelievable. At first we thought it was an outlier, but now the dataset is large enough that it is incontrovertible. I think it says less about virtual worlds and remote work than about humans,

Christian: Ren Reynolds sent me a great email. I sent him an email two months late, and the intimacy was preserved even though it was so delayed and asynch because we stay in touch via presence, twitter,etc. That is something that we get from physical proximity there int he cube farm, “did you catch the show last night.” And you miss that when you work from home.

If we had those tools, which are maybe microblogging, or whatever, constant status of someone remotely, that you take for granted in real world implicitly, I feel more connected. And technology might be able to address.

Reuben: I think you’re right… the question is… well…. it’s just interesting,

Byron: so how do you follow Reuben’s advice?

Christian: well, we get together, have beers, once a year, all that.

Byron: Do you see any reversing to the trajectory?

Christian: No, I think it is irreversible. teams are global, start learning spanish and Mandarin now.

Reuben: yes, that’s the 800lb, ton whatever train. The question is less whether we communicate in distribute fashion, and how we congregate workgroups, pods. I have never met 70% of my clients, and yet those are deep trusted relationships. But your daily coworkers — that’s highest stress and deepest collaboration, and that is where the immediate case for VWs in the enterprise occurs.

Let’s flip it and look at it next to the relalities of bringing the tech into enterprise. it is sort of trivial to have a hosted version of some VW tech that only works within the Cisco fireeall or whatever. There’s no security concerns there. And i can work well with my coworkers. But there is no solution for how you extend that to the next level so I can work with my supply chain, business partners, etc. And it will require a sacrifice of control and security.

Christian Renaud: bruce Schneier… trading off security for privacy… But I would like to take my Byron reeves avatar from the Stanfordverse to the Ciscoverse, that is a useful usecase. We do DMZ hosting on websites, etc, and the security issues have been solved for other sorts of workspaces. It’s not unfixable. i think it will come for VWs when the need is proven. I can’t understand why there is flight from SL for reasons like this. I can talk to a tradeshow worth of people for 1/10th the cost, using SL. And i fyou talk to customers, why woul dyou not do that as often as you can?

Henrik: Very interesting. Last year we had the director of community affairs for SL, and he said he was doing film interviews. Not so great, he said. What do you think about these environments in terms of people doing well in different domains?

Byron: not sure i get that.

Henrik: The guy said “I talked to the person on the phone, i wouldn’t hire them, talk to them in SL and I would.” So people doing differently in different domains.

Byron: the different modality. You can’t buy this solution right now, but i can imagine an enterprise wanting to do different functions within one environment. Call center might recruit, train, interview, at level might let you talk to a practicecustomer, at lvl 12 a real customer, at level 27 you manage a group. I think that’s a great idea. I think it gives this environments a chance to blue the distinctions between divisions in the enterprise right now.

The idea thta these environments would only be used for simulations and learning is really limiting.

Reuben: the question really is, i think, potentially, hwo cares? Who cares if someone is charismatic in rl if you are hiring them for a context that is all online? The phone interview may be a weird anachronism, an insurance policy. If they are never going to function in a phone context or a face to face context, you may have all the info you need.

Christian: this is true as a superset of virtual worlds. You have that in the real world too. I think it is just endemic to the fact that communication is complex and any electronic communication is lossy.

Anyone here ever hired someone sight unseen? I jhave a half dozen times, and this is going to happen more, That’s just going to happen, hiring someone and finding theywere transcoding their voice and genderbending.

Henrik: question form audience: why is any o this better than videoconferencing?

Reuben: as a small business owner we have struggled to find a videoconference solution for ten people to talk at once. If you find one let me know, we haven’t found one, it doesn’t exist. The catalytic next thing is that if you buy that sharing digital air is important, and that there is a sort of multiperson videoconferencing, then the important text tech i infrared consumer vidocameras that sense facial expression info and puppeteer the avatar.

Christian: I completely disagree with you.

So… if we are going to have this virtually, then i think that some facial cues, 3d cameras like Mitch kapor referenced yesterday, then there’s some virtue. If we are doing a one on one, i am going to want to videoconference you. But you cannot bump into someone in a videoconference. We get a high fidelity interaction, but we have to schedule, work out hardware issues, commonplatform. But if I have never met you before, how do I actually meetyou? And if there a bunch of you, how do you do it? Hollywood Squares videoconferences with 3 pixel blurry photos, you might as well be an avatar, because you lose all the fidelity anyway.

Anyone seen how Forterraand others do it, when an avatar speaks you get a little closed caption thing? That would be rgeat if it were actual videoconference embedded in the world, because I don’t think you can do this event in videoconference. And how do I get that serendipity and informalness that we have in virtual eorlds.

Henrik: I am very interested in that randomness, the playfulness. yron, what do we learn by studying gamers, and how do we apply it?

Byron: one thing I would add to what’s been said is that you cannot undersstimate the primitive engagement of puppeteering the avatar, unconsciously and psychologicall entertaining. When you go into the lab and look at what is happening, this is the research we do a block from here, the physiological signature… when their avatar gets touches, there is a physical complementary response in the puppeteer’s body. It’s important for memory and attachment. When you guys hugged this morning, you are going to hear tomorrow about how it triggers the same sorts of physical responses in the virtual world.

Bringing in those responses for an ROI presentation in a business is tough. But we know they are real in the lab, and that the social bandwidth will become rich enough to increasingly simulate this sort of discussion in a way that is primitively, physically engaging.

Reuben: the dataset I have regarding the enterprise is limited, but looking at the pruported exodusin SL. The average user in a campaign that lasts 4-6 months, they spend hours engaged with a brand, and it’s so large as to be incomprehensible. The challenge in SL you are fighting for a percentage of 1m monthly users with no good way to reach them all. So if you reach 50,000 people, that’s 5% of th addressable market. So as an advertiser, how do you buy the category while keeping the engagement?

In enterprise, it’s how do we offer the playfulness and lack of imposition of top down management, so we can take work and make it playful and engaging, in a way where people are not oppressed by work. “If work were fun, the rich would keep it for themselves.” I hope it’s less about the technology enablers… my gut is it won’t be about those. it’s going to be much more cultural, inb boardrooms and IT rooms, in policymaking, “what will happen if we allow mid and low lvl people to define their own work, will they storm the castle with digital torches.” if you talk about guild leaders to these people, they crap their pants and theythink that gamers will be running the company and reporting to stockholders.

Byron: until they survey their employees and find that their managers ARE gamers, like IBM just found.

Christian: “Got Game” says that gamers start in born in 1965, so that IS our workforce now. You have the demand, but people don’t realize there is another choice. And that’s the point behind Seriosity, Byron’s company…

Henrik: can you elaborate on that,Byron?

Byron: to do that call center game, there’s lots of problems. One strategy is to look ay the recipe for why these games or worlds are engaging, and see what ingredients you can extract . Like, the economy is fun, it lights up neural centers in the same way that real dollars do. Could you build that into other applications — and we have experimented with a virtual eocnomy structure that runs by email. So there are possibilities and may be necessary steps along the way. They aren’t 3d spaces and avatars, but still worth looking at.

Henrik: along similar lines, Christian; which technologies coming are you excited about. When you look ahead what exccites you in this space?

Christian: in the metaverse conversation of the future of work? Because I think it is a superset.

Henrik: work, but go beyond that…

Christian: making work more entertaining… the fact that we can all play WoW together and do collaborative tasks but cannot build a product… obviously we can learn from the gaming space, even if it just using email. There is no one tech by itself. Obviously shared social spaces in general — preferably 2d and 3d mode that interact with each other. Wiki page that talks to the virtual world…

We are a good way through the great digitization of our age. Getting intelligent about how the info gets to people, because there is too much info, we are all drowning in it. Netflix and Amazon and iTunes, sure, but that is a narrow subset. How do we do it ith everything?

And rich presence, like the example with Ren. Very infrequent presence updates via twitter, but still a sense of intimacy. And Reuben, you touched on this a year ago, presence, social spaces, all that, helping making decisions. That is going to be laying the foundation for that, because we have a bunch of discrete silos, and we have this context switch and the load is on the user. How many of you have IM and email and more open right now on laptops? We need a human-centered perspective on attention, which is the common thread there. We cannot do it with the industrial age tools we have right now.

I was really excited by the Mitch Kapor talk yesterday, when he talked about high fidelity webcams that use infrared to take things like gestures and puppeteer your avatar. Being able to do stuff that is more intuitive and hardwired, breaking down the symbolic barriers and playing into how we are biologically hardwired rather than making you learn tools. The more w can do that, the more it will drive enterprise adoption.

Henrik: I’d like to ask the other two the same question.

Reuben: I will get in big trouble for saying “nothing.” I think there is a huge amount of stuff that is very inspirational: birtual eorlds stuff that plays on the web will be enormous. This year will be extremely exciting. But respect to this subject, I find it heatbreaking to go to companies and see them resist change and it makes me depressed to see the inefficient, risk averse awful stuff. It’s tragic. My hope is that “everything is a game.” Just that the designers of many of these thigns, by which I mean of everything, didn’t realize it was a game, so they made shitty games, and I hope that culturally, we think about it in a more philosophical way. For it to deeply penetrate the enterprise, we need affordances made to allow us to work ina gamelike fashion. If games were like the way work is, when you died, your Gameboy would explode and scar you for life when you died. There has to be permission to fail. The benefit of repeated failure and risk taking outweighs the penalty of small failures. And innovation is underfunded and marginalized.

Christian: noo, really?

Reuben: there has to be something very simple, like “everything is a game” and proof points, like “here’s a good game, it’s called the iPhone, here’s a bad design.” And as people start to see what drives bottomline performance, I think that there will be an evolution of those principles not just into object but also into how we design group bhaviors, etc.

Christian: I am hijacking… Seriosity, is a game design.

Byron: it is doing exactly what reuben said.

Christian: so his point about shitty game designers. How many corporations are actualized enough to even recognize this, so they can set up good structures? So that people’ don’t game it, holding back credits, etc?

Byron: when you explicitly try to make what is implicit into a game with rule,s the key is the alignment of the reasons you play the game, with what makes the enterprise or the business succeed. If what I am doing to have fun in the context of my call center world, is exactly what would benefit the larger group, then that would be a great thing.

Chridstian: are the companies that actualized to understand it?

Byron: it’s what we strive for. But a call center could set things like calls per minute, etc.

Christian: in a very structured role, sure, but what about loosely structured jobs? We work more like Grand Theft Auto…

Byron: Most work that happens behind a screen is dull boring, repetitive, watching survaeillance video, data entry, categorizing, forms… look at the size of that pain. Collaboration withinCisco, is pain but not the same order of pain. People are losing money beause of the painfully dull stuff, and there is opportunity there if you can juice it up even a bit. Make it 30 or 60 days more interesting to be a bank teller, or loking Osama at the CIA, because sitting int he basement looking at those pictures is really dulll. Those are the kind of jobs — the hardest ones to do — if you could tackle that market. The conversation should about those, the vast majority of information jobs. When you ask the peopleusing SAp or Oracle, they say great product but it is tragically boring to be involved in that kind of work.

Henrik: 15 minutes left, time for bold prediction territory. Christian, you moved to the midwest… what will we be like. are a lot of pople be doing what you are doing? Will we all be consultants, how will we work?

Christian: there is a great tension. I had an opporunity to alk to someone at Intel, Igot on a plane, But for everyday work I think you can do it anywhere. And if you are a call center agent for JetBlue, all the stay at home moms in Utah… i think that is a trend that speaks to decrentralization and recentralization, how societies go.

As a generation, people are getting more actualized and spiritual. During the boom and bust, the buses has quotes on the side “what does it gain a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” This is a gorgeous place to live and I miss it, but i wouldn’t trde it for the midwest and raising my kids there. Am I the future work? Great anecdote, I was in London and talked to my taxi driver. he said business was bad bvecause everyone stays at the country homes, and they come in Monday and go back Thursday night, because nobody wants to be stinky crowded London all the time. That’s a leading indicator.

You cannot cram everyone so close. At some point, people reject that philosophically and spiritually, or they will have the means to work on Santa fe. The taxi driver used o have daily commutes with fares, and now his work week lost a day at each end worth of fares.

Reuben: isn’t it scary that business is bad because of that?

Christian: it’s bad for him as a taxi driver…

Reuben: I thought you meant for the Intel guy!

Christian: Did everyone get lost that way?

Everyone: No, just Reuben!

Christian: Coffee for Reuben, stat!

Anyway, am I a leading indicator… I am a geographic arbitrager. Coastal salary on midwest cost of living. Of course, i do have to shovel snow…

Henrik: Reuben: do you think he is the future of work… your company is decentralized.

Reuben: we’re not, 38 employees, five away… and as we scaled there was a subset of tasks that could not be done decentralized. I fantastize about what Christian is doing all the time.

Audience: heh heh.

Reuben: I would to wear those shoes. But i am not brave enough. But sure, I would love to live in Mexico, salary arbitage, anywhere with a broadband connection. There’s a guy who drives daily from Tahoe to Tasman to Cisco, worst commute in America…

In the area of predictions, the stuff that will get worked out… there are aspects… people read Malone, deploy Malone, scale, then see the cracks. It does not mean Malone is wrong, there’s somewhere in the middle. Live where you want, and communicate how you want, and we’ll plant a thousand flowers. There are some basic laws of human nature that drive how effectively we work together. In order: people like to know what is important and whats valued. Talking of designing a game work environment, what matters purpose, is clarity and rewards. people quit their jobs ebcause they do not feel they are recognized. And in the early cases of going virtual, that stuff gets lost. It’s hard to figure out and followthrough on what you value. Tie bonuses to it and you say “people could get good at this game and we will give away all our money.” Some company ill get this eventualy, and kill everyone, because it’s a huge competitive advantage.

Henrik: Byron?

Byron: Honey will trump vinegar. We talk about decentralization a lot, but the notion that work is more democratized — choice of city, company, project. At IBM, 8 teams and four bosses, two of whomI have never met — I have choices, and I need to b drawn to those teams.

The other thing I’d say is that the expertise that will drive success is the ability to coordinate. Stanford — without a doubt there are scientists here that know more about drug discovery than people at a pharma, but they have no ability to coordinate it. So that also plays into the sensibilities here.

Henrik: Thank you

(applause)