Liberating Structures

How do you structure a meeting so that goals can be achieved and there is a resulting sense of forward movement?  How do you facilitate meetings so that communication is effective and people feel heard?  While on the one hand we have the Art of Goethean Conversation which provides guidance on preparing for and working within a meeting, I often enough experience inadequate implementation regardless of the planning and intentions of the participants.  Concrete form is as essential to a successful meeting as is a meditative and “listening” gesture during a meeting.  While I’ve participated in a couple specific forms such as Conversation Cafe, I have been interested in exploring more of the actual meeting structures that have been developed over the years, which led me to finding this website, Liberating Structures, that documents 34 (yes, 34!) different structures.  Reading through these, I find that they are suitable for strategic planning, reviews, team building, disseminating information, planning, communication, etc.  These are structures that are applicable “horizontally” to businesses, study groups, think tanks, interpersonal development, and so forth.  For example, as a software developer, I can see how many of these structures can be applied to all aspects of software development and management.  As a person also with concerns and interests in local economies, agriculture, communication, and so forth, I can also see how these structures facilitate presentations, creative thinking, action groups, and so forth.

I recommend that you take a look at the Liberating Structures website.  What follows here is a very brief summary of the different conversation structures.   In order to facilitate choosing and working with a particular structure, I’ve attempted to loosely organize them into a few different categories, though certainly there is a lot of crossover.  Here is the very short summary of these structures.

Strategic Planning

Wicked Questions

Wicked Questions illuminate the impossibly paradoxical-yet-complementary attributes embedded in transforming change efforts. Tension between espoused strategies and on-the-ground circumstances may be revealed safely.

“How is it that we are ____ and ____ simultaneously?”

Integrated Autonomy

You can move from either-or conflicts to a both-and strategies and solutions. Everyone can engage in sharper strategic thinking, mutual understanding, and collaborative action by surfacing the advantage of being more integrated and more autonomous. Attending to paradoxes generates opportunities for profound leaps in performance.

Improv Prototyping

Participants sketch out and rehearse solutions to chronic problems.

Critical Uncertainties

A diverse group can quickly test the viability of current strategies and build capacity to respond quickly to challenges. This is form of preparedness strategy-making, not a plan to be implemented as-designed but rather a capacity to actively shape the system and be equally prepared to respond to surprise. Being prepared means an increased capacity to see different futures unfolding, act in a distributed fashion, and absorb disruptions resiliently.

TRIZ

TRIZ clears space for innovation by inviting creative destruction, letting go of things we know (but rarely admit) limit our success. A bit of heretical thinking is encouraged. What must we stop doing to make progress on our deepest purpose?

Conversation Café

Engage everyone in making sense of profound changes.

Everyone can be included in making sense of confusing events and discovering new strategies. People can have a profound and calm conversation with less debating, arguing, and more listening. You can avoid unproductive conflict.

Agree / Certainty Matrix

Sort challenges into simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains.

Clarifying how to match different types of challenges with appropriate change methods. A loose analogy may be used to describe the types of challenges faced by change leaders as: simple like following a recipe, complicated like sending a rocket to the moon, complex like raising a child. Complex challenges are characterized by low agreement and low certainty; simple challenges have high agreement and high certainty. Mismatches are common (e.g., many complex challenges are made worse by more analysis that does not increase certainty or buy-in strategies that force agreement).

Social Network Webbing

Map informal connections and decide how to strengthen the network to achieve a purpose.

Network webbing quickly illuminates hidden resources in our social relationships and next steps. The approach builds better connections in a way that attracts people to organizing themselves rather than through top-down assignment. Further, tapping informal or loose connections—even your friends’ friends’ friend—can have a powerful influence on progress.

Purpose to Practice

Design the five elements which are essential for a resilient and enduring initiative.

By using P2P at the start of an initiative a large number of stakeholders can shape together all the elements that will be implemented and governed by them. The group begins by generating a shared purpose (i.e., why the work is important to each participant and the larger community). All additional elements —principles, participants, structure, and practices—are designed to help achieve the purpose. By shaping these five elements together participants clarify how they can organize themselves to adapt creatively and scale up for success.

Activity Planning

Min Specs

Specify only the absolute “Must Do’s” & “Must Not Do’s” for achieving a purpose.  In contrast to maximum specifications, they detail only must-dos and must-not-dos.

What I Need From You

People working in different functions and disciplines can quickly work out the “knots” by improving how they ask each other for what they need to be successful. Demystifying what is needed from each other to achieve common goals may mend misunderstandings or dissolve prejudices developed over time. Core needs are articulated rapidly while giving each person the chance to respond in a simple-yet-powerful fashion.

15% Solutions

Discover & focus on what each person has the freedom and resources to do now.

Everyone can do something small immediately that may make a BIG difference. There is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. Pick it up a level. Focus on what is within your discretion; NOT what you cannot change. Solutions to big problems are often distributed widely in places not known in advance.

25 : 10 Crowdsourcing

Rapidly generate and sift a Group’s most powerful actionable ideas.

25/10 helps spread innovations “out and up” while everyone notices the patterns in what emerges.

Panarchy

Understand how embedded systems interact, evolve, spread innovation, and transform.

With a large group of people, you can identify obstacles and opportunities for spreading your idea or innovation at many levels. Panarchy helps a group of people visualize how systems are embedded in systems and their interdependencies influence chances to spread positive change. Participants become more alert to small changes that can help spread ideas up to other levels and how shifts at larger-slower levels may release resources to assist you at another level. Each level has Ecocycle dynamics at play that create “opportunity windows” for multi-level movement across boundaries.

Communication

What³ Debrief

Progressing in stages from exploring What Happened to So What and finally to Now What

Appreciative Interviews

Stories from the field offer social proof of local solutions, pattern recognition, promising prototypes, and spreading innovations.

Celebrity Interview

Reconnect the experience of leaders and experts with people closest to the challenge at hand.

A large group of people can connect with a celebrity as a person and grasp the nuances of how they are approaching a challenge. The interviewer is acting as surrogate for the audience. A well-designed interview can turn something that is a passive (often boring) activity into a narrative that is entertaining and valuable. Often the interview is an invitation to action, drawing out all the elements needed to spark imaginations and encourage coordinated movement. Interviews reveal the full range of rational (logos), emotional (pathos), and ethical/moral (ethos) dynamics at play.

9-Whys

Make the purpose of your work together clear.

Individuals and a group can rapidly clarify the ground truth or essence of why their work is important. It is the most commonly missing ingredient in gatherings. Without clarity it is very difficult to move forward together. With a clear purpose, it is possible to spread and scale innovations with fidelity. An unambiguous shared purpose can unleash more freedom and more responsibility.

Troika Consulting

Get practical and imaginative help from colleagues immediately.

You can unleash local wisdom with give-and-take reciprocal action. Individuals ask for help and get help immediately from two others. Peer to peer coaching helps with discovering everyday solutions, revealing patterns, and refining prototypes. This is simple and effective way to extend coaching support for individuals beyond formal reporting relationships.

Wise Crowds

Tap he wisdom of the whole group in rapid cycles.

Individuals ask for help and get help immediately from many others (from 5 to 150 others). The consultation taps inventiveness of everyone in the group while deepening inquiry skills. Individuals gain more clarity and capacity for self-correction and self-understanding. Supportive relationships form very quickly.

User Experience Fishbowl

Share know-how gained from experience with a larger community.

A subset of people with direct field experience can quickly foster understanding, spark creativity, and facilitate adoption of new practices among members of a larger community. Fishbowl sessions have an inside and an outside circle of participants designed to illuminate how a slightly more experienced group of people have made concrete progress on a challenge. Breaking down the barriers with direct communication, people learn best when they make discoveries themselves within the context of their working groups.

Simple Ethnography

Observe and record actual behaviors of users in the field.

Novel approaches to challenges are revealed by immersing yourself at the feet of the people with local experience—often your clients or colleagues on the frontline. Beyond what people say and think, exploring what people actually do and feel in a local setting opens wide the door to change and innovation. Anyone that uses your service or product has valuable tacit and latent knowledge. Drawing out user-centered observations can spur rapid improvements and prototype development.

Trust Building

Heard, Seen, Respected

Fostering empathetic capacity to walk in the shoes of others. Many situations we face do not have immediate answers or clear resolutions. Recognizing these situations and responding with empathy can improve the cultural “climate,” building trust among group members.

Drawing Together

Drawing together makes it possible to access hidden knowledge. Hidden knowledge may include feelings and patterns difficult to express with words. When people are tired, their brains are full, and you have reached the limits of logical thinking, drawing together can evoke ideas that precede logical, step-by-step understanding of what is possible.

Management / Team Work

Open Space

Without an agenda controlled by a few, a large group of people can take responsibility for what they care about most and move into distributed action very quickly. Letting go of control (i.e., the agenda) and putting it in the hands of participants generates more action, innovation and follow-through. When confronted with a common challenge, Open Space releases the inherent creativity and leadership in people as well as their capacity to self-organize.

Shift & Share

“Hidden” innovators and positive variation can be revealed to everyone in the community. Very short sessions help presenters “cut to the chase,” sharing a concise and compelling story. Drawing out innovators and their stories inspire creative mash-ups in the community.

Helping Heuristics

Change how you choose to work with others by utilizing a progression of practical methods. Heuristics are short cuts that help us identify what is important when entering a new situation. These structures helps you develop deeper insight into your own interaction patterns while making smart decisions quickly. A series of short exchanges reveals heuristics or simple rules of thumb for productive helping.

Generative Relationships

Reveal relationship patterns that create surprising value or dysfunctions.

Understanding how a group works together and identifying changes that can be made to generate better than expected results. All members of the group together diagnosis current relationship patterns and decide follow-up actions steps.

Ecocycle

You can eliminate or mitigate common bottlenecks that stifle performance by sifting your portfolio of activities, identifying which ones are starving for resources and which ones are rigid and hampering progress. The Ecocycle makes it possible to sift, prioritize and plan action with everyone involved in the activities at the same time. Conventionally, this is done behind closed doors with a small group of people. Additionally, it helps everyone see the forest and the trees—where their activities fit in the larger context with others. Ecocycle invites leaders to focus on creative destruction and renewal in addition to typical themes regarding growth and maturity or efficiency. All elements are needed to spur agility, resilience, and sustained performance.

Impromptu Networking

Rapidly share challenges and expectations, build new connections.

By focusing attention on the problems individuals want to solve, a deep well of curiosity and talent can quickly be tapped in large groups. Establishes a productive pattern of engagement if used at the beginning of a working session. Loose yet powerful connections are formed in 20 minutes by asking engaging questions. Everyone contributes to shaping the work, noticing patterns together, and discovering local solutions.

Meeting Structure

Design Elements

Five elements define the underlying design of all microstructures—conventional or liberating. We call them design elements because you can make choices about them based on what you want to accomplish. The five design elements for a conventional presentation or lecture are illustrated below:

1. a structuring invitation (listen to me);
2. how the space is arranged and what materials are needed (rows or U facing presenter, screen, projector and PPT slides);
3. how participation is distributed (nearly 100% of total time for presenter);
4. how groups are configured (one group, one presenter); and,
5. a sequence of steps and time allocation (presentation for most of time; possibly Q&A for balance of time).

Liberating Structures are designed with variations on these five structural elements.

1-2-4-All

Engage everyone simultaneously in generating questions, ideas, suggestions.

You can generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before. You can access know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance. Open, generative conversation unfolds. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Most importantly, the ideas are owned by participants so follow-up and implementation is simplified.

Design Storyboards

The most common causes of dysfunctional meetings can be eliminated: unclear purpose or lack of a common one, time wasters, restrictive participation, absent voices, groupthink and frustrated participants. Designing a storyboard draws out a clear purpose and matches it with congruent microstructures. It reveals who needs to be included for successful implementation. Storyboards invite participants to carefully define all the micro-organizing elements needed to achieve their purpose: a structuring invitation, space, materials, participation, configurations, facilitation and time allocations. Storyboards prevent meetings without an explicit design. Good designs yield better than expected results by uncovering tacit and latent sources of innovation.

Anthroposophical-based Life Coaching

I am putting some thoughts together on what a Life Coaching practice would look like based out of Anthroposophy. Here’s what I have so far, it’s a first cut of a mission statement for such a practice.

Anthroposophical Life Coaching

Mission Statement

Acknowledging the reality of the spiritual world, we practice grounding, earthly forms of thinking, speaking, and acting, to create a rich and meaningful existence in our daily life with conscious awareness of the guidance by the spiritual world.

Acknowledging the reality of the spiritual world…

The foundation of this work rests in the belief and faith of a spiritual world. We recognize that this is a challenging and difficult premise in these times. Science continues to deepen our understanding of the physical world and its processes while at the same time technology continues to improve its emulation of life processes – virtual reality, social networking, systems of commerce, and so forth. Much that has historically been relegated to the world of the gods in its mystery has been comprehended and rigorously verified by scientific discoveries. This however creates an existential crisis in which we, as human beings, ask “Am I nothing more than a biochemical process whose thoughts and actions are ultimately deterministic?” For some people, the answer is “yes”, that is all that there is to consciousness and life. For others, the answer is “no”, either derived from an original, intrinsic faith in a spiritual world or leading to a discovered faith in a spiritual world. The foundation of an Anthroposophical-based life coaching practice is a faith in a spiritual world.

…we practice grounding, earthly forms of thinking, speaking and acting…

Our thoughts, speech, and actions are malleable–we can choose to change the quality of our life by changing our thinking, feeling, and willing. We can teach ourselves and each other how to move from an unconscious reactive response system to increasingly conscious, proactive responses. This requires that we engage in concrete practices that begin to shift our minute-by-minute awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. In essence, we practice heightening our self-awareness so that our response to what is happening around us and within us begins to transform into a conscious choice-making activity–we become the leaders of our selves. The development of these skills is the material of numerous self-help books, workshops, and teachings, some of which are thousands of years old. What is important in Anthroposophical-based life coaching is not a prescribed “these are the tools that will work for you” but rather that we choose out of our own freedom the tools that we feel are right for us at this moment in time and that we work with them with the foundational awareness of the guidance of the spiritual world. In other words, we frame our work within this foundation by asking “how am I being guided in this work?” This may include seeking out traditional and non-traditional therapies, medicines, dietary changes, exercise, and so forth. It is essential to acknowledge the physical reality of our existence and our physical needs and concerns within the framework of spiritual guidance.

…to create a rich and meaningful existence in our daily life…

We can remove the shackles of our present patterns and discover a vastly richer landscape of choices that can be made consciously and freely. As our self-awareness develops and we discover more choices in our thinking, speech, and actions, our existence becomes richer and more meaningful. This is a personal process that is not judged or criticized. The question is not “what did you fail at today?” but rather “what free choice did you experience today?” As we tenderly nurture these incremental experiences, we can reflect on how these experiences enrich our lives and bring meaning in the form of compassion, understanding, empathy to ourselves and those around us. Our lives also become more meaningful when we choose healthy boundaries in our words “this is not right for me at the moment” or “I am in disagreement with this thinking or activity.” Our awareness of the guidance coming from the spiritual world helps us to discover, maintain, and develop our true center. We can then communicate with compassionate and understanding what is right for us. By becoming more conscious of our boundaries, we can develop the skills to avoid the inner emotional and thought turmoil that occurs when our boundaries are violated, and instead acknowledge those situations objectively and respond to them with consciousness.

…with conscious awareness of the guidance by the spiritual world.

The spiritual world wants to be an active participant in our thinking, speech, and actions. The very concept of “being human” implies a self-awareness that “I am human.” But in saying “I am human”, is this statement not imbued with the question “How do I be human?” In our self-aware asking of this question we reach out with a gesture of listening to the spiritual world for the guiding answer. As we practice this, our self-awareness occurs more frequently and more deeply in each waking moment, which in turn strengthens our connection with the spiritual world and our ability to hear the guidance coming from it. Eventually this can become as natural as breathing, such that we are in constant relationship with the spiritual world in all of our activities, from the mundane to the sublime.

Political Activism

Political activists generally know what to ask of other people, but they hardly ever talk about asking anything of themselves.

Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds, Pg 100

Needs and Gifts Website Is Up!

I’ve put together a Needs and Gifts website for community building and sharing of our talents, gifts, interests, and needs.  Feedback is welcome, this is a beta-test release, so please be patient with the website which may be slow at times.  Enjoy!

http://needsandgifts.herokuapp.com/

Marc

gem native extensions, ansicon, and auto-run

If you get this error:

“Failed to build gem native extension”

And you’ve installed AnsiCon and initialize it in the startup folder, you will encounter the above error.

The fix is explained here, scroll down to “ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension”

It took me a couple hours over the last few days to figure this out, mainly because that page never came up when I googled for the error, instead, I got a dozen stackoverflow hits.  I’ll have to remember to exclude stackoverflow if what I’m finding there is not useful.  It seems to be taking over!

Marc

Authentication in Ruby on Rails

There are dozens of articles for Ruby on Rails on how to roll your own authentication system or use an authentication gem.  Why did I write one?  Because none of them are comprehensive in their coverage.

In my article User Authentication in Ruby on Rails, I discuss:

• how to write a Rails application with RubyMine, the IDE
• how to create migrations and inspect your data in PostgreSQL
• how to add “remember me” and reCAPTCHA features
• how to add email notifications for new users and users that forget their password
• how to use the authentication system in the applet itself

and I cover some basics about Ruby on Rails development:

• Gems
• Site Environment Variables
• Database Migrations
• HTML metadata
• Controllers, Models, and Views
• Application Layouts
• CSS
• Cookies

If you’re new to Ruby on Rails, this article will help you get started with all the tools, technologies and concepts that you typically need to touch when developing websites with Rails.

And even then, there are large pieces I’ve left out: testing, FireBug, etc., so keep a look out for further installments.

Marc

Windows 8 == Fail

A friend of mine recently purchased a laptop with Windows 8, and to preface this, I want to point out that she is well versed with Windows 7. She was trying to figure out how to get some basic things working and solicited my help.

As an introduction, when we booted the laptop, it comes up with lovely full screen image of a road meandering off into the mountains (beware, there be dragons!) and a clock and date. Now what? Oh, click the mouse button to get the login screen. OK, so now W8 has added an extra click just to get started.

The first thing I noticed was that of all the colorful squares to click on from the W8 start screen, she only used two: email and Internet Explorer. All the other squares, Netflix, games, video stuff, social networking stuff, even I couldn’t identify what most of them were, elicited a “what is all this junk?” response.

She uses Yahoo email (yeah, I know), and there’s this “integrated” Yahoo email reader that W8 provides. Her first question was, “where are all my emails?” The emails that were showing up were only a week or two old, nothing else. Now, this isn’t necessarily a W8 issue, but I had no idea why (we discovered the answer later.)

Her next question was, “how do I print an email?” Again, I was totally lost because I don’t use W8, there is no menu bar, and after accidentally moving the mouse to one of the corners of the screen, the popup, I guess they’re called “gems” didn’t refer to anything having to do with printing.

At that point, I was also curious how one searches for emails. One of the “gems” was a magnifying glass which I clicked on and it dutifully came up with a search textbox. I entered some text that I know matched some text in an email, but nothing happened.

At this point, we were both frustrated and she asked where she can get some training, as obviously I knew nothing about W8 (and have no desire to learn after these experiences.) Googling for W8 help, an ad came up for the local Microsoft Store – wow, a useful Google ad! So off we went to the Microsoft Store.

Now, you should know that even though I am immersed in Microsoft technology, I loathe walking into these stores. But we trundled off to the shopping plaza, laptop in hand and found the Microsoft store, right next to the Apple store. Lots of glitter, shiny toys, and robots walking around in blue shirts with small plastic, white, rectangles with the Microsoft logo attached to lanyards hanging from their necks. Oh wait, these aren’t Microsoft robots, they’re people!

We went up to desk where I explained that my friend was having trouble getting a few things working. Well, what do you know? For $200 you can get a year “subscription” to three, one-hour private sessions! Really. However, she was also kind enough to offer that someone could sit down with my friend to answer a few questions, for free.

So, first, “where are my emails?” After a couple minutes of fussing around, the nice fellow found out that there’s this configuration option (I have no idea how he got there) to change Yahoo’s email from “2 weeks” to, if I recall correctly, “every day” (how’s that for intuitive for “all my emails”) and lo-and-behold, it began syncing and retrieving all her emails.
As to the “how do I search emails?” this fellow tried the same thing I had, and after a few minutes of fussing around, declared that the integrated Yahoo mail program was very limited, didn’t offer the ability to search emails, and she should buy Outlook. Really. The web-based Yahoo email has more features!

As to the “how do I print an email?” he showed us that, once a printer is connected, you mouse over to the right corner, then mouse over to “devices” and then select the printer. Really? That’s incredibly intuitive.

Lastly, among the dozens of useless squares littering the start screen, I asked the fellow, where’s a basic word processor. What does he do? He switches into the “old” W7 desktop mode and brings up WordPad. I have no problems with WordPad, but really, switching to the W7 desktop mode? The start screen is literally littered with useless shiny squares, and a basic word processing app isn’t one of them. So I ask him, how can I put that on the start screen? A couple minutes go by before he figures out how to pin the app to the start screen.

Finally, just as we were about to leave the store, I noticed that the laptop had gone into “updating Windows, do not turn off your computer” state. Argh. It took another 10 minutes, trapped in the belly of the beast, before the OS completed its updates. During that time, I wandered around checking out the shiny toys. They have these plastic flat keyboards you can attach to pads and other devices. I tried typing on one of them. “Tried” being the operative word, as the visual feedback is delayed about half a second and by the time you notice the keyboard didn’t register a keypress, I was ten keystrokes ahead, which took another second or so to show up on the screen. Utter junk. But I digress…

So we trundle back home, plug in the printer, and I go through the “mouse to the corner”, “mouse to devices”, “click on printer”, and what do you know, there’s the email document previewed and ready to print. At least that worked.
So, I hand the computer over to my friend and have her try a few things. She tries to print an email, and the first thing I discover is that it takes a significant amount dexterity required to bring up the sidebar of “gems” (or whatever they are called.) I tell my friend, move the mouse to the corner of the screen. She does so, but leaves the mouse where the whole pointer can still be seen. No, I say, shove it all the way into the corner until it disappears. She does so, and the transparent sidebar appears.

UI Design Lesson #1: Never design a user interface that requires something to disappear in order for something else to appear. Invisible screen hotspots sound like a great idea, but they are actually terrible. Think about it.
I then tell her, now move the mouse to “Devices”. By the time I get done telling her this and by the time she sees where “Devices” is (being new, she’s reading all the text under the icons) the sidebar times out and disappears. First response “What did I do???” Well, you didn’t do anything, which is the problem, because what you needed to do you didn’t do fast enough.

UI Design Lesson #2: Never design a user interface that requires the user to act within a certain timeframe. Beginners probably will not realize this, and it is an incredibly frustrating experience watching them trying to act in a smooth manner. First they put the mouse in the corner and then pull it back right away, before the popup appears. Then they pull back outside of the sidebar region, and it again disappears. In the process, they will probably click on something else. And the confusion goes on.

Eventually, she succeeds in printing.

Next, she wants to show me something on the web. So we launch IE and, having figured out that the address bar is at the bottom of the screen, she brings up the website. Now, this website has a lot of information that requires scrolling. IE, in W8, is a full screen app. Which means that the scrollbar buttons are conveniently (that’s sarcasm) located very close to the hotspots that bring up the W8 “gem” sidebar. In fact, my friend struggles several times with the dexterity required to mouse just over the scrollbar up/down buttons without activating the sidebar!

UI Design Lesson #3: Don’t position useful things so close to a hotspot that you can’t easily distinguish the two. Of course, this issue wouldn’t be a problem if it had been realized that invisible hotspots are a terrible UI design to begin with!

After some frustration, I tell her, just use the arrow keys to scroll the page up and down.

The next question is, how does she go back to a previous page? How does she enter a different URL? Because, you see, by this time W8 has conveniently (that’s sarcasm again) hidden the address bar. To this, I have no idea. I play around with W8 and after a particular mouse motion, some strange thing happens. The top of the screen all of a sudden shows small windows of previous web pages she has visited, and there on the bottom of the screen is the address bar! However, as soon as I mouse to my destination (the address bar) it (and the small windows at the top) disappear as if I’m playing a game of “hahaha, you can’t mouse over to me!”

UI Design Lesson #4: If you’re going to show something after a magical mouse gesture, don’t remove it until I actively choose to.

UI Design Lesson #5: Magical mouse gestures are nice, but whatever brings up the address bar in IE is unpredictable and I still haven’t figured out whether it’s a mouse gesture or some other random action. Mouse gestures may be a quick way for an experienced user to do something, but always provide more conventional means for the beginner to accomplish the same thing.

After a while, we give up and discover a workaround: go back to the desktop, click on IE again, and it shows an address bar! Of course, I have no idea how many IE windows that will result in remaining open in the background. It seems like quite a few. At some point my friend actually managed to get the “small windows” to stay in place long enough for her to close them. At one point, I started laughing my arse off when an IE message came up about “closing all tabs.” That’s cute, because W8, being full screen, has no tabs, but obviously IE has been coerced into a mode where, behind the scenes, it still thinks it has tabs. My friend was not amused at my laughter.

So, lastly, we go through a short “using WordPad” lesson. The fellow at the Microsoft store at pinned it to the start screen but it was off screen. So I show my friend how to scroll the start screen. Of course, what I really want to do is get rid of all that junk on the start screen. Anyways, she dutifully clicks on the “WordPad” square and W8 dutifully switches into the W7 mode to bring up WordPad.

Now note this. After typing in some stuff, she wants to make sure that the printing works. So she mouses over to the right corner of the screen. Ah, no, this is schizophrenic, psychotic Windows, and in this mode, you have to use the standard File/Print feature from the menu bar that Microsoft is remove from our collective memory.

UI Design Lesson #6: Consistency. If you’re going to come out with a new OS, then everything should behave consistently. If you can’t figure out how to get older applications to use poorly designed new user interface concepts, then maybe that’s a clue that you shouldn’t, and you should instead stick with something that doesn’t require users to remember which “mode” they are in to do basic tasks.

I see a bright future in Windows 8 psychotherapy and recovery counseling.

Oh, and as a final footnote, she later shows me some pictures on her iPad (which can by default view PowerPoint slideshows, which is not a feature already installed on W8 so she can’t open them on her laptop) and at one point she says, “see how easy the iPad is to use???

Marc