I was explaining the value I've found in Twitter to a skeptical friend not long ago.  But when she asked how often I tweeted, I did have to honestly answer "not much".  It made me think about why I seem to have this love/hate relationship with this tool - and for me it is a tool.

Of course, I do have a Twitter account - @elldir, but I don't tweet much.  When I do, it tends to be in bursts that last a few weeks or months, and then I tend to take a long break from it.  Why? Because I would much rather talk to real, live human beings. For me there really isn't an equivalent online that can truly take the place of meeting people in person.

Also, the Twitter format, 140 characters, isn't really conducive to working out complex ideas.  If I'm going to write, I typically want to convey something I'm thinking about, explain ideas and ask others for feedback.  My online writing is about my work.  I really don't care what people are doing in their personal lives unless they are my personal friends, and i really don't care to broadcast my personal life, so Twitter doesn't really fit into my personal life in any way.

However, I cannot deny the benefits Twitter has brought to my professional life.  The greatest benefit to me is that it is an excellent way to find others like yourself.  I've been very pleasantly surprised to find so many like-minded individuals from all over the world who have given me excellent feedback, criticism, encouragement, and support over the years.  Yes, I get that from this blog, but many people have only found this blog because of the way Twitter makes it easy to be found. I also enjoy reading links that others post to interesting articles I may not have found.

Some people have done very creative things with their Twitter accounts.  I still smile when I think of Brent Spiner's (remember him as Data on Star Trek) suspense story he wrote in 140 character chunks. Brilliant.  But I'm not Brent Spiner, not even close.  For me, I have to sit down and interact with Twitter at the expense of anything else I could be doing in that moment.  Since I work on confidential projects, I can't tweet about what I'm thinking most of the time if it's directly work related.  My writing is about abstracted ideas and models I develop from aggregated work experiences. Tweeting regularly about specific experiences would require that I sanitize my thoughts to the point that I don't fine them particularly interesting or relevant.

And therein lies the rationale for why I both love and hate Twitter.  I love the ability to find people I wouldn't have found. The new connections are very valuable to me.  But I hate the fact that I have to actually sit down and interact with it.  I don't like to divert my attention from what I'm doing at the present moment, so you'll never catch me tweeting from a restaurant, a meeting, or even while I'm watching TV.  For that reason, I will miss things that pass by on the Twitter stream.  Once a woman I know was in town, and the only way she let me know was via Twitter.  I found the tweet a few days after she had come and gone.  So for me it will never replace email or even a text message.

But I do look forward to finding even more great people out there, so I'm going to try (again) to focus on tweeting for brief blocks of time during the week.  If you respond and don't hear from me right away, now you'll know why.

I teach a multidisciplinary product development course at Boston University. For their semester project, the students have to develop a new product that incorporates what they are learning in Marketing, Operations Management, Finance, and Information Systems. At this point in the class it is beginning to dawn on the students that there are no fixed, prescriptive answers for what they should be doing, or how they should be doing it relative to their specific projects. Up until this point, there were clear guidelines for what was expected of them. In terms of course material, there still are clear guidelines for what they should study and how they will be tested on the material. However, the project is different. Some students who performed well in fact-based classes find themselves at a loss for what to do - the project is terrifying. Others find the project to be a platform in which they can exercise leadership skills that didn't have an outlet previously, and thrive in the ambiguous, autonomous environment - the project is liberating. All of them come away with a much better sense of how work needs to be done when they enter the workforce.

John Hagel recently posted a review of his colleague's new book "A New Culture of Learning". According to Hagel's review, the book discusses the need for new models of learning that will embrace tension and ambiguity, and stress the development of new ideas by encouraging imagination and play.  I couldn't agree more.

What's interesting to me is that what I'm seeing in the classroom is exactly what I see happening with my clients. In the past, their success was clearly defined and measured. However, it is no longer possible to compete by using static metrics that encourage static behaviors in our increasingly dynamic economy. The industrial revolution has had a good run, but it has run its course.

People resist change because it's scary, and one of the things I think is most scary is not knowing whether or not you're on the right track. When I work with both students and clients, I spend most of my time creating appropriate evaluation methods and metrics. For students I help them to think through whether or not they are solving the right problem, and then I help them to figure out how to know that their solutions are working.  It's the same with clients, but to a much more detailed, in-depth degree which often takes the form of innovation strategy and process development.  It's also what I often find missing in much of the writing out there on innovation. There are lots of thoughts on how to come up with new ideas. There are far fewer thoughts on how to identify a successful idea. I look forward to continuing to develop new learning models that do not tell people what to think and do, but help people to think through the implications of what they do.