5G is not going to give you cancer or blow up your house.

You’re likely to see a lot of articles about the safety and risks of 5G, the next generation of mobile data infrastructure. I did not realize how pervasive these ideas were until my wife pointed me to a conversation on the social media site Next Door.

The whole conversation started out with a post from a member who discovered she unexpectedly had 5G at her house and hadn’t known anybody was putting up antennas for the new service. Over a couple of days, the discussion turned pretty heated as one side of the conversation tried to use evidence and reason to allay the fears and worries around the technology, and the other side alleged that hundreds of birds had already been killed by 5G and that the government (or someone) was using energy weapons to disintegrate enemies of the state.

I think it was day three when I noticed that the original poster had simply confused her 5Ghz WiFi signal with the 5G cell coverage. In her defense, they do both have a “5” in them. But they’re not the same thing.

Critical thinkers have a tendency to assume that everyone will be persuaded by evidence. This is the kind of thing that compels and convinces them, so it should work for all of us, right? Alas, this is not how humans are persuaded. If it were, then we’d have far fewer wars and more power-point presentations.

Internet fact-checking site Snopes.com used to be a simple way to rebut nonsense and web rumors, but the conspiracy-minded came up with the perfect response. They have spread the story that Snopes is a political puppet, so now sending your relatives debunking info from Snopes gets you nowhere. “They’re shills for [insert whomever here],” your angry uncle responds. “I don’t even need to look at that garbage.”

Immune to facts. That’s a big problem when fighting conspiracy.

The Failure of Facts

I could tell you that 5G cell signals are not ionizing radiation. That means that the kind of radiation that they emit doesn’t have the ability to mutate your cells, which is the only known mechanism by which 5G might conceivably cause cancer. This would have zero compelling effect on a 5G conspiracist because it still has the word “radiation” in it. And like the word “chemical,” there are people who find these words trigger a startling array of emotions starting with fear.

I could point out that these same fears of new mobile technology prelude every new advancement in the mobile signal space, despite the lack of any corresponding increase in cancer rates. Sensibly, with the incredible adoption rate for mobile phones, it would seem inevitable that there would be a corresponding soaring rate of related cancers if the technologies were in fact dangerous. The absence of such evidence is seen by some as further proof of the conspiracy. Of course, they are covering it up. Whoever they is.

I could mention that bringing “smart meters” into the 5G conversation is like insisting that we talk about Star Trek: Deep Space 9 every time we discuss Star Wars. Sure, they both have space ships in them. But isn’t it possible that you’re just throwing in every fear of radiation into a giant bucket? My neighbors on “Next Door” certainly felt it was appropriate to bring these up.

Obviously, no conversation about 5G risks would be complete without addressing the alleged use of directed energy weapons during California’s Paradise fire. According to my “Next Door” neighbors, someone was using smart meters to direct energy blasts at the homes and property of California citizens for reasons, and they were using the smart meters to target them. Or something.

Evidence won’t help. Anyone who believes the government is using orbital platforms or powerful drone aircraft to launch precision energy weapon strikes against US citizens by leveraging smart meter readers for targeting purposes will not care about your evidence and logic. You can take your carefully crafted arguments and citations and graphs and whatnot and go back to your nerd treehouse because the conspiracy kids are not going to play with you.

Is Reality Dead?

Here’s some consolation: This is not new.

Conspiracy theories are as old as human culture. Nero, for example, was alleged to have set fire to Rome, to have “fiddled” while Rome burned, to have sung or performed poetry while it burned, and to have faked his own death with plans to come back later.

The theories themselves are certainly not harmless. Millions have died because of various conspiracy rumors, often with government endorsement. Unfortunately, advances in our ability to communicate with large audiences have not been conjoined with advances in our ability to differentiate reality from nonsense.

Lies can go viral around the world while the truth is still trying to get its AOL dial-up connection to work. Fact-checking, a deep-rooted regard for accuracy and plausibility, and a belief in a social structure predicated on logic and reason are the very things that make reality-based thinking the foundation of discovery and advancement — yet also hobble it in the competition with conspiracy rumors.

This is a blog about technology and business process improvement, and figuring out what to do about conspiracy theories as a whole is far, far outside of our expertise. I can point you to a few good books on the topic though:

A Culture of Conspiracy by Michael Barkun

Escaping the Rabbit Hole by Mick West

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe by the hosts of the affiliated podcast

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

But let’s get back to the topic that we can cover here with some degree of certitude…

Will 5G Survive the Conspiracies?

Despite the many fears being drummed up by conspiracy theorists and certain media outlets that I won’t bother naming, I think 5G will arrive intact. Here’s why:

The current standard for cell data is 4G. While 4G has theoretical maximum speeds in excess of 25Mbps, the real world max tends to be between 5 and 15 Mbps.

Meanwhile, 5G has an expected low-end speed of 50Mbps. Yes, the LOW end of 5G is supposed to be exponentially faster than the high end of 4G.

Potentially, this means that network video game lag would become a thing of the past. Pixellated low-res YouTube videos could all be instant 1080P high-res. Video conferencing, VR gaming, streaming, basically anything that requires high bandwidth to function would suddenly become better.

It’s going to take a lot more than imaginary energy weapons attacks and hysterical misattributed “bird deaths” to overcome the benefits that this kind of speed will offer.

Tell My WiFi Lover

So how did things turn out with my “Next Door” neighbor and her mysterious 5G signal? That remains to be seen. I explained the difference between 5G cell technology and 5Ghz WiFi signal, but that message sits beneath a waterfall of angry pro-vs-con 5G cell conspiracy posts. Will she be relieved? Will she find out who upgraded her router? Will she cancel her mobile service and move into a Faraday Cage? I don’t know, but I hope her fears are put to rest and she’s able to find other things to worry about.

As for the 5G? The irony of seeing people outside in the sunlight protesting the non-ionizing radiation from 5G mobile technology will stay with me a long time.

Fear of Change

Fear of 5G is probably rooted in a lot of different anxieties. Sometimes fears are founded on real dangers, but when it comes to new technologies fear of change is often the biggest underlying challenge to adoption. General angst about the risks of cell phone radiation is far more common than the fear of energy weapons being turned on citizens by THEM. Neither risk seems to bear up under scrutiny, but that doesn’t stop fear. That’s not how fear works.

Fear is a primal emotion. Animals with limited emotional range and tiny brains still manage to express fear. Humans brains have this huge wrinkled neocortex that allows us to do all kinds of advanced planning, modeling, and abstract contemplation. However, underneath that amazing computing power, we share a primitive engine of emotional decision making, the amygdala.

When people are comfortable with the status quo, threatening to change that — even to ostensibly make things better — is likely to trigger fear responses in at least some of the population. This is one of the hidden hurdles businesses face every day. You can’t make things better without change, and you can’t change things without dealing with the associated fear. The teams that are bringing the change will be dealing with fear and anxiety throughout the project. The people receiving the change (whether that’s a reorganization, a software rollout, or even a new product line) will often be faced with accepting sudden change with which they had no voice.

Being on the receiving end of a transformative change in which you have no voice can be terrifying and frustrating. If you’re on the development side of such change, giving a voice to those concerned parties is one of the easiest ways to alleviate fear.

At Apex, we are an Agile development group and we give the customers a voice in the process all the way through from beginning to end. As we develop solutions for our clients, they get constant updates and are able to voice concern and we adjust as we go. Fears are addressed, not dismissed.

I’m sure that customer worry is somewhere on the list of things the big carriers are concerned about as they develop their 5G infrastructure, but clearly, that message is not getting out to the concerned and frightened citizens who have taken up conspiracy theories around the technology. You can’t stop the tin-foil hat brigade with informative leaflets, but the wireless industry does need to address this small but noisy contingent of the population to ensure that America gets network infrastructure that can keep us competitive with the rest of the modern world.

Fear of 5G was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Few aspects of information technology have been as massively misunderstood as Artificial Intelligence. Before getting into the discussion, let's take a minute and talk about what AI is and what it isn’t.

The history of Artificial Intelligence is not lengthy, but it is complicated. We could start arbitrarily with Claude Shannon’s paper on Information Theory which demonstrated that digital computers could solve logic problems using Boolean algebra. Or we could go back to Ada Lovelace’s letters to Charles Babbage where she postulated that through abstraction his mechanical contrivance could be used to solve problems mechanically. Arbitrary moments, but both are significant. You could read about Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and many others and still not have a full picture of how AI has developed.

The more poetic way to describe the development of AI would be to say it was built on a foundation of speculative promises, delivered on very few of them, yet has accomplished many amazing things that weren’t mentioned in the brochure. The disconnect between what has actually transpired in AI and what was promised is significant because disappointed consumers represent both a danger and an opportunity for innovators.

The Promise

When it comes to technologies that have been poorly represented in fiction, Artificial Intelligence may be the most egregiously oversold and inaccurately portrayed. From the homicidally neurotic HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey to the helpful “butler AI” Jarvis from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the fictional version of AI comes across as human-level consciousness behind a screen. Often this consciousness is insane or dangerous.

The interfaces for these AI are often shown as robots — or, more specifically, as Androids. The premise of 2001 makes the AI quite dangerous to the crew of the space mission, but HAL is not particularly frightening if you can walk away from him. The W.O.P.R. from War Games had no hands or feet, but it packed a nuclear wallop.

It’s the androids that seem to really add menace to the AI though. The skull-crushing androids of James Cameron’s Terminator series are iconic examples of the misanthropic AI in an unstoppable body.

Fictional depictions of technology can raise people’s expectations about what real technology is capable of to the point that they become disappointed with reality. We’ve been watching robots on television and movies to the point that when our Roomba doesn’t behave like the robot from Lost in Space or Star Trek: The Next Generation, it is a let-down.

The disparity between what we expect and what actually get with AI might be best shown with Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri. The services sound quite human and understand many commands, but a few interactions where the underlying AI can’t decipher commands which a toddler would be able to grasp and the shortcomings become all too apparent.

Amazon is the most successful retailer in the world, but its AI for suggesting products can’t seem to figure out that you don’t want to buy 9 different versions of that action movie you just bought. Google’s navigation technology is amazing until it delivers you to a dark abandoned housing development instead of the bowling alley where the rest of your team is enjoying pizza and beer.

Even though your sad carpet robot, confused talking hockey puck and addled shopping and navigation assistants may disappoint you, there is much more to AI than these. Any time the AI interfaces with humans there is an opportunity for disappointment on the human side. Thankfully, AI hasn’t developed its own sense of disappointment.

If AI has disappointed us or slipped past our notice, the most likely cause is that we are often so busy noticing what AI isn’t that we fail to see what it actually is.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

One of the great ironies of Artificial Intelligence is that the more science tried to create artificial kinds of thinking, the more we realized how little we understand about what intelligence is. Terms like intelligence, cognition, and consciousness seem simple enough until we try and define them. Trying to get a machine to closely emulate human brain function is difficult when we can’t even determine how our brains do them — or what they are exactly.

So the history of AI research has been closely tied with advances in neurobiology, psychology, and mathematics. While there are many who still dream of having an artificial “human” intelligence to command, the reality of AI is that it has taken a multitude of approaches and this has resulted in a slew of different technologies of varying complexity and usefulness. Some of these are domain-specific, others are general purpose. Some call the narrow-focused AI “weak” but that adjective refers to its breadth, not to its efficacy within that domain. A “strong” AI might be able to do more with a question than just tell you that the answer lies outside its area of expertise. If you’ve ever been disappointed with Siri or Alexa because they couldn’t answer your simple question, you’ve experienced the limits of a narrow AI.

Collectively they may all be thought of as part of AI.

In the brief history of the field of Artificial Intelligence, there have been numerous forks and divergences. As particular approaches have come into favor, others lose funding and become dormant. Rather than go through the history of the field, let’s take a brief look at some of the dominant paradigms in play right now in the late second decade of the 21st century. Advances in cognitive approaches and the ability to apply massively parallel problem solving to incredibly large data sets have made it possible to gather unexpected, sometimes even eerie insights into various areas of expertise.

Language Processing

On the TV show Star Trek it was routine for the crew to speak to the ship’s computer in order to posit questions or ask for advice. The 1970s series Buck Rogers featured Dr. Theopolis, an erudite and wise AI carried around the neck of the diminutive android Twiggy whose Loony Tunes voice (he was voiced by Mel Blanc, the talent behind Bugs Bunny and many other iconic characters) and antics provided comic relief from the grim drama of the 25th century. These fictional examples use what we now call Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Despite the stacks of grammar books and rule sets defining what is acceptable within languages, such rules are notoriously difficult to turn into meaningful computer code — and vice versa. Perhaps it is because language is primarily a human skill, that producing a machine capable of deciphering language is seen as a primary demonstration of intelligence. The dream of rendering moot the barriers of language is ancient, but the first hint that the solution might lie in computers came in the 1950s. Even though it seems like mapping words from one language to another would be simple enough, it turns out that the complexities of grammar, the nuance of poetry and metaphor, the bite of sarcasm and satire, all rely on the cognition of the receiving partner to be understood. The computer tackling this work has to not just map (for example) Russian to English, but also understand the message so that the message’s intent can be conveyed appropriately. That turned out to be a harder problem than a surface assessment would imply.

There are a similar number of complex obstacles to having machines listen and understand spoken language. Anyone with a home automation speaker system is already aware of the kinds of surprising annoyances when the “always listening” devices mistake your conversation as an activation command, or when they misinterpret your simple directives in the most profoundly annoying ways. Having your Amazon Echo repeatedly come awake when you’re watching Alex Trebek on TV’s Jeopardy, or having Siri constantly play Glee covers instead of the original performances of your favorite ABBA song — sure these are “first world problems,” but they also represent the obvious limits of what is effectively still a big challenge for AI.

Having to deal with Siri or Alexa not quite understanding your intent is a far cry from a world where the computer couldn’t listen and even when it could, it didn’t know how to understand you. Things have improved dramatically over where they were just 10 years ago. Perhaps these quaint moments of AI inadequacy will disappear into a more disturbing “teenager” phase where the computer nods as if it understood us but is actually playing games and texting with its friends?

Deep Learning

There are a few remarkable developments that have made the field of Deep Learning become an exciting branch of AI. Thanks to Moore’s Law, the cost of extremely fast processing power becomes cheaper every year. With Deep Learning, incredibly large data sets turn from intimidating obstacles into enticing opportunities. Approaches in Deep Learning vary around what algorithms are used, and how the data reviews are configured and applied.

The ability of AI to be trained to teach itself has resulted in major improvements in speech recognition, photo and video analysis, robot training, OCR, and self-driving vehicles. As computer power increases, and as data assets grow, the ability of these tools to help with a plethora of applications is inevitable. In the meantime, just keep repeating the song title louder and slower until Siri either gets it right or figures out you’re being condescending to her.

Robotics

As I’ve mentioned above, the disconnect between how robotics were shown in fiction and how they’ve actually been implemented continues to foster disappointment. Back in the 1940s, Isaac Asimov wrote up his famous laws of robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A few years ago, I interviewed Daniel Wilson, a roboticist who had written a book called Robopocalypse. I was disappointed when he explained that Asimov’s 3-Laws were merely a fun fictional convention for robot stories and not anything actual computer scientists were aspiring to develop.

A more interesting part of that conversation was learning how imprecisely the word robot is used. A lot of systems can be described as robots. Self-driving cars, autonomous vacuum cleaners, aerial drones, coffee vending machines, and very clever toys can all be accurately described as robots. Wilson said that even simple systems like automatic fire detection systems can be thought of as robots.

Having robots fall short of their fictional counterparts is fine by me. I don’t want a T-800 wandering the streets of Los Angeles looking for Sarah Connor. The weird-looking but amazing robots of Boston Dynamics show that the state of the art in robotics is approaching and sometimes exceeding their fictional promise.

There is another kind of robot hard at work in America today, the bots behind Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA has a tremendous amount of potential for putting tedious manual processes under the control of semi-intelligent bots. While researching for this article, I came across a clip from the 1957 film Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy, Audrey Hepburn and the fictional blinkenlights system known as EMARAC. In the clip, the research team is challenged with a “John Henry” type comparison of efficiency, and the scene culminates with everyone’s most dire take on RPA. Would the bots really be taking our jobs?

The answer to that is going to be complicated. In all likelihood, RPA will lead to some job loss — but the upside is that jobs that are soul-crushingly boring can be automated. In many companies, this will lead to work assignments that are more cognitively challenging. RPA is also creating new jobs for people because even the most repetitive tasks need occasional changes and tweaking. The specter of “robots are taking our jobs!” has been lurking in our culture since at least the 1950s* and will continue to lurk for decades to come. You are probably in a better position to know whether your employer would embrace RPA as a method to empower the workforce or as a means to reduce it, but I suspect the fear RPA is far overblown compared to the actual benefits.

The Turing Test

What I’m getting at is that it is very difficult to make real systems that match up with the hype and imagination of fiction and with the hyperbole of the sales team. If you can get past those feelings of disappointment, there is a lot of amazing advancement within AI which is benefitting us even if it is obscured from our direct view by user interfaces or other forms of obfuscation. But what about the big hurdle? Can a computer pass the Turing Test?

The Turing Test is Alan Turing’s thought experiment about whether or not a person could communicate with a computer and not know there was a computer at the other end of the conversation. It is, effectively, a test to see whether a computer can pretend to be a human. However, there are several problems with this “test” as a measure of the efficacy of AI.

First, part of the test is whether or not a person can be fooled. Everyone can be fooled, but there is a broad spectrum of gullibility. An IT expert will know the kinds of questions that might trip-up or confuse an AI. If you think I am wrong, just consider the ease with which phone-scammers are duping Americans right now. Many of these calls don’t even have a human at the other end. A well-crafted computer script is using recorded snippets, voice-recognition, and deceptive wording to trick citizens out of their wealth. Ta-da! We’ve passed the Turing Test in the dumbest possible way.

Turing called this “The Imitation Game” and it was meant to show whether a machine could demonstrate the kinds of conversational flexibility sufficient to simulate a theory of mind. Turing knew that within the context of his test parameters this would only be an imitation of human intelligence. Tricking people with clever text scripts has already possible for decades. Even the primitive program ELIZA was able to fool some people into believing they were in conversation with an intelligence.

From an Artificial Intelligence perspective, another problem with Turing’s thought game is that it isn’t aspirational. From the outset, it seems to ask can we be tricked rather than can machines become sentient. Personally, I think we need look no further than to cats as pets to realize that humans can definitely be tricked. I have owned numerous cats and dogs through my life and one species is a loyal and intelligent animal companion, the other is cats. There’s nothing wrong with having cats as pets, but if humans were any good at spotting phony companionship there would only be one aisle of pet food at WalMart and it would not have any “authentic fish flavor.”

Computers, like cats, are cold and emotionless. When empathy and joy are present in our computer relationships, we’re the ones bringing it. Computers aren’t that into us.

The Loebner Prize is a contentious contest that purports to test the best of the chatbots out there to find which are most suited for passing the Turing Test. For the past three years, the winner has been Mitsuku, a chatbot from Steve Worswick. It is, I must confess, an impressive little chatbot but it’s not fooling me.

The future is insight

Let's discuss one of the most promising aspects of modern AI, that of providing deep and unexpected insights by mining big data. If you read a lot of AI marketing, you’ll find insights is one of the hottest products. It can be difficult to quantify exactly how AI can help you until it is applied to your company’s data. When it is effective, AI insights can be quite spooky.

To give you an example, imagine your company carries a variety of inventory items in stores across the country. You’ve been in business for two decades, and have lots of data about your inventory and sales. But what if there were other data that affected your customer’s behavior? Imagine an AI that could look at your sales data and compare the sales history to the weather history to sales behavior that goes right down to the product SKU? Perhaps after recurring patterns of heat or rain, there are specific sales behaviors. An obvious one might be an uptick in umbrella sales during rainy periods, but perhaps it is more complex? What if the AI could see that after hurricane season, a particular pattern of expensive Generator sales kicks in. An adept AI could observe the first insight, about the weather and certain products. But the next step might be for it to look at hurricane prediction patterns for the season and to dynamically order or move inventory based on those predictions because of how they will likely be needed.

That’s a crude example, but the insights that these machines are able to find are not always intuitive. AI doesn’t think like us, and that’s the point. Unlocking the possibilities of big data/AI insight is happening right now. Big companies are leveraging their AI capabilities through the Software as a Service (SAAS) model. You can get IBM’s Watson, Amazon’s AWS Cognition, Microsoft’s Azure, Oracle Cloud Analytics, and leverage them through monthly cloud-based engagements without having to spend a lot on infrastructure to get started. The cloud-based approach is powerful since it is built on flexible virtualized hardware which means you can ramp up your computing power as needed without having to do a large initial outlay of cash for systems that might not be fully engaged until you can define the project parameters.

It is good to see so much competition in this space. This means there is competitive pricing, and it also means that novel innovations are likely to arise as development teams compete.

Cogito, ergo summary

The promise of Artificial Intelligence is not illusory. We’re getting real-world benefits right now that are powered by AI. However, the disparity between the fictional promises of AI and the sometimes clunky reality of its implementation will continue to frustrate users, probably for another twenty years. One strange thing about the nature of AI is that much of it exists behind the scenes, apart from human interfaces. In those cases, we don’t see the AI at work. This invisible implementation of AI systems is likely to continue such that we may be reaping benefits without even knowing there is an underlying digital cognition at play.

Computer power grows exponentially. Even though we’re seeing some amazing products and breakthroughs with digital assistants, language processing, and robotics, the whole idea of artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. Computing power is about abstraction. As we are able to model more and more complex systems and true up those models with real data from a vast array of collection points, it points to a future where AI will be ubiquitous. Yet the very scale of its broad applicability means that predicting the future around this technology is likely to be wildly inaccurate. How will AI impact business processes? Will we need to regulate what companies can do with AI? Should we fear a robot uprising? Stay tuned.

We’re a long way from digital consciousness. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. I’m already worried that too much reliance on AI will lead to a dumbed-down populace all too willing to turn over the thinking to the computers. I’m not ready for robot overlords, at least not while they can’t even get spelling and grammar right on the “auto-correct” suggestions. And don’t even get me started on the idea of apologizing to a computer.

I will not end my sentience with a propitiation.

*Just watch the clip. It’s maddeningly prescient and outdated at the same time.

Unmasking Artificial Intelligence was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a temptation to do things the way you’ve always done them. I mean, they worked, right? But the reality is that when we are given new ways to perform our work, it’s best to revisit the whole premise in case there are efficiencies to be gained that would otherwise be lost.

There’s a word for design elements that refer back to outmoded predecessors. Skeuomorphism. When you see a little 3.5" floppy diskette as the “save” icon in a program, this is skeuomorphism. Nobody uses those disks anymore — and new generations of computer users will probably never even see or touch a 3.5" disk.

When you’re converting paper forms to online forms, the first inclination of most people who come from a paper background is to re-create the form’s layout to closely emulate the paper design. But before you fall into that habit, consider this question:

Why was the paper version of the form created with that particular layout?

The medium of paper limits how much information can fit on a single page. Your Apex Forms (and web forms in general) do not have this limitation. We’ll be talking more about taking advantage of web form layout tools for more effective form results in future posts, but for now, we’re going to talk about columnar layout.

What if you just made your form one big single column? If you are on a big widescreen, this kind of layout might seem a bit of space waster. But as users transition more and more to phones and tablet interfaces, the advantages of a single column layout begin to outweigh the desktop-centric designs. Let’s compare a couple of designs:

This is a simple wrap-layout. It’s clean but ideally, the submit button would be moved to the bottom of the form.

The same form, only now we are using column-layout, forcing all the page elements into a single vertical column.

Let’s see these same views on a mobile device.

Even the two-column view looks pretty good on mobile, but the single-column view on mobile is the cleanest and most useful design.

While both views are readable and usable, the single column view really looks sharper on the mobile screen. Bottom line is: Don’t be trapped in the idea that your forms need to look like their paper counterparts. The point is to accurately capture the information in a way that users find compelling and easy to use. A single column form is a good step towards clarity.

Columns Support Your Forms was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First, don’t worry about reading an article instead of doing something. This article will give you some tips about how to get away from the many distractions that turn your simple plans into obstacle courses and mine-fields.

Make a List

This is a personal tip that works for me. I’m frequently overwhelmed with a dizzying array of thoughts. Sometimes they even become a horrible loop as though my brain has gone into an infinite loop. I haven’t found the biological equivalent of BREAK, but a strategy that has really been beneficial is to make a list of the things that are distracting me. This might be a “to-do” list if it turns out that the items are actionable. Or, it might just be a reminder to look at these problems later. Whatever the mechanism, writing these distractions down and putting them to paper seems to extract them from my “looping” thoughts and makes my mind more orderly. Then I can tackle the list one item at a time.

Earlier this year I read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done and this turned out to be one of his tips as well. He describes it as getting control of the things that demand attention in our workflow. (In a full-blown workflow improvement program, there is more to his method than this.) Sequestering these distractions gives you permission to focus on the one you need to focus on right now, with the assurance that you’ll get back to the rest of the list soon. Put your list somewhere that reliably prods you to return to the other items later.

Avoid Interruptions (if you can)

I’ve read that it can take half an hour to get back into a “state of flow” after an interruption. One university study suggests that on average, an interruption takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds* to recover from.

As if interruptions didn’t already cause people to snap out of their flow state, they also literally take you away from the task at hand. So you lose not only time for the duration of the interruption, but also the time it takes to get back into the correct state of mind.

Before getting into a task that requires a high degree of mental focus, it might be a good idea to look at your calendar and plan your work sessions well outside of meeting times. During a busy day it may be difficult to find time to sit down and seriously apply your mind to these high-cognitive load jobs, but making sure that you don’t cram your work into the five minutes between back-to-back calls is probably going to give you better outcomes and lower your stress about the workflow.

More ideas:

• Block out time in your calendar for high-focus times
• Disable instant-messaging with a notice that you’re busy
• Turn off phone notifications
• Enable social-media blockers for the duration of the work period
• Close your office door (if you have one) or move to a quiet workspace
• Practice meditation (?) — Many people report they are able to achieve a better mental-state for work by practicing meditation. I’ve never had much luck with it, but some people find it very helpful. Because there’s an app for everything, of course, there are Meditation Apps. Your enlightenment will be quantified.

Work at home?

I’ve been working at home a lot lately and I can tell you that there are specific rules that need to be set to keep your focus. As a culture, America has been shifting from an Information Society to an Attention Economy. Nearly every “entertainment” device in a modern home is designed to distract you from the present. I am all too aware of the delightful distractions that social media, streaming shows, radio, and television can provide. Distractions do not lend themselves to moderation. That has to come from you. So here are a few suggestions to help with that.

• Set up “commitment devices” — this means figuring out ways to reward your self-discipline later after you’ve worked through the hard part of staying on-task. I can’t tell you what that will be for you. For me, it might mean allowing myself to relax and watch some TV only after I’ve completed an item off my checklist. The point is that you don’t have to abstain from the distraction forever, but that you reward your self-discipline so that you feel better about doing the right thing.
• Establish boundaries — during the summer, my children kept interrupting my work with questions that could easily have waited until after working hours. I finally had to call a family meeting and state: “Between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., I am at work. Sometimes those hours will be longer, but Monday through Friday, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., please do not bother me unless it is an emergency. If I’m out and about in the house, feel free to talk to me as normal. If I’m at my computer or hunched over some documents, I am working.” I know that’s not an inspiring Winston Churchill level speech, but it did the job. I only had to ask my kids once or twice, “What time is it?” when they walked into my office during these work hours.
• Take regular breaks — this is a good idea in general to prevent cognitive depletion. I’m not talking half-hour coffee breaks. Just take five minutes or so every hour and get up and move around. Just taking a lap around the house can clear your head and also get your blood flowing.
• Listen to music — music can help alter your mental state. This works in the gym and it can work at the desk as well.

Putting it All Together

Everyone is different and works under different circumstances. However, these suggestions might help make the difference in your getting things done and losing work hours. Remember the things you love about work and the challenges that inspire you. Take steps to minimize distraction and maximize enthusiasm.

You’ve got this!

*That study only had 43 participants and seems highly subjective. I think the correct take away is that interruptions can disturb one’s mental state, and the length of that distraction is going to depend on the nature of the interruption.

Fighting Distraction with Focus was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As well as being a whiz at anything computer related, Dave brings his process mindset to his hobbies. He is a master woodworker (from cutting trees down, preparing them in his sawmill, to the fine detail work of a homemade desk), and he brews his own beer and wine.

Watch this video to hear Dave talk a little about his beer brewing process using a Blichmann Engineering system.

Finding products and technologies that enable process improvements is what we do, at home and in the workplace. We create optimal outcomes. Read more about our approach to innovation here.

David Knapp talks Beer, Brewing and Process was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I keep writing about how much I like the work culture here at Apex Process Consultants, but I thought I’d talk a little about how we use music during collaboration. When I was hired, one of the things Dave Knapp (our President)told me was about how Apex plays music in the workplace and the method they use to choose the music.

I think this arose somewhat organically across several projects, but by the time I joined Apex the process worked like this:

While we’re working collaboratively, we use a communal Bluetooth speaker and each hour one of the team gets to play an album or playlist. After the hour, another person can pick. And so on. Everybody gets to pick.

Does music help you get more work done? Maybe? Studies show that music changes brainwave patterns which might suggest an effect on focus and cognitive efficiency. But whether that effect is a positive or negative one, may depend on whether you enjoy the music or merely let it get you into a state of deep focus. The evocative nature of music can result in a variety of emotional outcomes, depending on many factors.

It’s not mandatory, but it gives a chance for the team to learn about your musical tastes — or perhaps they learn that you like trying out new music? Or have a huge affinity for 1980s hair bands? Or grunge? Or perhaps you’re a Fanilow?

So this prompted me to wonder several things:

• Do people like music at work?
• If people do use non-headphoned music at work, does it make for a good work environment?
• What music works well with your teams? Can you share your favorite work playlists or streaming channels with us? (Safe-for-work playlists only, please!)

To kick it off, here are a few Spotify and Pandora links that have worked well for our “listen while we work” sessions.

This upbeat list is a bit eclectic, but with random shuffle and a 60 min listening window, it works well with others.

One of our team members is a big fan of 1970’s Prog-Rock and suggested this playlist.

Some folks like Electronica without lyrics. Sometimes the eclectic mix of World Music is a nice shakeup to standard radio-fare. So far literally nobody has tried to share Swedish Death Metal with our workgroup — but perhaps that’s your favorite?

Why should I guess when there’s no need? Why don’t you share your favorite work playlists with us! Tell us what you think about music at work. We’d love to hear from you.

Does Music at Work Create Harmony or Discord? was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s an old canard about boiling frogs*. They say if you gradually increase the temperature, the frog won’t notice and will eventually boil to death with only the briefest consideration of “Goodness, it is getting hot in here!”

That frog story is total BS, but it does dramatically remind us of how change can creep up on us slowly and quietly and leave us unprepared for disaster, or ill-prepared to exploit the change of circumstances to our advantage. This article is about some changes you may (or may not) have noticed.

Let’s start with computing power. Moore’s Law states that approximately every two years, the price of computing power will halve. Or, to put it another way, the speed and power of computing will double every two years. One of the easiest ways to grasp the impacts of this law is to look back at how computing power looked in the past compared to now. If you have a smartphone, it is faster than the fastest and most powerful supercomputer of the 1970s, and cost a tiny, tiny fraction of the millions of dollars required for access back then.

This phenomenon of incredible power becoming accessible to the masses usually happens slowly so that we often don’t even realize how transformative it is. Being aware of these changes in accessibility to formerly unattainable technologies is the first step to being able to harness their potential.

Some of these kinds of changes creep up on you. Take video for example. In the past thirty years, the transition from film to digital photography has completely transformed how movies are made. But not just big blockbusters — even the home-movie world has been changed by this technology revolution. People now take far more photographs than in the film-camera days, often on their mobile phones. Mobile phones? Yes, those too used to be the exclusive purview of the ultra-rich or the TV Detective.

Helicopter photography shoots are still very expensive, but thanks to low cost and easy to use Drone technology, your vacation can now include aerial shots of your trip to the beach or pool-side cocktail party. A friend of mine is shooting a documentary and was able to get amazing footage of a Jeep excursion for a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to hire a copter-mounted rig. For comparison, a very low-end helicopter video rig rental is $300/hr. That’s without the skilled pilot and videographer. More common rates are around $600/hr and go up depending on the copter and pilot. A very nice drone with a 4K camera will run you between $500 and $1000 — but you own it and can use it over and over again.

I hate to keep harping on movie technology but it really has been one of the easiest examples to make my point. For example, the camera in a new iPhone or Android phone is capable of recording cinema grade 4K video. Many independent movies in the 1980s and 1990s were made by directors leveraging huge credit card debt to cover camera and film costs. Famously Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Haxan Film’s The Blair Witch Project were made on meager budgets (compared to Hollywood studio productions) but reaped huge rewards. People focus on the return ratio, but the initial outlay of cash was largely around camera and film. How much would it cost to shoot Clerks today?

You don’t even have to pay for prints of your movie anymore. It’s all digital. You don’t have to send it to the Theater distribution system to get it in front of people, because there are numerous streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc…) available for the hustling storyteller.

There has been a revolution in book publishing as well. Thanks to digital book technologies like ePub and Kindle, you can get your written creations out to huge audiences without the backing of a big publishing house. Print-on-Demand (POD) means you can also have your book never go out of print. I don’t want to overstate how effective this has been for authors, but there are more books available now than ever in history and that number is just growing. How many talented writers got thrown aside by the publishing industry’s tastes, nuances, and slavery to trends? There are still many barriers to success in publishing, but getting the book out to readers is no longer one of them.

These are just highly visible examples of revolutionary technical innovations. Behind the scenes, invisible to most, there are huge transformative technologies that have been unleashed and I wonder… are you taking advantage of them?

Virtual Machines

One of the strangest changes to me, as a former server administrator, is the shift from physical computers to Virtual Machines. Yes, behind the scenes there are still physical computers running everything but thanks to the flexibility that running on a VM offers, you can rebuild a server platform with increased CPU, Memory and Storage in just minutes. This is accomplished through abstracting the computing a layer up so that a VM management system creates multiple emulated servers on real hardware. These behave like a traditional rack server but offer quite a few advantages to just having a 1:1 relationship between OS and physical computers. A cluster of a few powerful servers might host many VMs, each siloed off into its own secure kingdom. The resources on these boxes can be kept in reserve and put into play as needed. This means you only need to pay for the more expensive larger system allocation when you’ve grown into it based on actual demand. For start-ups and enterprise alike, that is a huge change in how much it costs to grow your IT footprint, and how quickly it can be done. (Hint: It’s cheaper and it is faster.)

Virtual Images

Sitting in the world of Virtual Machines, the Virtual Image lets you clone and replicate machines within a virtual environment. Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a good example of this type of technology. A company can prepare a single image of what they want their servers to look like as a template, then duplicate it as needed. Each copy carries the same configuration rigor as the original. This empowers extremely fast server rollout times for the IT department that needs to run lean and fast yet keep security in mind.

Dynamically Sized Cloud Storage

Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft Cloud, it seems like everybody’s got a large scale storage solution built in the cloud. Originally these seemed to be about providing safe off-site storage with some sharing capability but expanded features now allow real-time collaboration, file-level access control, sharing with entities outside your corporation, and increasing levels of granular administrative control. There are always security risks to be considered, but when you offload your document sharing to cloud-based services, you’re definitely freeing up at least one full-time employee from having to manage all the admin overhead around managing those resources. On a personal note, I’ve been using Google Docs and collaboration features extensively for more than a decade and it has empowered me to work seamlessly with colleagues all over the world without having to email changes back and forth. And there is no concept of “running out of space” as long as you can afford your data storage bill. Do you need more space? Just order it, and suddenly you have more space! Compared to resizing storage volumes on a rack server, this is liberating for IT staff.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

There was a time when Artificial Intelligence (AI) was science fiction. Even today, people write about how AI is just around the corner. Those people need to ask Siri to help them find something else to write about. The meaning of AI in real life IT scenarios is quite different from the colloquial use. We don’t need machines to have Artificial Consciousness or to pass a Turing Test in order to be doing real AI. To paraphrase Ben Kenobi, AI surrounds us. If you’re reading this on a screen, then AI is affecting you. Decisions on what articles you will want to read, what videos you’ll want to watch, what weather prompts should be sent your way, what kind of music you will likely enjoy, when you should be prompted for reminders, how to get the best airline rates… there are so many hidden ways that already implemented AI empowers or affects your world. However, that’s just the part in the cultural foreground. Thanks to new tools that make AI available as a service, we’re going to see strange and unexpected decisions empowered by companies that purchase AI insights based on their own library of data. This is an intriguing and powerful technology that is still very much in its early days of wide availability and reliability. What can it do for you? Should you partner with an AI consultant company to find out?

There are also new tools for processing really large problems across multiple computers. Machine Learning tools like Google’s Tensor-Flow, Microsoft’s Azure platform, and Keras are making deep learning available in ways that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. Now they not only exist but are quite affordable. The real challenges in this field are how to apply them to your particular needs.

A little pedantry — Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have very specific industry meanings, and within both, there are a variety of specializations. Deep learning, neural networks, voice-recognition, face-recognition, language-translation… books have been written (and are still being written) about the field but we’re definitely in a stunning boom-town of ideas and products in this exciting landscape.

Low Code Software Platforms

A quiet revolution has been making it possible for non-Programmers to produce bespoke software solutions that they manage and grow themselves. For years businesses have struggled with the timeless question: “Do we try to get by with off-the-shelf software, or commit to developing our own solution?”

Enter Low Code platforms! These tools let your business experts develop their own software without having to use lengthy software development projects. When new requirements come up, the same people who use the tools are able to modify them to include new features. This is still an emerging technology but I suspect the reason we don’t hear much about it is that the tools built on these platforms quietly get business done. A really good solution is practically invisible.

Low Code platforms let you get most of your tasks done without writing code but they do retain the ability to inject custom programming as needed. This is different from No Code solutions, which are also quite powerful but may be limited when very specific technical challenges come up. Low Code has the best of both worlds — many solutions can be built without code, but the flexibility is there if you need it to connect to in-house proprietary systems or extend the features beyond what comes with the installation by default.

Brewing Systems

You didn’t think I forgot the beer, did you? As it happens, my boss (Dave) is a home brewer. I used to have a roommate who liked to brew beer and I occasionally helped out with some of the work around cleaning the glass carboys. I’m familiar, if not experienced, with the labor and chemistry that goes into a reliably good brew.

Dave has taken it to the next level.

He’s got the Blichman BrewEasy system added to his home brewing setup. This brings a recirculating infusing mash system (RIMS) into the hands of home users. This is the kind of equipment that commercial brewers use but was previously prohibitively expensive for the homebrew enthusiast. This system automates much of the labor and has precise temperature controls that provide a consistent product result. Dave has also switched from using glass carboys to a conical fermenter.

This kind of fermenter changes how the trub interacts with… you know what? If I’m not careful this will turn into a giant Beer 101 digression which I am unqualified to write. Let me just reiterate that Dave loves beer, and he loves process improvement and has applied the same principals to his hobbies as he has to his professional endeavors. He’s taken advantage of technological improvements and applied them to his passions.

Are you being boiled?

Let’s wrap this up. There are many technological advances that are changing the world, but it is easy to ignore them if you are getting by. Are you that frog? Are you going to ignore the incremental changes until one day you turn around and find that you’re cooked?

Sooner or later you need to change your circumstances or you will be boiled. That metaphorical frog will eventually jump out of that water — will you?

*No frogs were harmed in the making of this post.

Boiling Frogs and Brewing Beer was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The HBO series Game of Thrones has come to its conclusion after eight seasons of treachery, hopes, dreams, betrayals, battles, victories, and defeats. This is not going to be an article full of spoilers but thinking about the conclusion of this multi-year entertainment investment has me thinking about its parallels in Information Technology.

Hopefully, none of the projects you’ve worked on were as ruthless as Game of Thrones, but stories have to end eventually. Whether you were pleased or disappointed with the outcomes of the show (or your projects) the wind-down happens.

Apex Process Consultants is an Agile Development shop. Part of that development methodology includes Retrospectives. There are several sports metaphors at play in Agile, such as scrums, and sprints. The Sprints are regular intervals of development which end in a playback. The playbacks are followed by retrospectives where the team discusses what was effective and what was ineffective during the sprint. At the end of the overall project (if there is an end) there should be an overall retrospective.

Through the course of a large, lengthy project it is not unusual for various contributors to come and go. As in Game of Thrones, you may come to really like some of these characters and rely on their assistance but it is common for budgetary, management or personal choices to take them away. Their watch has ended.

There are many reasons a project comes to an end. As external consultants, the ideal outcome is that our team has helped the business achieve both its internal project goals as well as a degree of autonomy by teaching the business teams our tools and methods. The project is rolled out into production and everyone lives happily ever after.

The End

Of course, no project ever really ends like that. There are always loose ends. But getting back to this Game of Thrones finale metaphor, what happened there often is the case on big development projects. The client has huge aspirations, but either deadlines or budget constraints press for hasty conclusions. Sometimes, much-desired features have to be pushed to future iterations. Sometimes, heroes have to come in and solve seemingly insurmountable problems with cunning and skill. Sometimes, hopefully rarely, the project will even fail.

That’s not the ending we want. That’s not the ending anybody wants. We want optimal solutions and best outcomes.

That’s what the sprint-level retrospectives are about. Through each phase of the project, we look at which strategies have worked well and which have not. The purpose of these reviews is to identify the positives and strive to get more of those outcomes and to identify the negatives and to mitigate or prevent those from continuing. These happen every two weeks or so, depending on the specific sprint-length used on the project. By constantly conducting code-reviews, playbacks, and retrospectives throughout the project, we are much more likely to identify obstacles and clear them so that the end of our project has a smooth and satisfying denouement.

Post-Project Disappointment

Some people experience a sense of let-down and even depression when a project comes to its end. The amount of effort to push the project into the world might be disproportionate to the recognition or sense of accomplishment one experiences. Post-project disappointment, even in the face of success, is not uncommon. Here are a few things that might help mitigate it:

• As you complete sprints, keep a list of your accomplishments and what you were proud of. When your watch has ended, go back and look at the cumulative list of things you did and take time to reflect on the good that you did.
• If you review the things you didn’t like or the things that went wrong, take the time to make a list of steps you could take to prevent those issues from affecting you on future projects.
• Talk to your teammates. Recounting stories with others who were there is one path to peace.

Get back on the wall

The best remedy for post-project disappointment may be to find that next project. Like all the Game of Thrones fans scrambling around the entertainment world looking for the next thing to obsess on, the creative personality needs to create. The story goes on.

Look at Arya — one of the most popular characters on the show. She was absolutely critical to solving key storylines in the series, but virtually no one in Westeros knew who she was. Moreover, she was often completely incognito as she did her work. It was accomplishing her goals that gave her intermittent peace. In a field where recognition for your accomplishments may be as rare as dragon eggs, it may have to suffice you too. (That and a paycheck, one hopes.)

Your Watch Has Ended… Now What? was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the United States, Arbor Day is nationally celebrated on the final Friday of April. Strangely, despite the continuous news cycle around climate change, the simple act of planting a tree on Arbor Day seems very under-reported in US media.

Planting a tree is not going to stop the debate about climate change, nor is it going to stop climate change itself. It will, however, give you the moral high ground in a debate with coworkers. Even as you do a small part to help fight smog, you’ll empower yourself to be smug. That’s a win, surely?

Roots of the Holiday

I’m not even sure Arbor Day is a holiday. It’s a nationally recognized day to go plant a tree (or trees). It’s a day to think about nature and the circle of life.

It seems to me extremely odd that so much of the conservation movement has gotten tied up in partisan politics in the US. All of us live on Earth. As The Tick, once said of the need to protect our planet, we must protect the Earth because it’s where we keep our stuff.

Started in the 1870s in Nebraska, the US Arbor Day movement continues to have a strong presence in that state. Millions of trees have been planted through the inspirational seed of Arbor Day.

We could do more to make it feel like a real holiday of course. Having a picnic with your newly planted tree might be a fun tradition. Get the whole family involved. Perhaps give an Arbor Day gift? Or Take family photos in front of your tree each year to show how it and your family change over time?

What if I can’t?

Maybe you can’t plant a tree for some reason. You live in an apartment or you’re physically or financially unable. There are other ways to participate. One of the easiest is to donate to the Arbor Day Foundation. You can also look at recommended organizations from the National Forest Foundation.

Will it stem global climate change?

I strongly suspect that planting a tree has more positive potential environmental impact than boycotting plastic straws. I have not done the math on this, but the tree potentially grows and generates oxygen and even leads to the growth of more trees. It provides shade, it helps stop erosion, it gives squirrels and birds and insects a home, etc…

You can plant a tree for moral reasons, for aesthetic reasons, for ecological reasons, or even economic reasons. If all goes well, your tree will live long after you’re gone and continue to provide benefits for generations. If you can participate and either plant or help support others to plant a tree this Arbor Day, please do!

What else can I do?

I don’t want to turn this into an advertisement, but there has been so much talk about the paperless office over the last two decades, it’s worth mentioning that a lot of what Apex Process Consultants does has an impact on reducing paper. Our latest product, Apex Forms, is all about making it easier to perform work functions online. Despite evidence that a lot of initiatives to “go paperless” didn’t really work, the rise of tablets and mobile devices in the past decade has made the success of such efforts more attainable. (For example, note the irony that the book about the myth of a paperless office is now available on the Amazon Kindle.)

People love paper, but with tools like Apex Forms, it is now possible to shift a lot of those tedious paper-driven office activities onto screens that don’t need a paper version. Workflow, document management, digital signatures, tablet-based data collection — there is a huge range of technologies that make going paperless less of a pipe-dream and something more companies can actually implement. The dream has finally started to be reality.

So plant a tree for Arbor Day. Or support a tree-planting charity. Also, give us a call to see how we can help your company move towards a paperless future with Digital Business Automation and Apex Forms.

Arbor Day 2019: Plant It Wholly Wood was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Well, technically, that’s not true. It’s actually called Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day. According to my deep and thorough research*, the tradition began in 1992 as Take Your Daughters To Work Day. I was surprised to find that this practice was so recently created because I first encountered it in 1995 in my workplace, and every year since until I started spending a lot of time working from home. It felt like a well known tradition back then, but now I suppose it actually is one. Kids who went to the offices of their parents or guardians back then might well have their own young candidates now.

I suppose if it were rare for my kids to see me working there would be some novelty and excitement around the prospect of finding out just “what Dad does for a living.” But since what I mostly do for a living is stare at screens and type, I suspect they find my work indistinguishable from their own endeavors at online gaming and YouTube surfing. Oh, I’ve tried to explain to them the exquisite joys of getting some code to work just so, or having some coworker forget to mute on a conference call. But these are pleasures unique to the rarefied atmosphere of the work-at-home coder. They’ve no nose for it.

My father was a self-employed carpenter for most of my life, so for my sisters and me what we really craved was a Stay At Home While Dad Goes To Work Day. Sure, I learned a lot of handy skills while helping him out during hot Georgia summers, but mostly what I learned was that I wanted to work inside with air-conditioning.

Mission accomplished.

I’m not making fun of the idea behind this initiative. Far from it. I think making kids aware of what adults do to pay the bills is extremely educational. But what if your job is incredibly boring to the uninitiated? I’d strongly encourage you to have a plan before trying this out at your workplace.

Here are some tips for making your TYDASTWD successful for you, your daughters and sons, and your employer.

Make sure your workplace supports the program

As fun as it is to surprise your colleagues by bringing your family in for a visit, make sure that the idea is embraced by your employer and coworkers. Check with HR. Sure, if the boss says it’s okay you’re covered — but it is courteous to check with your coworkers especially if your company has never participated in this program before.

Check with your school system

Some schools may consider this to be an excused absence. Others may not. You’ll need to check with your particular school to be sure of what the rules are around participation. The point of having this event on a Thursday is that the next day it can prompt in-class discussions around what was learned by the various students as they visited workplaces with their parents or guardians.

Plan for activities

Your school-aged children are probably used to a highly structured schedule. They might not understand the ad-hoc meeting schedule, coffee breaks, lunch decisions and other administrative factors that shape a typical office day. Think about how you can engage your student in your work, or within your company’s work in ways that are educational, engaging, and memorable.

I wish I had more advice here but I don’t know what you do for a living. But don’t despair. Even if you think your work is boring, that’s true for even the most interesting jobs much of the time. How much of a firefighter’s job is fighting fire? Thankfully, not a lot. Most jobs have long stretches of boredom punctuated with periods of high stress.

The program was envisioned with kids from 8 to 17 in mind. Think of activities that would appeal to people that age — and here’s the tricky part — that don’t don’t involve playing on their phones.

If you’re going to have several participants, it might be helpful to have them engage in some brainstorming meetings. Or perhaps they can take a tour of the workplace? Maybe you could schedule a time when they could ask questions to a director or executive?**

Encourage questions

Your workplace is a new landscape. Perhaps your kids will ask a lot of questions — but some kids become quiet and introspective when exposed to this kind of experience. Make sure that you ask your child questions, and encourage them to ask questions. If you’re not going to explain things they’re not going to get much out of the endeavor.

Plan your lunch

Make sure that you have a plan for lunch. Depending on your work environment you may be used to eating in the break room, or perhaps your coworkers pick a place and go out for lunch. Make sure you have a plan in place so that it doesn’t take you 30 minutes to figure out what you’re even doing. Because that never happens, right?

This is a good day to have lunch in the office and show your kids how to survive in the perilous world of corporate America. If you work in a large company, you might also give your offspring a hunting lesson in how to obtain bagels from meetings to which you were not invited. (I speak here of scavenging, not stealing. Your morals may vary.)

Show them the bathroom

Make sure your kids know where the bathroom is. Remember, even though you know your child is at the office it doesn’t mean everyone does. If your workplace has a badge system for security, remember to make sure that you don’t get your young charge locked out of the office with no way to get back to you.

Remember those drills

Hopefully this will not be a critical part of your day, but take a moment to show your young charges where the exits are, where the first-aid kit is, and generally what to do if a fire-alarm goes off. Statistically, it’s unlikely but school kids have drills for this stuff and it is good to show them that adults deal with the same safety concerns in the same orderly manner.

Get feedback

When you’re finished with the workday, don’t do the obvious thing and just ask your kids, “how was your day?” Does that ever work at home? Of course not. Without turning it into a huge homework assignment, ask very specific questions:

What was your impression of the [workplace]?

Did people seem to get along well when compared to school?

What did you most enjoy about the experience?

What did you least enjoy about the experience?

Do you have any questions that you didn’t ask while you were there?

Do you understand now why I just say “I work with computers?”

My wife suggests you take this opportunity to discuss things about 30 minutes prior to the end of the workday rather than on the drive home. It is a good way to share the ethos of Leave Work at The Office. You can certainly talk about work on the way home, but I like her suggestion a lot.

Personally, I’d avoid asking them potentially ego-smashing questions about whether they are impressed by what you do for a living. If you wanted your ego boosted, having kids was probably not the best move.

In Summary

Hopefully, if you get to participate in Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day, you’ll all have a rewarding experience. Remember that kids sometimes don’t tell you in the moment that they appreciate what you do. Sometimes they don’t even realize it in the moment. You do this stuff because it’s the right thing to do, not for the transitory pleasure of a “thank you.” Maybe you’ll get lucky and even get one of those.

But do not worry if things go a bit poorly, because your chance for redemption is right around the corner! After all, April 26th, 2019 (the very next day!!) is Take Your Daughters and Sons to Avengers: Endgame Day.

*I looked it up on Wikipedia. The Canadian counterpart is actually called Take Our Kids to Work day. They have such an economy of words.
** If you’ve made a habit of saying bad things at home about your company’s leadership, you might want to avoid this last suggestion.

Take Your Kids To Work was originally published in Apex Process Consultants Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.