Guilty Pleasures, Survivor, and Information Management
When I interviewed people on Zoom during COVID, one of the questions I asked to warm things up and to give people a little bit of a personal glimpse of industry thought leaders was, “What has been your Netflix guilty pleasure during COVID?”
Among the more entertaining answers (and with links to the original interview):
Ken Withers, The Sedona Group -- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Vienna Blood, and Around the World in 80 Days
Lewis Eisen, Author of How to Write Rules that Others Want to Follow: A guide to drafting respectful policies and directives -- Downton Abbey
Steve Weissman, the “InfoGov Guy” -- Succession, a repeat vote for Around the World in 80 Days, and Borgen
George Warner, ECM industry consultant and pundit -- Captain Marleau
Charley Barth, Cummins -- Yellowstone, The Crown, and Outlander.
Thornton May, Futurist and the guy who hired me at AIIM -- New Tricks
One thing that can now be revealed is MY guilty pleasure (actually OURS because my wife Mary Glenn was just as guilty as me).
There. I’ve said it.
Let me tell you how this happened, and then let me do something even more astonishing -- explore how lessons learned from my Survivor addiction apply to the world of records and content management.
You are undoubtedly asking, “Are there no limits, even after all these years, to how far Mancini will go to find parallels between his personal and professional lives?”
No, there are not.
My daughter Erin (then 8 years old) and I watched the first season in 2000. For those who have been living under a rock, Survivor is now in its 44th (!) season. But we didn’t watch after that first season.
Fast forward 21 years, and Erin is married to Spencer, a very talented writer working at the time for Men’s Health magazine, charged with a writing assignment on Survivor. The assignment resulted in The 'Survivor' Guide to Outwitting, Outplaying, and Outlasting Whatever Comes Next.
Per Spence, here’s what the show is about [Spoiler alert - If you do wind up convinced to take up a Survivor binge, wait a while before reading Spencer’s article.]
For the uninitiated, Survivor places a group of strangers in an isolated, often-tropical locale and divides them into tribes. The goal is to literally survive and thrive—they’ve got to make their own shelter, fire, find food, and win a series of in-game challenges—or teammates on the losing tribe are forced to vote each other out at a tribal council meeting. Eventually, it’s every person for themselves with a twist: At the finale, a jury of eliminated players selects the season’s Sole Survivor.
Spencer explained how he and my daughter were hooked:
My wife, Erin, who works as a pediatric oncology nurse in New York City, and I began watching the show to distract ourselves from the dread that seemed to fill our day-to-day existence. We found solace in the show’s structure, its emphasis on placing ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and even the paternal presence of show host, Jeff Probst.
The evangelism of Spencer and Erin ultimately convinced our son Will, his fiancee Nats, and my wife and I to catch the fever.
And thus the explanation for a record I probably own -- the longest gap between watching the first season of a show and then watching a subsequent season -- a mere 21 years.
But I digress.
“What,” you may ask, “Is the tie between all of this and records and content management?” The answer lies in the amazing resiliency of the show; 44 seasons over 23 years ain’t nothing.
Is the whole thing silly? Yes. Is the show imperfect? Of course. Are there more important things in the world on which to spend time? Duh. But remember the theme -- GUILTY PLEASURES.
I have been listening to a podcast about the show while riding on the Tobacco Trail (On Fire with Jeff Probst), and what grabs me over and over while listening to the podcast is the creative approach the show’s producers have taken in two directions: 1) Embracing self-inflicted disruptive innovation; 2) Maintaining a consistent long-term strategy and vision at the core.
Embracing self-inflicted disruptive innovation
Jeff Probst intentionally introduces all sorts of crazy new elements into the show’s basic format. For fans of the show, these can include idols and fake idols and extra votes and all sorts of sudden twists and turns. Some of these innovations work, and some do not, and some seem to threaten the very existence of the franchise. “We take chances, we stay inspired, and we're willing to risk failing in order to find something exciting,” Jeff notes, “and I think the key is that we're asking our audience to have an open mind to new ideas.”
The flow of the game is now dramatically different in Season 44 than it was in Season 1. This seems crazy in a business that seems to bend over backwards to avoid alienating their audience. An added wildcard is that the game itself -- and whether innovations work or fail -- are determined by the participants in real time.
Some elements of the audience absolutely hate the innovations, some love them. It’s the kind of passion that periodically ignites in Twitter and Reddit debate. But the producers just keep trying things to see which innovations stick. The attitude is to radically experiment with the show, and if you’re going to fail, then fail fast.
But rather than fall victim to all this chaos, the whole thing works. Why?
Maintaining a Long-Term Strategy and Vision
There is a segment at the end of the On Fire with Jeff Probst podcast in which a random listener gets to tell Jeff “Why I think You Suck.” It can be brutal. One passionate inquisitor takes great umbrage that Probst uses the same phrases year to year.
“The Tribe has Spoken.” “Drop Your Buffs.” “Wanna Know What You’re Playing For?” “In This Game, Fire Represents Your Life. When Your Fire's Gone, So Are You." The list goes on and on. The charge by the questioner: “For the first few seasons it was mildly amusing. Then it became mildly annoying, and then embarrassingly trite. And now it is just cringeworthy.”
Probst’s response is, “Those phrases occurred naturally, but then they just became part of the show…I think if you start taking away those things, you start losing what the show is.” I think the response gets to the heart of why all of the crazy ad-hoc innovation works doesn’t become a collapsing house of cards -- there is a huge passion and respect for the underlying strategy and integrity of the game.
Which gets me back to records and content and the crazy evolution of the information management profession.
“Survival” of a Profession
It makes my head spin to think about the massive disruptions that have occurred since I first dipped my toe into the information management profession in 1996. From microfilm to imaging to document management to web content management to enterprise content management to SharePoint to content services to intelligent content management, with a bunch of other inflections and sidesteps in between. A whole set of unexpected idols and fake idols and extra votes thrown into the middle of the information management pile. Sometimes these disruptions and innovations threatened to rip our profession apart.
This editorial in AIIM’s Inform Magazine the month I arrived at AIIM should have been a harbinger of some of the professional disruptions that lay ahead:
Despite the euphoria of Internet enthusiasts and the hyped-up selling palaver of some web services providers, we remain uncertain as to the long-run substantive benefits the Internet will bring to businesses and to individual users…Like most who have sampled it, we like the Internet. And we think Intranet usage for document management makes eminent good sense. But until the webmeisters persuade us otherwise, we'll hang onto our CDs and floppies, along with the aperture cards and other imaging artifacts that have served our corporate and personal purposes so cost-effectively in the past.
To be a little forgiving of this editorial with the benefit of a long lens, consider what life was like in 1996:
Only 20 million American adults had access to the internet.
Something called “a blog” was still three years away.
99% of phone users did not find text messaging to be of any use whatsoever -- assuming they even knew what it was.
The first iPhone was still 11 years away.
Microsoft Office 97 was published in December on CD-ROM but also on a set of 45 (forty-five!) 3.5 inch floppy disks.
Each successive technology disruption inevitably created an us vs. them mentality among the professionals and the companies who made their career in each stage. Microfilm vs. Document Management. Document management vs. the web. ECM vs. content services. Records management vs. Information governance.
Survivor is not about the particular challenges and games and lies played in any one season. It is about how these individual tactics connect to the overall vision of the show — what it means to take a 18 strangers and ask them to survive both with and in spite of the other players.
Our information management profession is ultimately not about a single technology but rather about a constant evolution in the intersection between people, information, and process -- with an emphasis on constant. In the Ghost Island season of Survivor, a deserted island is created, haunted by all the bad decisions of past players. Those information management professionals that thrive place their focus on understanding the evolution of technologies rather than investing all their passions in defending past decisions and technologies.
The point is that absent a sense of strategy and an embrace of continuity we are left with the chaos of all of our tiny day-to-day choices, pieces of a long-term puzzle that don’t all quite seem to fit together. If the Survivor show had failed to constantly experiment, it probably would have run out of steam and collapsed under its own weight after a few seasons. Alternatively, if they had failed to take all that innovation and still be passionate and faithful to a long-term strategy and vision, the collective incoherence of all those experiments would probably also have brought the show to its knees.
So too for information management.
One of the new topics at the MER Conference this year will be the impact of ChatGPT -- and AI in general -- on the future of information governance. A panel discuss of AI On the Edge: Navigating the Perilous Terrain of Generative AI will include John Isaza, Esq., Partner at Rimon Law PC, Tara Emory, Esq., Senior Vice President of Strategic Growth at Redgrave Data, Dave Lewis, PhD., Chief Scientific Officer at Redgrave Data, and me (John Mancini, non-Esq. and non-PhD., but Immigrant Secrets author).
Here’s what we’ll talk about:
Buckle up for a thrilling ride as our expert panel of lawyers and data scientists navigate the explosive intersection of Generative AI and Information Governance. OpenAI's ChatGPT has unleashed the full power of Generative AI, and it's shaking the very foundation of content creation. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the risks of this groundbreaking technology are not to be underestimated. Join us as we explore the dark side of Generative AI, where data privacy, intellectual property infringement, and biased content creation threaten to take down organizations. Our panel won't leave you hanging. They'll arm you with the latest tools and best practices to protect your organization from the risks of Generative AI. The clock is ticking, and the stakes are high. Don't miss this thrilling panel discussion that could mean the difference between your organization’s success and catastrophe in the world of information governance.
Registration is now open for MER, May 22-24, and back in Chicago. HERE.
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