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!

When you think about it, how you make decisions is your knowledge.  Knowledge is not "do you know the capital of Vermont? It is Montpelier".  I still have never met anyone from there. Your knowledge is how you make decisions.  The definition of "decision making" is "Choosing between alternative courses of action using cognitive processes - memory, thinking, evaluation, etc." As a doctor it is how you decide what is wrong with your patient. As a teacher, how you decide to get the message to your students. As a programmer, how you decide to design your code. At Discovery Machine we focus on just that in capturing knowledge.  Capturing how you make decisions. What data do you consider? What are the parameters at that time?  I heard someone say this week it depends on a Billion things.  Well you know there is probably not anything that depends on a Billion things.  Think about the most complex decision you made today and how many "it depends" really went into it? By using Discovery Machine’s proven methodology and patented technology we can help an expert tease out pieces of their knowledge. We then use our AI approach to multi-strategy reasoning to make the decision just like the expert. We are not modeling how to design a nuclear power plant.  We start by domain scoping the knowledge we will model into a manageable project. But we can work with your most critical Subject Matter Expert and capture their knowledge which is most critical to your business. Knowledge is what making someone valuable, someone critical.  But knowledge is lost every day because it was never captured.  Starting this year 10,000 Baby Boomers will retire every day taking that knowledge out the door.  Some people say we have always gotten along before.  But that is old school thinking that does not consider all the tools we have available today.  Just think how impressive it was to see IBM’s Watson win Jeopardy using AI. Why have the new people taken the three decades to get to the point of the person who just left?  Would it not be better to give them the tools, coaching aids, and actionable knowledge that lets them take that expertise to a new level? At Discovery Machine we have a way we know we can help you do just that. Are knowledge capture approaches in place for your organization?

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!

At the ASTD conference in Chicago recently, Colleen Barrett made a really interesting point in the session we did together. She said at Southwest, they want to make sure that their customer service is as good internally as it is externally. They believe in the Golden Rule—treating people the way you would like to be treated. One of the things we talked about is that it’s amazing how people will treat strangers or customers better than they would treat people they love or people who are coworkers. I often tell the story about having a group of people over to your house for a party and some new neighbors are there. As they are leaving, you notice that the man has left his hat. So you grab his hat and run out to the road and catch them before they pull away. As he rolls down his window, would you say to him, "You idiot! If your head wasn’t screwed on, it would fall off!"  No! You would say, "Here’s your hat. I’m glad I caught you. So good to have you over." You would be really polite. And yet, we hear mothers screaming at their little kids who left their lunch on the bus. "You idiot, why did you do that! If your head wasn’t screwed on, it would fall off!" We just seem to take license with people who are close to us that we wouldn’t take with people who are less familiar with. So that’s a really interesting thing to think about. Why is there so much divorce? Why are there so many family conflicts? Because we don’t use the Golden Rule all the time. So remember—be as good to people that you love and work with as you are to others.

We would like to think that successful corporations are getting smarter every year.  But how are they getting smarter and where is this improved knowledge?  Well, they get smarter in one sense by learning lessons on each project they complete - both what worked well and what didn’t work well.  Some corporations hold post-mortem meetings at the end of each project to reflect as a team and really uncover these important lessons.  They often store this knowledge in the corporate SOPs (standard operating procedures).  Companies following ISO or CMMI principles then require each employee to review the relevant SOPs every year to make sure everyone is up to date with the latest knowledge.  This is a reasonable approach to capturing lessons learned and distributing them throughout the organization, but in practice people don’t always go get the latest SOP, and review it completely before executing whatever job they are faced with. Discovery Machine helps solve this problem by creating deployable best practice models of critical operations within an organization.  Instead of encoding an SOP in a static document, we model the process of the SOP in a way in which the model can be run and produce some meaningful output.  In this way, we create job aids which actually help people get their jobs done, and they do it in the up-to-date ‘best practice’ way, instead of the way they recall from reading an SOP a year ago.  In addition, these best practice models can be stored on a server and executed from a client interface so all employees have direct access to the latest information. At Discovery Machine, we have been developing a Best Practice Toolkit which can be used to make a corporation’s SOPs more actionable.  Part of this toolkit allows for capture of lessons learned and ways to incorporate these back into the best practices with an optional approval process.  Using elements from the Discovery Machine Knowledge Capture Methodology, we can enhance the capture of lessons learned by getting employees to uncover more than just what worked or didn’t work well.  This feature really helps to keep those SOPs up to date. Are you ready for the next enhancement to employee productivity?  If so, think about a few of your SOPs that are hard to keep up to date or could be made actionable and give us a call.  Once you get started, you’ll realize this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I recently saw a wonderful piece about "If I Had My Life to Live Over." I thought it was worth sharing with you. It’s from the late Nadine Stair of Louisville, Kentucky, who wrote it when she was 85 years old: If I had my life to live over again, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I’d limber up. I’d be sillier than I’ve been this time. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances, I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would, perhaps, have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely Hour after hour, Day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments. If I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else—just moments, One after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, A hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to live my life over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring And stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances, I would ride more merry-go-rounds, I would pick more daisies. Isn’t that fabulous? What a wonderful, wonderful way to live. Try it. If you had your life to live over, what would you do differently?

Innovation is the motivation that drives our society.  It is the catalyst for change and the means of advancement.  Technology has been rapidly evolving ever since man innovated to make his first tools and information technology has brought forth innovations throughout the decades.  Human intelligence has led rise to numerous inventions that in their time were revolutionary.  Today we look at those same "impossible" achievements and take them for granted.  Things like the TV remote control, microwave oven, industrial robots, LED lighting, video games, smoke detectors, GPS, and more have come about over the last 50 years.  In addition to new devices, the rise of search engines has made the access to knowledge exponentially easier.  Where will we go next, as intelligence evolves? Merriam-Webster defines innovation in two ways: 1. "the introduction of something new" and 2. "a new idea, method, or device".  With the understanding of what innovation means, the question becomes how do we aspire to be innovative?  I believe the answer is through knowledge.  People are by nature curious and so they explore the things that interest them.  They reflect on their experiences and leverage the experiences of others to satisfy their curiosities.  Internet search has made the knowledge of others readily accessible to the masses and allows people to search through articles, videos, podcasts, and more.  The point is, for those who want it, information is available so they can learn and enhance their own knowledge. But what if there were a way to accelerate this process?  What if there was a way to have the experience of others at your fingertips?  What if a search engine not only gave you articles but an intelligent answer that exactly matched what you need?  Wouldn’t that accelerate the quest for knowledge and lead to faster, more efficient innovation?  Imagine the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) Decision Engine which leveraged the knowledge of an expert.  This AI Decision Engine would not only give you a list of relevant results based on keywords but instead would give you an answer that was right 9 times out of 10. The recent successes of IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy prove that this type of concept is possible for concrete questions, but I assert that it is possible to ask questions that require experience to answer.  Discovery Machine, Inc. is already on the path to this end goal.  Discovery Machine has a proven process to document the best practices of an expert and recreate them as artificial intelligence in job aids, training programs, video games for training, and decision-support tools.  Discovery Machine works extensively with experts to accurately depict their own knowledge developed through years of experience.  We have had success in multiple domains including bio-technology, logistics planning, military training simulations, and more. Discovery Machine has proved it is possible to document, deploy, and leverage domain specific expertise.  From there it is a small step to create a framework for an intelligent Q&A session which leverages experiences.  This is not only a possibility but an eventuality.  The conventional search engine will be a thing of the past and an AI Decision Engine will be the way of the future, the question is how soon.

I had a wonderful time recently, playing in a charity golf tournament with coworkers Steve Murphy, Randy Conley, and Brent Bystedt. It was really a lot of fun; we played a scramble. One of the things it reminded me of—and this is so important to Colleen Barrett and Herb Kelleher at Southwest—is you really have fun in life and do well when you take what you do seriously, but yourself lightly. That was really evident as we were playing golf. We were trying to do the best we can, but we were laughing and enjoying ourselves. I don’t think there’s anybody who is more fun to be around than Steve Murphy. He’s one of our great consulting partners and he is absolutely fun. He takes what he does seriously but himself lightly, and I think that’s what endears him to clients. We had a great time—Randy and Brent and Steve and I. I just wanted to reiterate the importance of that. I think very often we forget sometimes and start to grind our teeth, whether it be in golf or what we’re doing at work, and one of the joys I have in the world is to hear people laughing out loud with some funny thing we’re doing. Because we take what we do seriously but ourselves lightly. Because we do serious work but we have a lot of laughs, and I think that’s so important. I was reminded of that yesterday while we were golfing. So have a fun day! Take what you do seriously—because we’re all doing very important work—but take yourself lightly. Get your ego out of the way and enjoy your strengths and weaknesses and moments. Life is lived in moments.

I recently heard a story about a young boy who was out at recess one day. He wandered near a line of trees and found a small, blue egg shell. Excited, he ran to his teacher and exclaimed, "I found an ostrich egg!"  Since this took place in central Pennsylvania, chances are it wasn’t an ostrich egg, but actually a robin’s egg. This story is a simple example of having knowledge, but it was either incomplete or incorrectly categorized. The boy was able to correctly identify the object as an egg, but reached an incorrect conclusion about the source of the egg. The color of the egg, the size of the egg, or the location of the egg all should have been clues that it probably wasn’t an ostrich egg. However, without utilizing all of that knowledge, it’s easy to reach the wrong conclusion. Instead, he identified the egg incorrectly as an ostrich egg.  There are many reasons why the incorrect answer was reached. For instance, maybe he just learned about ostriches so that was the conclusion he reached. As he grows, he will gather more knowledge about how to identify eggs. This also demonstrates why capturing knowledge in a computer program has been a difficult problem in the field of Artificial Intelligence. How do you collect, classify, and store knowledge in a way that can be leveraged in the future? When do you know you have enough? There have been several blog entries here about the Watson computer program that competed on Jeopardy. One of the reasons the Watson program was so impressive is because it demonstrated a large collection of information that was correctly classified, connected, and able to be leveraged. At Discovery Machine, we have a Methodology to work with the expert and find out what knowledge is important and how it works together. We can then leverage the knowledge to make intelligent decisions about the situation. We utilize our methodology and our technology to create realistic behaviors in simulation environments. Having logical knowledge structures driven by an expert and being able to leverage these knowledge structures in a visual environment to create robust, executable decision models is something unique that Discovery Machine offers to the world. These completed models and knowledge representations can be useful in teaching others how to make better decisions and understand what knowledge is needed to make correct decisions. In our example, the boy had trouble classifying the egg due to lack of experience.  Using a Discovery Machine model, he could leverage the experience of an expert to correctly classify the egg.  By using the tool, the boy would have learned how to figure out what type of egg it really was so that next time he finds an egg he will know how to use all knowledge at hand.

Here is a small sampling I really enjoyed from my book with Don Shula, Everyone’s A Coach. The way managers treat people is powerfully influenced by what they expect of people. If a manager’s expectations are high, productivity is likely to be excellent. If expectations are low, productivity is likely to be poor. It is as though there were a natural law that caused a person’s performance to rise or fall to meet his or her manager’s expectations. My wife Margie has often said that one of the reasons she didn’t get into trouble when she was a young person was that she knew her parents expected the best of her and knew she would be a good role model for her younger sisters. She never wanted to let her parents down. If you have someone working for you whom you don’t think much of, I think it’s your ethical responsibility to get that person transferred to another department or team. Because no matter how hard you try, you’re likely to treat him as if he isn’t any good. And he’ll prove you right every time! I ask people all the time, "Given the amount of time you spend at work, would you rather spend that time being magnificent or ordinary?" What do you think they say? They shout out, "Magnificent!" And yet, are most of the people in organizations performing magnificently? Of course not. And a key reason is the self-fulfilling prophecy that starts in the heads of leaders, managers, coaches, and parents, with the belief that most people are lazy, unreliable, and irresponsible. This belief plays out in how they treat people and ultimately in how those people perform. People generally respond well to leaders, managers, coaches, and parents who have high expectations and genuine confidence in them. So believe in the abilities of your people, students, and kids, and they will be more likely to believe in themselves.

Discovery Machine, Inc. is delighted to see this critical legislation making it to the Presidents’ office. We hope and trust that President Obama will sign promptly, as predicted by The SBIR Insider. As a woman owned small business we recognize the importance of the SBIR/STTR/CPP programs to innovation and sustainable high quality jobs in Williamsport, PA and the rest of the country. This is a very important victory for all small businesses in the United States. Our hats are off to all those who have worked, so hard, to keep these programs alive. The news release headline from The SBIR Insider is reprinted, below. "Dear SBIR Insider,  With your help and a ground swell of support S.1082, "The Small Business Additional Temporary Extension Act of 2011″ has passed overwhelmingly, thereby extending SBIR/STTR/CPP "as is" through September 30, 2011.  The President will quickly sign this bill and there will be no lapse in the SBIR programs. Repeat: SBIR/STTR/CPP are now extended through the end of the fiscal year, September 30, 2011.  Preliminary vote count: The bill was passed 387 / 33 Republicans  224 / 11 Democrats 163 / 22….."

I was once involved in a corporate study where criticizing and praising were actually tabulated and the reactions measured. Look at what we found: When there was one praising for each criticism, people felt as though they had a totally negative relationship with their boss. When the ratio was changed to two praisings to one reprimand, people still thought their boss was all over them. It wasn’t until we got to a ratio of four praisings to one criticism that people began to feel as if they had a good relationship with their boss. Think of the power of a reprimand—or even the perception of a reprimand—if one negative word can only be balanced by four positive words.  It’s clear that if you as a business leader, coach, or parent don’t start giving a lot of praise, the people you work around will begin to think of you as negative and unfair. Every time you give someone a reprimand, hopefully you’ll have the opportunity to catch that person doing something right four times—and will give them a praising. I should note that this whole concept can work both up and down the organizational ladder. People can, and should, praise their bosses. And supervisors should be constantly looking for opportunities to praise their people. It’s a two-way street that creates good feelings at all levels. Just as important, it prompts people to want to work harder to be more effective. So remember, in healthy companies as well as healthy families, there’s a need for four positive interactions for every negative one. Have a great week and praise somebody today!

In the coming weeks, Discovery Machine will be releasing the newest version of our behavior console for Bohemia Interactive’s Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) simulation environment. We’ve taken our experience from behavior modeling for the US Navy, and developed an easy to use toolset for creating non-player character (NPC) behaviors within VBS2 training simulations. VBS2 already provides an extremely powerful toolkit for developing highly realistic training simulations for military ground forces. Their mission editor allows a scenario designer to quickly drag-and-drop content into a virtual world, rapidly constructing an new training environment containing enemy combatants, civilians, friendly forces, vehicles, and buildings from a large library of pre-developed content. Additionally, for particular tasks, such as walking around the scenario on pre-defined routes, VBS2′s toolset offers a number of easy to use mechanisms for defining character behavior. But what if you want to start developing behaviors for characters that don’t fit into the set of predefined options that come with VBS2? Bohemia Interactive has provided an ability to develop new behaviors through a robust scripting interface, enabling users to develop totally customized behaviors to create a wide variety of training scenarios. However, this powerful capability comes with a number of caveats; in order to utilize these capabilities, a user needs to be familiar with how to write scripts in VBS2′s proprietary scripting language. This means that in order to extend VBS2′s capabilities beyond what are offered directly through its mission editor, a user needs to have some significant programming capabilities. In addition, as these scripts become more complex, debugging issues that inevitably arise and result in unexpected behavior within a training scenario becomes more and more difficult. Discovery Machine’s VBS2 behavior console and engine attempt to address these issues, offering an easy-to-use, visual programming solution for developing new behaviors within the simulation environment. Our behavior console provides a high-level, visual interface which sits on top of VBS2′s scripting language. This leverages our behavior modeling approach, developed and tested through a number of projects for organizations such as DARPA, NAVAIR, and ONR, to enable VBS2 users of various skill levels to more easily develop and customize training scenarios. By wrapping useful chunks of process logic into building blocks we call Basic Level Actions (or BLA’s), we’re able to provide users with no programming experience at all the ability to create new, customized behaviors for characters within their training sim. For more advanced users, our console also provides the ability to fully leverage the power of our Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) language to create arbitrary behaviors capable of performing any task which would normally require complex scripting to complete. These new behaviors can even be published as new BLA’s, and provided to non-programming users to extend the library of building blocks available to them. Even for users who are already well versed in complex VBS2 scripting, our console and engine offer significant advantages over traditional scripting solutions. At runtime, our behavior models are rendered visually, displaying the behavior hierarchies for all characters in the environment. This allows the scenario developer to easily identify and inspect decisions made by characters, in real-time, as they are made. This dramatically eases the development process of complex behaviors, because you can quickly glance at a character’s  behavior model and see what decisions they’ve made to get into their current situation, but you can delve into why they made those choices. Not only does this run-time visualization of character behaviors offer tremendously powerful debugging capabilities for scenario developers, but it even offers insight to users who would normally be unable to understand the scripting representation of character behaviors. Discovery Machine behavior hierarchies are represented using human-readable names and descriptions for the various tasks that make up the models. We have had experience suggesting that users with absolutely no programming experience at all are able to view and understand these behavior models to the extent that they can offer specific suggestions as to how they might be improved to result in more appropriate character behavior, or in many cases, simply make the changes themselves without assistance or supervision. Our team at Discovery Machine is excited to offer this new capability to the VBS2 community, and hope that it will enable users to find even more new uses for Bohemia Interactive’s already impressive suite of simulation capabilities.

A lot of managers don’t realize it, but one of their responsibilities is to be an educator.  The problem is that not all managers are born teachers.  For those who want to be good teachers, here’s a five-step method for developing those necessary teaching skills. The five basic steps to good teaching/training are:  1. Tell; 2. Show; 3. Try;  4. Observe; and 5. Praise or Redirect. Knowing and following these five steps won’t make everyone a great teacher, but using them ensures that the learner will be able to accomplish what he or she is taught. The first step, "Tell," is critical.  It seems so obvious, but people sometimes fail to explain to those they supervise just exactly what it is they wish them to accomplish.  A manager must tell a person specifically what it is he or she is to achieve. In business I see people running around with nothing but a perception of what they’re supposed to be doing.  When someone does something wrong, the manager definitely uses the "tell" step, as in "telling someone off."  People get reprimanded for not doing what they didn’t know they were supposed to do in the first place.  If this seems confusing, just think about the poor employee’s advanced state of confusion! All good performance begins with clear goals.  These goals should include a statement which defines what it is a person is to accomplish.  If people know what is expected of them, it’s much easier to teach them, as well as to ensure that they know when their goals have been reached. The second step in managerial teaching is to "Show," which is also the second part of goal setting.  Here, a manager sets standards.  It’s one thing to tell people what you want, but another to provide them with a clear picture or model of what or how to perform the task. With this second step of "Show," managers need to have a series of stages or steps to get people to deliver good performance.  You can’t manage what you can’t measure.  Hence, it is helpful to have stages that demonstrate and document when someone is achieving his or her goal.  These stages can be measured in terms of dollar value of sales per quarter, the number of sales calls made weekly, or the number of pages typed in a given day. If these steps are laid out in advance, a manager and the employee have specific criteria to use should things go wrong.  If the manager says, "Charlie, you didn’t make enough sales calls today," with no pre-determination of how many "enough" is, Charlie has no standard by which to be judged whether he or she is successful. The third step is "Try."  This is the step in which you give the ball to the employee and let him or her run with it.  A wise manager will be careful not to let the trainee try to achieve too much initially.  Frequently, you’ll find that beginners are naively enthusiastic.  In their excitement, they will take on more than they can handle.  This sets them up for an inevitable crash when things start to go wrong in the learning process and the learner becomes disillusioned with his or her progress. The fourth step is to "Observe" performance.  It’s necessary to observe beginners very closely throughout the very early stages of development. Some might wonder whether this kind of observation makes people feel they are being micromanaged. The answer to this question is "no"—if the employee knows that you’re observing for the purpose of helping him or her win.  If people really know you’re out to help and not to harm them, they’ll welcome your observation.  In fact, what beginners really don’t like is a manager who gives them a new and unfamiliar assignment and then disappears. Observing is one of the biggest problems in training.  Here’s what frequently happens:  The leader or manager, who is supposed to be supervising and directing, adopts a delegating style of management. The learner is set adrift to fend for himself or herself without supervision.  The manager will be looking over the learner’s shoulder and will react only when something goes wrong.  You can imagine the outcome.  The manager lets rip and the poor learner, who has had no positive direction, falls apart. With this type of training technique, all the manager achieves is to teach people how to avoid punishment, which is an unproductive skill. The last step in the process involves "Praising or Redirection." There are two parts of this last step, since there are two potential outcomes to the efforts of any beginner, and each needs special treatment. The key to praising is progress.  It isn’t necessary for a job to be absolutely perfect.  The goal of a manager-teacher is ultimately to transfer the praising process from the manager to the learner. As employees get better and more adept at performing tasks, they should be able to pat themselves on the back for a job well done. The object is to create mature, self-reliant achievers. Redirect is what a manager does when things go wrong.  Remember, never punish a beginner.  A good manager-trainer will redirect the learner and have him or her try the task again.  If a person has trouble successfully performing a job, he or she should be redirected to try and try again.  If success is still not achieved, then it’s necessary to go back to goal setting. The odds are that with proper training, the beginner will achieve success, assuming his or her trainer follows these five steps.

When reprimanding, what you do is often not as important as what you don’t do.  Since no one really enjoys a reprimand, it’s easy for people to be put on the defensive when receiving criticism.  I suggest remembering these "don’ts" when you must reprimand an individual.  If you don’t observe these points, you may find that people become less concerned with listening to you and more concerned with fighting you off. 1.  Don’t attack someone personally.  Never begin a reprimand with a statement such as, "Listen Fred, you idiot, …"  Address the problem at hand.  Be specific about what was done incorrectly.  It is never okay to insult a person just because you are upset. 2.  Don’t store up reprimands.  By this I mean don’t wait "for a good time" to deliver one or more reprimands.  The best time to give a reprimand is immediately after the incorrect behavior or action has occurred.  If you wait a week or so to discuss the problem with the individual, and then throw in some other problems you have observed in the past months, your impact on that person’s behavior will not be very effective.  Accumulated griefs and problems will only make you feel bad.  When you do finally "dump" on the person, there will be so much to digest, and the error so far removed from the actual event, you’ll just end up blowing off a lot of steam, which will have little or no impact or effect on behavior. 3.  Don’t threaten people.  Such threats will either immobilize them with fear or cause considerable resentment.  Stick to the point.  Point out the error or incorrect behavior.  Then reaffirm them by telling them they’re okay—but their actions need to be modified. 4.  Don’t reprimand people in public.  Public fireworks, such as chewing out an employee in front of a customer, is a technique used only by bullies.  It’s thoughtless, damaging, and embarrassing for everyone.  If you have occasion to reprimand a person, do it privately. Before you give a reprimand—think!  If someone has done something wrong you must ask yourself, "Should he or she have known better?" If the answer is "No" then the person is obviously still unfamiliar with his or her assigned responsibilities or task.  In this case, Do Not Reprimand.  Never reprimand a beginner—be it an experienced employee working in a new position or your own child learning to tie his shoelaces.  It will only cause confusion or outright discouragement.  In this instance, your role as a manager is to help, or redirect, the person who is having a problem. However, if a person should have known better, then you must ask yourself, "Did they make the mistake deliberately, or might it have been because they lacked confidence?"  If the problem revolves around confidence, Do Not Reprimand. You need to determine the reason for the problem causing this lack of confidence.  It could be that there is a new situation which is unsettling to an experienced worker.  For example, perhaps a long-time sales clerk makes many errors on the new cash register.  If so, the reason is probably a lack of confidence with the buttons or the new routine required when ringing up sales.  In such a situation, a supportive managerial style is required.  No one needs to reprimand this clerk. Rather, the clerk needs some training and some practice on the new register, coupled with support from an understanding boss.  Reprimands have no place in this example. Remember to only reprimand deliberate, regressive performance or behavior.

Did you ever look back on something you did think, "that was stupid, why didn’t I notice that?" or miss a scheduled event and wonder, "how could I have overlooked that"?  Well, don’t be too hard on yourself, you’re not alone.  Things that look obvious are only obvious within the context of your current awareness.  In addition, ‘obvious’ events can be missed due to a psychological effect called inattentional blindness.  Chabris and Simons describe this concept in their book "The Invisible Gorilla."  In their well known experiment,  "Gorillas in our Midst",  they show that about half of the people tested fail to notice an actor in a gorilla suit walk through a group of other actors who are passing basketballs back and forth.  It seems they are too focused counting the number of basketball passes and totally don’t notice the gorilla.  More importantly, after they are told of the gorilla and see the event again, they are shocked that they could ever miss seeing the gorilla.  This shock illustrates the illusion of attention. At Discovery Machine, one of our product lines involves developing behavior models for use in military training simulations.   We strive to make the behaviors as realistic as possible or capable of passing the Turing test.  Typically, automated intelligent behaviors would not make mistakes like missing the gorilla.  They would see everything and of course, the computer would not make a mistake. However, Discovery Machine behaviors are designed to include a model of situation awareness which forms the entity’s view of the world.  This fundamental architecture allows us to set limits on the cognitive abilities of the AI behaviors.  The goal is not to make them perform flawless, but to model human cognitive abilities.  One simple way to model inattentional blindness is to prioritize the objects that an entity is aware of and apply a weight to effect what impact those objects would have on decisions that the entity is making.  This would provide some ability for training simulations that could benefit from this capability.  There are certainly other ways to model inattentional blindness as well.  The main point here is that our behavior models have a solid foundation for making enhancements such as inattentional blindness.