Tour of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies

A few months ago, I took a half-day tour at the University of Southern California’s astonishing Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). As a citizen, I set aside my view of current military engagements and allowed myself to be amazed at the leading-edge training that ICT is developing for our soldiers. As a learning professional in a company that prides itself on innovative use of technology in learning, I was blown away by a new glimpse at the art of the possible (given enough budget).

According to the tour, the idea for ICT was first raised by a woman named Anita Jones when she was the Director of Defense Research & Engineering at the Pentagon. She observed her son’s immersion in video games and wondered about the use of video games in training for the military. A few workshops, conferences, and publications followed, leading to the founding of ICT in 1999 through a contract with the U.S. Army. Its mission was to create synthetic experiences so compelling that participants would react as though the simulation was real. As the tour guide put it, “We were trying to create the holodeck from Star Trek.”

I learned on the tour that from the start, the human dimensions of simulation had priority. While other organizations were focused on functional simulations to develop the motor skills involved in driving a tank or flying an airplane, ICT was focused on simulations to develop skills in interpersonal interaction, critical-thinking and decision-making. The examples shown on our tour included examples of learning simulations for:
-Leadership 

-Cultural awareness
-Negotiation
-Post-traumatic stress disorder therapy 

ICT tackles these difficult challenges by teaming experts in learning, graphics, and computer science together with creative professionals from Hollywood and the videogame industry. Together their teams produce immersive, interactive media for learning and entertainment.

Projects generally start with a cognitive task analysis to understand the activities to be simulated. Subject matter experts describe detailed steps, including physical movements, environmental factors, mental activities such as judgment calls, assessments, or problem-solving, and emotional responses. Care is taken to surface not just the behaviors of actors in the simulation, but also their thinking and emotional processes. Many recent projects focus on soldiers working in the Middle East, so cultural components also receive due care.

With the focus on developing simulations to build skills in areas such as leadership and negotiation, the emotional content is particularly important. Compelling stories are a key way that emotional context and cultural content are included in the simulation experience. ICT uses “story nets” to convey a series of events over a sequence of turns. The story changes (within the limits of the simulation) depending on the learner’s actions and the responses of other parties in the simulation. So, for example, if the soldier using a negotiation simulation foregoes the opportunity to prepare and then, uninformed, takes an action that is disrespectful of the local culture, the tribal leader with whom he is negotiating might derail the conversation.

Non-verbal communication behavior by the avatars -  their gestures, facial expressions, and stance -  also has key importance in realistically conveying human emotion. ICT has advanced the state of the art in rendering avatars through innovations in lighting, photography, and skin scanning. Their advances have been used not only in simulations for the military, but also in Hollywood movies, for which they earned an Academy Award. Realistic avatars help learners become immersed in the simulation.

ICT sees itself as a research center, and so of course it undertakes a huge amount of R&D. This ranges from foundational research in the construction of virtual humans and learning simulations, to the development of enabling technologies such as the “virtual human toolkit” and the LAST method (learning with adaptive simulation and training), to a series of prototype applications.

According to a speaker on my tour, it considers all of its products to be prototypes. Clients don’t necessarily expect deployment, although many of the “prototypes” have been good enough to be widely fielded. During the tour, I saw excerpts from Bilat, which provides training and practice in cross-cultural negotiation, Urban Sim, which was the subject of a recent article in The Atlantic, and the Mobile Counter-IED Interactive Trainer, a blended learning solution delivered to soldiers in the housing of a shipping container which can be dropped at nearly any location.

In addition to conducting R&D to develop new prototypes, ICT also publishes studies about the impact of their innovations. They have found, for example, that the serious-game-based approach to teaching intercultural communication skills in ELECT BiLAT successfully led to learner’s mastery of cultural rules relating to meeting phases and the timing of communicative actions.

How much does all of this cost? In 2004, the Army awarded ICT $100million to continue its overall R&D work. The Mobile Counter-IED Interactive Trainer was the result of a $10million contract in 2009. 

Clearly, the military’s need for state-of-the-art training tools stands to benefit the videogaming industry and its customers who are willing to pay for ever-more-realistic scenarios.

My work involves accelerating the development of corporate leaders. How can we apply the insights and technology developed by ICT? We’ve got enough scale (almost 35,000 first-line managers). If we invested $250 per manager in annual leadership vitality education, that would be $8.75million…more than enough to produce something really compelling. It is possible that one solution, even one with a lot of story nets, meet our needs globally? These are conversations worth having.

The CEO of the Future

A few months ago, a colleague asked me to read a speech given by Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, at the Economic Club of Washington, DC on May 12, 2009. It was an inspiring speech. Even just reading the words - - without the benefit of seeing her deliver them - - you get a sense not only of Nooyi’s intelligence, but also her warmth and humor and humility.

Her message is that the CEO of the future must “marry performance with purpose.” This isn’t a new idea. Peter Drucker advocated that the deeper purpose of a company lies beyond producing a profit for shareholders. Contributing something useful that customers really need is the essence of business. Nooyi goes even further, arguing that the company of the future has to see itself as an organization rooted in the community, with ethical obligations to pay back to society.

She notes that CEOs of the future will still need to know how to operate a company, manage the economics of the firm, and lead people. Those capabilities will continue to be table stakes. But leading a company that both produces performance and serves a social purpose will take a different kind of leader than today’s typical cost-cutting whiz or a financial engineer, or short-term-returns-at-all-costs hard liner. This implies a different kind of shareholder, as well - - one with long-term interests.

There is a lot more to her speech, and you have the link so you can read it and decide what you think about her ideas. As often happens, I’m now seeing variations of these ideas everywhere…from IBM’s worldwide investment in Smarter Planet, including transportation, food, healthcare, utilities, and other public goods….to an article titled “Toward a Common Wealth” in my Cal Berkeley alumni magazine…to a new book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter called Supercorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.

One more thing about Nooyi’s talk. Only a woman CEO could have given this speech. I love that she talked about her own mother in the speech and that she described how she writes every six months to the parents of her 29 Executive Committee members, telling them about how their grown sons or daughters contribute to Pepsi, and thanking them for the gift of these individuals.

So go read it, and tell me what you think!

Global Work

In the course of career discussions with mentors, managers, colleagues and friends, working globally is always something that comes up. Working internationally is something I’m paid to do, and I’m happy about that! Working globally is often hard, and it is a challenge that I truly enjoy. Why?

Maybe it’s a natural strength. According to Marcus Buckingham, each of us has strengths. He defines these as specific activities that “make you feel strong.” In his methodology, you can look for signs of strength in the following ways:
• If you have some success at it, it may be a strength.
• If, before you do it, you find your self instinctively looking forward to it, it may be a strength.
• If, while you are doing it, you find yourself easily able to concentrate (your synapses firing, your brain literally growing), it may be a strength.
• If, after you’ve done it, it feels like it fulfills a need of yours, it may be a strength.

I have had success working globally, I do look forward to it, I can lose track of time when I’m engrossed in a conversation or running a workshop with colleagues halfway around the world, and I do get a sense of fulfillment. I love learning about people everywhere, and in the process learning about myself. This sums up as a set of positive emotions around this kind of work. (NB – I get a similar charge working with colleagues nearby, but there is a little something extra that comes with connecting with others around the planet.)

Maybe it’s enlightened self-interest.  As Thomas Friedman has written about with such clarity in The World is Flat, if politics and terrorism don’t get in the way, knowledge workers like me will increasingly be part of a single global network. The ability to collaborate with others throughout the world will be more than an advantage, it will be table stakes to get into the game of knowledge work. As we continue to find activities that can be digitized and decomposed and shared with lower cost providers around the planet, then the touchy-feely human relationship and consulting skills that I have will also become more important than ever. Effective communication among people is hard enough, and even more so across distance and culture. So maybe it’s not just a natural strength, but also a sober reckoning of economic advantage.

Maybe it’s a family legacy. Although my grandfather Martin L. Ehrmann passed away when I was only six years old, I retain strong memories and a feeling of attachment for him. He was a mineralogist, and traveled the world collecting minerals at a time when global travel was far more difficult and far less comfortable than it is for us today. He wrote several chapters for a book about some of his adventures to Burma (Myanmar) and other locations where just getting there took a week or more. He seemed to be able to adapt to do business in any country and relished extending his network around the world; I aspire to the same. He was able to pick up a little of the language wherever he went; I too, find it easy to learn at least a few words of any language (and I can do better than that in several). He counted many of his business counterparts as his friends; the same can be said for me (even in a company where this sometimes feels a little counter to the culture). So maybe the explanation goes beyond strengths or skills or economics to something that lies in my genes.

Of course, there is a lot to complain about, too, working globally.  But that's for another post.

Do you work globally?  How do you find it?