Death of a Salesman

I went to see Death of a Salesman in London on Saturday. It was a great production, with Brian Dennehy tremendous as Willie Loman. I've not seen it on stage before and it was a treat to come to it with fresh eyes.

Loman is the archetype of the man who didn't get Kipling's advice about not making dreams your master. This, Miller spells out for us, is the trouble with being a salesman. Loman is a furious meaning-maker, lurching from wild despair to naive optimism and unable to make any real connection with those he loves. He loses touch with reality, his life becoming a confused mixture of hallucinations, punctuated by shocking interruptions from the real world around him - ranging from the breakdown of his fridge to the intrusion of his adoring son into his tryst with his mistress.

In Loman's world, the heavily advertised product ought to be the most reliable but his car and his fridge, you might say his life, prove otherwise. It's a biting counterpoint to what I might call the dream of the American dream.

It's a good reminder not to confuse our experience with our interpretations of it. There's not so very much that we really know for sure, and getting to stuck to our interpretations can be a source of a lot of pain...

Open Source Museum Going

Good spot by Tom Guarriello:

The New York Times reports today that podcasters have hacked MoMA. Instead of listening to the official audio guides provided by authoritative critics, visitors are listening to MP3 commentaries recorded by...well...just anybody

Interesting to reflect on that word "authoritative". Time and again, I'm seeing examples of us no longer looking for monolithic authorities on anything, but making our own decisions based on different sources. I might bring this up at Blogging: A Real Conversation?

Censorship

I have reluctantly deleted some of the comments being made to my post about Schapelle Corby.

I don't like doing this and I have agonised over if for a few days. The trouble is, once I say I'm deleting extreme comments, that might seem like an implied approval of those that remain. Basically, I want to indicate that I am not happy about hosting conversations that veer towards crude racial stereotyping. I am doing so fairly clumsily but I think clumsy is better than not at all.

(Tony Goodson has an interesting perspective on the Corby case.)

Bioteams

The Bumble Bee is a new addition to the list of blogs I'm reading. It's about the idea of bioteams, a way of applying principles from nature to human teams to make them more effective. Quite a lot of it seems to align closely with the Improv principles I'm keen on. Here's a snippet from one post:

In an perfectly working bioteam there are no leaders. Everyone contributes to the well being of the team and to achieving the agreed goals.

In a bioteam there are no leaders issuing orders, as everyone is broadcasting relevant bits of information just-in-time to all other team members.

Leaders are not needed as there are no rigid permission structures and any team member can take timely action relative the information received. Direct, responsible individual action is supported and facilitated.

Some nice feedback and a possible undertoad spotting

Mark Lloyd gives some generous feedback on the Open Sauce Surgery session with James and me. Thanks Mark, and congrats on getting your blog off the ground.

What I would say is that I found the experience very enjoyable, which is always a bonus, but it was also interesting, provocative and stimulating....I think it clarified the idea that whether or not "openness" is a good thing (and the Open Sauce boys clearly think it is) it is a fact of life and the sooner people get used to that, the better. That there are loads more opportunities than threats with openness. That it is worth experimenting with it, even if you are wary. That you meet interesting people that you wouldn't necessarily meet if you just sat in your office all day. And that there's no need to have an agenda to get value out of a meeting.

Mark adds

I suspect that to an extent Johnnie and James were preaching to the converted with me and I was always going to buy into it. It would be interesting to know what sort of impact it would have on a number-cruncher. The sort of person who expects a return on their investment out of a seminar.

Mark really seemed to enjoy what we had to say and has some very interesting perspectives on the law, which I think will emerge in his blog over time.

But, oh, those number-crunchers. I have this pet theory that they are a bit like the Undertoad from The World According to Garp. (The youngest child, Walt, worries about an undertoad because he mishears the warning to beware the undertow while playing in the surf). I keep hearing about these Gradgrind-like number crunchers, but I've never actually met one. I do sometimes meet accountants and finance directors who mostly seem rather keen not to be misunderstood as nay-sayers with no human feeling

It's my policy to point this out everytime number-crunchers are invoked as I am coming to suspect they are a figment of our imaginations.

Analysis paralysis...

"The only humans who analyse all the data and then make a rational choice are autistic, but economists insist this is the way we all work."

Dave Snowden, quoted by Lee from Headshift in this post: Peripheral vision and ambient knowledge. Lee does a nice review of Snowden's performance.

(I see Headshift now offer a fat RSS feed, with comments and trackbacks. Good job!)

The new world of marketing, part 94

Compare and contrast, this

just a friendly mid day reminder never to rent from this man, allan gerovitz. rudest. broker. ever. we've taken our search to fifth ave in park slope and left this chump behind. chump!

and this:

Fondly called “the maven of rentals”, Allan is known for his incredible dedication to both landlords and customers. Often people say that in real estate, “location” is everything. However Allan believes it is “relationships” that count. When Allan hunts for an apartment for his customers, you can be sure he will look in every corner and miraculously find the perfect place “to call home”. His office is decorated with letters of thanks from all of his satisfied customers. He is very pleased that the majority of his customers are repeat and new referrals.

Two different stories about the same guy. Seth Godin would say two different lies about the same guy.

Neither is definitively true, we'll have to make our own sense of our own experience here. I would say that while the first is rude but engaging, the second is what Hugh would call Dinosaur Speak: "That rather sociopathic combination of being completely focused on customer benefit and yet completely selfish at the same time". It's gushing, a bit grandiose and... well yucky.

(Hat tip: Tom Guarriello)

Stories

Tom Guarriello reflects on Seth's All Marketers are Liars. Even though he's not read the book, I think he's written the clearest summary I've yet seen (and I have read it).

Tom likes the sound of it, but concludes

But, am I the only one who thinks that this "lying" business muddies more than it clarifies?

He's put his finger on a half-finished thought I had. I added this comment to Tom's post.

Tom, yes, I think it does muddy the waters, and I think there's a role for books that do that. I have found it difficult to write a coherent review of Seth's book as I'm not too sure what it means. I quite like that.

What's perhaps most interesting here is the realisation that these stories we make up about who we are or how the world is have some downsides. And the thought that they may not be the truth is both scary and exciting.

It's exciting because it gives us a glimpse of greater possibilities. (You've written recently about the excitement of wildly improbable things happening.) Scary, because we're quite attached to the security that our fixed worldviews apppear to offer us.

Beneath the stories are our actual felt experiences. When we talk about those (angry, sad, happy etc), and when we name our stories for what they are - fantasies we make up - then I think we're getting close to the source of authenticity.

Open Sauce Surgery

James and I are running our second Open Sauce Surgery on the morning of July 5th. It's a an opportunity to generate ideas for collaborative marketing and is suited to both consultants and clients. We ran the first one last Friday and everyone seemed to have a good time.

Reboot request

James and I are looking forward to doing a mini OpenSauceLive at Reboot next month. We'll be flying into Copenhagen on Thursday 9th and leaving on the Sunday. Looking forward to meeting up with lots of folks, including Jacob and Hans from CPH127.

If you're going to Reboot and have a video camera, we'd love to persuade you to record our session for posterity...

On moralising and meaning-making

I've been thinking a lot about moralising lately. By that I mean, the creating of rules or principles for our conduct. I've been thinking about it a lot since reading Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty.

I do plenty of moralising. (You can find some of the more extreme examples under my Dr Rant category. I'm a bit embarassed by some of it). Lately, I've seen a large outbreak of moralising in response to my post on Schapelle Corby, including some of my own.

Blogs are full of moralising, taking individual experiences and relating them to grand universal principles. All good fun at times, and downright unpleasant at others.

Blanton has some interesting things to say about what he calls the Disease of Moralism.

The passing on of learning from one generation to the next is not a bad design, and as an evolutionary development it seems to have triumphed... The ability to act based on accumulated information, and to pass great quantities of new information on, is the primary survival characteristic of the strongest animal on earth.

But, paradoxically, our survival mechanism has proved to be ultimately suicidal.

He argues that we have taken to talking about rules and principles, our stories about what the world means, and neglecting to talk about our actual experience. For instance, instead of saying "I'm angry with Fred for being late" we moralise about punctuality. We don't say anything to Fred, of course, though we start acting strangely towards him, and gossip to his colleagues (hoping they will make him change so we don't have to face up to our urge to control). We make up stories about the sort of person Fred is instead of dealing with our actual experience in relation to him. Similarly, when one country puts one of our fellow citizens on trial in dubious circumstances, we create a huge number of stories about what the country, and all its people, are like.

We perpetuate a kind of anger phobia... indeed a kind of feeling phobia, in which we end up denying our experience and vanish into storytelling, through which our feelings leak out, indirectly. Blanton again:

Adult moralists are always angry people. The more the moralist is confronted with sloppy old experience, the more hysterical he or she becomes. We all get hysterical, but some of us lighten up and come to our senses more often than others. Some of us operate from hysterical moralism most of the time. Famous political moralists like Joseph McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, J Edgar Hoover, and Hitler are great prototypes of the disease in our culture.

One of my interests is branding, which seems largely preoccupied with the making of meaning. I've heard humans described as "meaning making machines" - an interesting choice of words. I rather like this counterpoint from Blanton:

We are constantly creating the world by merely perceiving. When we hear, we are creating sound. When we see, we are creating what is seen in our visual cortex... We are... each creators of the world. But since we do it effortlessly, and everybody does it, it doesn't count for much in our considerations of who we are... We take for granted our function as creators of the world and focus much more attention on creating meaning. We are preoccupied with the power of interpretation. We are much more interested in our uniqueness, derived from what we have worked to learn, than in the source of our power as creators.

Later on he says

We are responsible for cutting ourselves off from experience by substituting our interpretations of reality for reality. We invent some fundamental lies about how life should be and shouldn't be, how life is or isn't according to what we have taught ourselves to ignore or deny and what can or cannot be talked about.

There are times in my life when I feel I escape from this kind of laborious rule-making and meaning-making. I experience them in the face of honestly described experience, my own or someone else's, and I experience them in Improv exercises, often punctuated by uproarious laughter, when someone surprising happens that has not been planned for by anybody. In these moments, there is a spontaneity and a sense of something vital taking place.

We could call this presence. For the not unsurprising reason that it only happens in the present. We like to ascribe it to particular individuals ("he has such presence") as if it's a thing to be owned or stuck in a cupboard, but I think it's an experience available to all of us.

I said that blogs are full of moralising. Fortunately, they can also convey - directly or indirectly - the individual voice behind them. It's the voice that makes 'em engaging, I reckon. (You see, my Dr Rant posts aren't very nice but they do at least reveal, albeit indirectly, the author's frail humanity).

This feels to me like what's really going on behind the well-manicured stories of corporate success with which our bookshelves heave. Behind the clever storymaking, something much more mysterious, vital and exciting is going on. Somehow, I fear this gets lost amidst the urgent search for "meaning".

(Incidentally, Jeff Tweedy's explanation - Music is not a Loaf of Bread - seems to relate to this)

Feeds

Christopher Carfi talked about comment feeds on the latest Hobson & Holtz report. And Jackie from Customer Evangelists commented on the fullest feed I do. So I've uploaded a couple of text files with the templates I use and quick instructions for doing the same in Movable Type. Typepad Pro users can do this too, I think. Comments welcome. (I can't now remember the blog which guided me through this in the first place, but thanks to whoever it was!)

Comment feed template
Fullest feed template

Morale sapper

Kathy Sierra comments on this morale-sapping policy at Mrs Fields Cookies:

Employees must throw away ALL unpurchased cookies at the end of the night. Employees are expressly forbidden from taking leftover cookies home.

Crunch time

Good find by Jeremy at Lifestylism: Crunch Time

A great report on overwork in IT and the gaming industry: Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons. It's so good to see compelling arguments that show how crunch-time development is ineffective, expensive and demoralizing. This study is loaded with great quotes and links to all sorts of goodies on the topic.

Learning

Tom Guariello reflects on his first year of blogging.

It's been a tremendous learning experience, mostly about myself.

Don't read this

Christopher Carfi:

Johnnie Moore's blog rocks, and it's one of 100+ that I have read through my aggregator in the past. But I rarely read it anymore. Why? Because there's something better.

What's better than his blog? Finding the conversations that he's hosting.

This is because, although his blog is here, he publishes the feed for just his comments.

(I also do a fat feed with posts and comments and trackbacks)

Secure all objects before looping the loop

This made me laugh out loud. (Hat tip: Adam Curry)

Interesting times

Jack Yan took his successful website, Lucire, and turned it into a print magazine in New Zealand. Now he's starting a print edition in a second country.

Romania.

Jack say he's ignoring the advice of experts. I've met Jack a few times and had the pleasure of his company in Auckland and Wellington. This guy has balls.

Filling the canvas

James comments on an article in the Independent about how advertising agencies will fare in our interconnected world

However, old-school ad boys like Mark Wnek think that the ad industry will take all this in it's stride, because as he states in today's Independent, the web is really just a "canvas for commercial messaging".

Wnek believes that ad guys will just turn their skills effortlessly from one medium to the next. After all, he points out, "Who will fill these canvases in a way that excites consumers? The creative ladies and gentlemen who live in advertising agencies, that's who."

I can just imagine what Doc Searls would say.

Being changed

It looks like the last entry to the wonderful Darth Side blog.

The author, Matthew Hemming, is interviewed on Maurice's Blog. Here's one snippet that caught my eye:

As a creative writer I'm just one of the thousands who have discovered that getting instant feedback from hundreds of strangers each time you write makes you a helluva lot better a helluva lot faster than writing things only seen by yourself or your spouse.

The web is the greatest free proving ground for writing talent the world has ever known. If you're any stripe of writer and you're not putting your stuff out there, you're wasting a golden opportunity.

And here's another:

Separated from the hype of big publisher marketing, if your writing is popular on the net it can only be because the quality is there. Nobody is reading just because of your name. The reader has not spent a nickel up front to gain access to the content (unlike a magazine or a book), and thus will cast you away from their screen in a heartbeat if you lose their interest for even a second.

The joy of sharing

And now for some good news about music being copied and adapted.

For several weeks, the top selling single here in the UK was Is This the Way to Amarillo?. This is a song recorded many years ago by Tony Christie, recently re-released with a funny video in which a popular comedian, Peter Kay, mimes the words, accompanied by a variety of UK celebs.

Just as the song drops from No 1 slot, three solidiers in Iraq make a spoof version - Is This the Way to Armadillo? - on home video. A shaky version is placed on the net... and demand promptly crashes many of the Ministry of Defence IT systems.

So how do people react?

Does Tony Christie appear on TV bemoaning the pirating of his song or loss of revenue? Does he heck. He's delighted, appreciates the tribute and is glad the soldiers, doing a tough job, have had some fun.

Does the MoD get in a tizzy about indiscipline in the ranks and threats to national security? No, it has a good laugh and makes the soldiers available for media interviews.

And today's question for the RIAA (conferring allowed)... so who's lost out here?

(Here's The Times' account)

Bonus Link: What Amarilloans made of the original video. "When they're in here they hear that song and they start hooping and hollering. It's the darndest thing we've ever seen in our life"

Changing behaviour

Freddie Daniells has a good post

In the Spring issue of the Marketing Society’s Market Leader magazine, David Cowan of Forensics, a strategic growth consultancy writes:

Marketing’s proximate mission must be to change customer behaviour – it is customer behaviour change that leads to top line growth. Changing customer behaviour is the link that connects the CEO and finance directors requirements with marketing.

and later…

Changing customer behaviour should be formally set as the header objective because it gives direction to the whole marketing enterprise.

Sorry David, I just can’t get with this at all.

And I'm not going to get with it either. (Though David Cowan's reply to Freedie's post suggests we may be reading too much into his article).

When I'm facilitating, I tend to remind people that in any relationship it's easier and saner to change yourself than to try to change the other.

For instance, coverage of blogs often focusses on their role in influencing audiences but tends to ignore how blog authors are changed themselves.

Freddie goes on to talk about co-creation, which seems a rather more organic and exciting idea than one that tends to see our fellow human beings as objects.

One reason why brands often miss the mark is that they are so concerned with influencing (manipulating?) customers that they stop paying attention to what customers are doing and what they want. That way they stop learning. Somehow the idea of being surprised by, and learning from customers, seems to get squashed somewhere.

I find that marketing departments struggle with their internal relationships, leading to a lot of waste and frustration. They end up in a kind of shadow world trying to "fix" customers and distracting from the meatier, and scarier, problems they face themselves.

See also Jennifer's comments on this at Brandshift.

Music is not a loaf of bread

Chicago band Wilco put its album online, free, after being dropped by their record label. It seemed to work out really well for them. In a great Wired interview with Xeni Jardin (Via Boing Boing), frontman Jeff Tweedy makes this excellent comment:

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property.

I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic.

Big message here, and not just for the music business. Do you want to treat your customers as collaborators? If so, you have to let them make their own meaning out of what you say and lighten up around "owning" ideas. (It's called conversation)

Disrupting disruption?

I'm trying out ineen, which is an alternative voice-over-internet package to Skype. It has a few advantages: it incorporates video (nice but not that important to me), call recording (now that is useful, recording Skype conversations for podcasting is a pain) and more conferencing features. Plus a nice, more intuitive interface.

Plus they are using Open Standards. I'm no techie, but this sounds like a good thing. Savvier readers, please shoot me down in flames if I'm wrong.

Skype has a big head start in user numbers... I wonder if ineen can catch them? We live in exciting times... if Skype is a seriously disruptive technology, I wonder if it might be out-disrupted?

Tech note: It installed fine but it argues with my Netgear router. Am working on a fix. My ineen number is: 2009207.

Blogging: A Real Conversation?

I've been asked to speak at Blogging: A Real Conversation? on 28 June, which will be fun. Mostly because my general boredom with conferences is usually alleviated when I get to be on the panel delivering the boredom instead of in the audience receiving it. That's a bit unfair probably, as I see the lovely Suw and Sabrina are going and I'm pretty sure they're going to keep it lively.

I'm doing the panel on, "Are blogs the new voice of authority?" Here's the copy I knocked out on what I'll be saying.

I have a number of fantasies about what I may say at this event. Some are grandiose dreams of making a big impact in a short time and outclassing all the other speakers. Others involve being exposed as an inarticulate fraud.

There are yet more in-between that are even less interesting. What I actually say on the day will be in-the-moment and won't follow much of a script.

I suspect that being in-the-moment is something to do with the effectiveness or otherwise of blogs. It may also have something to do with creating authentic authority. Whether marketers like this or not is not something I plan to lose sleep over.

In this spirit, I promise not to use Powerpoint and I may attempt to sabotage anyone who does.

Beyond that, I don't know what will happen, but I expect to be interested in what I have to say.

And a hat tip to Brad Blanton, the author of the brilliant Radical Honesty, for some of the inspiration for this.

Geek-style dinner

Liam Mulhall of Blowfly Beer is in London next week. Liam used to work in tech and wondered if he could apply some of the magic of the Open Source movement to... brewing beer. He seems to have succeeded as Blowfly is now planning its IPO.

James Cherkoff and I are having dinner with Liam around 7pm on Tuesday 24th. If you'd like to join us, email me or post a comment below. I'm calling this a Geek-style dinner cos it's like Geek Dinners but not on a techie subject.

Facilitation for Surprise Seminar - feedback

Jeff Risley seems to like me more than Skype. I prefer things that way round.

UPDATE: Rick Cecil enjoyed the seminar too. "There’s a couple more of his seminars coming up, and I would strongly recommend you attend." If you want to follow his advice, here are some details of the telephone version.

Galloway

This is way off the admittedly wide path I normally tread here. But for readers in the states who don't know who George Galloway is, look out. He's testifying on Capitol Hill next week and it should be... interesting. Another Galloway link.

Organising a lot more than a piss up in a brewery

Here's an email a customer might not normally expect from a company that sells him beer. But this is how Blowfly is playing with the idea of doing an IPO. It's worth pointing out that anyone who has bought this stuff over the net gets a stake in the business.

‘Afternoon there Johnnie,

Well the time has finally arrived! We are now in a position to consider listing Brewtopia’s Blowfly on a Stock Exchange!

The whole reason for Blowfly beers' existence is about to become a reality: for you to own fair dinkum listed shares on an Exchange with a real value that can be traded.

In fact, in true Blowfly style, it’s now up to YOU to decide if we do or not!

All we want you to do is to reply to this email and let us know what you want us to do:

HIT ‘REPLY’ and type YAY or NAY in the Body text.

You’ll have until 17th May to respond, when the votes are tallied. That’s it! As always, majority rules.

We’ll let you know by the 19th the result and if its YAY, we’ll also outline the plan of attack, including:

1) How you’ll able to apply to convert your share allocations into real shares

2) The campaign for Brewtopia to position for a listing

3) How Members who have allocations can apply to purchase pre-IPO shares.

P.S There are 2 reasons we are doing this. The first is for compliance and to make good on our promise to convert allocations and the second one is that over the last 2 years we have had many requests from members to invest and we wanted to get the basis of the business right first - which we believe we have now done.

P.P.S I must point out that you will also become part of history. An IPO like this has never been done before EVER in this part of the world, so go on, make history, vote YAY and really Own the Beer You Drink!

Remember: just HIT ‘REPLY’ and YAY or NAY in the body email to count your vote!

Feel free to forward this to anyone you deem worthy, or you can refer them at www.blowfly.com.au/send2friend.aspx

Best

Liam Mulhall
CEO
Brewtopia Ltd

Personally, I think Blowfly is a bit of serious, kick ass, open source marketing. I'll overlook the fact that the result looks like a foregone conclusion.

BTW Liam Mulhall is over in London soon and James Cherkoff and I will be organising a Geeks-style dinner with him. Details soon.

Stories, stories...

I've just posted an article at the Applied Improv website: Stories that Inspire Action. The picture here is taken from it, produced by the exasperatingly talented Gary Hirsch of On Your Feet. It illustrates one of four kinds of stories that might get told in an organisation - stories of anxiety. The other categories Gary and his colleague Brad Robertson list are: stories of possibility and revolution, stories of contradiction and stories of fact. They explain how it's natural for all these different kinds of stories to circulate, and how a sane organisation might choose to respond. If you're intrigued by the growing interest in branding-as-storytelling, this is a great read.

Reboot Session

James and I have kicked around ideas for the session we're contributing to Reboot next month. Here it is:

Open Sauce Marketing: Giving up control doesn't mean the end of life as we know it.

Marketing is being shaken up, much as predicted in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Organisations are having to plan less, and improvise more, to succeed. Some fear chaos, but others are embracing it. This interactive session explores the spirit needed to get by in a market that is more connected and less predictable. Presented (sort of) by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff.

WARNING: This is a PowerPoint Free Zone, life’s too short. Some participants may experience spontaneity and laughter. Your mileage my vary. Dress acausal.

Now we've got a month to change our minds! Take a look at the Reboot site, there's some interesting stuff going on.

Last calls...

There is still one place left for tomorrow's free Skype seminar on Facilitation for Surprise. It's at 6pm UK time, thats 1pm on the US East Coast. If you're a Skype user and want to join us, please email me (johnnie [at] johnniemoore [dot] com)

Likewise, we still have one place left at our Open Sauce Surgery on May 20th. Details here.

The Student, the Nun and the Amazon

There are moments when I get really excited by an unexpected byproduct of my own blog. One such happened a week ago when I met Sam Clements. Sam found me via some post or other here and we agreed to meet for a chat.

At first, I thought I'd just be offering a bit of advice to him on a marketing project for his leadership course. Then he told me a bit of his life story. Rather an astonishing bit, as it turned out. Here's how the tale is told on his website, studentnunamazon.com.

In the summer of 2003 James Newton and Sam Clements headed to Brazil with a video camera, a map, and the idea to make a documentary. It was whilst filming in Southern Brazil that they heard about the extraordinary work of US missionary Sister Dorothy Stang, a nun with a price on her head. For over 20 years she had been fighting to preserve the Amazon rainforest, while helping peasant farmers live sustainably. Inspired by a mere five-minute call to Sister Dorothy, they set off on a 2500-mile journey to find her. Little did they know of the dangers ahead, or that Sister Dorothy would later be killed by hired gunmen.

The Student, The Nun and the Amazon is a remarkable, touching, disturbing film. (Sam kindly sent me a copy). I can't easily explain why it engages me so much but it's partly its paradoxical mixture of innocence and sharp clarity about the brutality of the real world. On the one hand, Sam comes over as the intrepid explorer and yet also he's a man with a mission and a point to make. The same can be said, in spades, for Sister Dorothy. Consider this description of her murder:

Sister Dorothy’s name had been on a death list for many years, although no one really thought it could happen to such a dear elderly lady. On February 12th 2005 whilst on her way to a meeting of poor farmers – on the same red dirt road we had travelled together two years earlier - two gunmen confronted her. She pulled out her Bible and read to them. They listened for a moment, took a few steps back, then shot her six times. In this lawless latter day Wild West, life is cheap. Her killers were paid a mere twenty dollars each for her death.

Since watching it, I find myself feeling very distant from the day-to-day consumerism I see in action here in London. Confronting the extraordinary challenge of making our life on the planet sustainable looms larger in my imagination.

There's a very short trailer here: Windows Media
Quicktime

And heres a mp3 recording of James and Sam discussing their experiences on the BBC World Service.

Sam's sunk quite a bit of his own money into making this video and I would like him to get some of it back. He's thinking of recovering his money by charging for the DVD/VHS of this. I wonder if he should take a risk and offer it free or for a donation and aim to recover his costs by speaking opportunities or getting sponsorship from an organisation that wants to identify with this kind of brave endeavour. (I think he needs to make a longer trailer too).

First rule of the blogosphere..

...is not to generalise about the blogosphere, says Chris Anderson. I agree with his sentiment. The trouble is, we all need to generalise from time-to-time, so perhaps we just shouldn't take our generalisations too seriously.

More fun at 173 Drury Lane

Adrian is continuing a stream of interesting posts at 173drurylane.com. I need to start writing some more stuff there too. I like the way our little experiment is going... I wonder if anyone at Sainsbury's has noticed yet?

Fun

The excellent elearningpost blog pointed me to Thinker. It's an interactive site exploring how we think. Some great stuff there.

Scoble on blogging

This is a good 11 min online video: Robert Scoble talks to Forbes about corporate blogging.

Crumbs

Did you realise that if you just Google the word "Evelyn", Evelyn Rodriguez is the fifth entry. Evelyn Waugh is a whole page behind her. And for "Hugh", Hugh MacLeod come in as number 2. Hugh Jackman limps in fourth. I won't say what happens when you try "Robert", it might get Dave Winer complaining again.

Not saying this means much, but it amused me.

Waterfalls and chaos

I linked to this paper on wicked problems the other day, and Chris Corrigan commented "there's a lot in that paper eh?". Which is true. Here's another part of it that has stuck in my mind.

The authors put up this diagram. It shows the traditional view of a problem solving process. This should be pretty familiar to any kind of consultant. It shows four stages of problem solving: gather data, analyze data, formulate solution, implement solution. Apparently, this is called the waterfall model of problem-solving, where we move graciously from the area of looking at the problem to that of working out the answer.

A study at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) looked at whether this model is a good description of what happens in the real world. So they took a team of successful designers and set them to work on a real world problem (designing an elevator control system). They then looked at how one designer actually spent his time. That's then plotted over our waterfall here:

That's interesting isn't it? He's clearly not following the script. Instead, he's jumping to a potential solution and then realising another aspect of the problem and so on. Here's someone who allegedly is a good designer and he's not doing "the right thing".

Now let's introduce a second highly-rated designer and add him to the plot.

Oh dear, not only is he not paying attention to the masterplan, he's totally at odds with his colleague!

Of course, the real point here is that real life doesn't follow the script. And the waterfall model is a considerable simplification of the natural way we humans like to solve problems.

Many meetings fail because we try to follow the linear agenda and stop people from "wandering off the point". The trouble is, most of us need to wander off the point to follow our natural manner of figuring stuff out. And the bigger the meeting, the greater the likelihood of people being frustrated by what one person is focussing on. (This is part of why so many conferences suck.)

Chaos or order

What's needed is a willingness to allow more of the apparent chaos. One simple example is Open Space facilitation, which creates enormous freedom for people to wander around and join or create conversations about the part of an issue they most want to focus on, moment-by-moment. Once you let people do this, it's amazing how effective they become.

I say apparent chaos because it's only chaos seen from one perspective. If you look at great impressionist art close up, it's just a mess of dots. When you step back, you realise the exquisite order. It's much the same with meetings, there can be method implicit in the madness. (And these layers of apparent order and chaos repeat: step back far enough from the painting and you can't see what it is any more; step back further and you realise you are present to the order of a fine gallery of art...)

When I talk about Facilitation for Surprise, I suppose I'm making a related point. Good facilitation is often about embracing the spikes, not flattening them.

This is such a rich topic that I'm barely scratching the surface. Check out the whole article, it is really rich in thinking.

This is one of the beauties of blogging. This post is just one of those seismic spikes on the graph. (And enfolded in this spike, are lots of mini iterative spikes as I keep finding typos and tidying them up.) Maybe reading this you're wanting to push back or qualify what I say, or maybe right now you want to emphasise a point, or elaborate... You and I get to wiggle over a larger blogosphere graph the way we like; hopefully out of our interplay an interesting pattern will emerge.

Take a look at the recent excellent debate in and around Micrsoft's blogs. When Scoble challenged CEO Ballmer over anti-discrimination, some folks bewailed the fallout. Yet out of the apparent chaos of views, a new policy (rather laudably, I think) has been made. Or see how a series of successful business are emerging from Hugh's blogging. No-one could accuse Hugh of being too linear.. yet it turns out he makes stuff happen. Or think about what emerges from Evelyn's experience of being in the chaos of Tsunami.

It's the same with branding. Far too much of what is written about branding gives us the neat linear idea. The whole Cluetrain schtick is saying hey, look at all these wiggly lines all over the place. The wiggly lines are a representation of markets as conversations.

The waterfall is itself a fine example of order and chaos enfolded together.

I could go on but I'm out of time. (And the paper makes some great points about the effect of deadlines too.)

Stories and predictabilty

Great writing from Tom Guarriello: Pillowmen, reviewing a new show on Broadway (my emphasis).

But, we're all in the entertainment business today. This means we'll all be called upon to take risks based upon instinct, intuition, imagination; tools that have not been popular in those parts of the world that demand predictability above all else.

But, it's hard to predict whether an idea like The Pillowman will become a Broadway hit. Like in baseball, get it right maybe three times out of ten and you're a Hall of Famer. But the business world demands much more reliability than that and punishes unpredictability harshly. These demands will drive many, seduced by the illusion of safety that comes with familiarity, to re-tell old stories rather than make up new ones.

Work related blog

The latest addition to my Sharpreader is James Richards' Work-related blogs and work. He's keeping track of a growing range of work-related blogs, including Station Supervisor from which I reversed into James' Blog. (Unintended railway pun). James includes On The District, another underground blog, and many more.

Here are James' ten reasons why people blog about work:

My categorisation of why people blog about work (in no particular order)

1) Let other people see what really happens in their workplace, i.e. informal whistleblowing
2) Let out frustrations and decrease stress levels - a coping mechanism
3) An educational source or outlet for tacit expertise, i.e. on a professional or extra-professional basis (informal and personal continous personal development?)
4) A source of shared entertainment or knowledge - create/sustain a sub-group identity either inside or outside workplace
5) Connect with similar minds and seek affirmation of viewpoints and experiences
6) Make sense of work-related experience
7) Make up for lack of fulfillment at work, i.e. boring and/or degrading job leads to creative writing - pursual of a worthwhile and rewarding hobby
8) Challenge public or media stereotypes of certain jobs, occupations or professions
9) A sense of having something interesting to offer other bloggers or public in general, i.e. amusing tales from the workplace
10) Seek indirect retribution against employer or particular employee (typically a manager)

This is based on his own survey of work bloggers. James concludes "The responses, to me, are quite staggering and go right against emerging myths that people who blog about work are just letting off steam or mischief makers."

Flexing

Jennifer Rice at the Brandshift blog, making good sense as usual.

What survives unscathed in a massive storm isn't the huge tree but the flexible grass. A company's ability and willingness to flex in the grassroots economy, rather than rigidly trying to maintain a fixed brand, will be the one that endures. Yes, there will be bloggers writing about your company. There will be creative souls who decide to make their own commercials for your company. Customers will break your rules and create their own. You will wring your hands in anguish because what's happening isn't consistent with your brand strategy. You can either ignore them, sue them... or flex. Like it or not, they're part of your brand ecology. Join their discussion instead of requiring them to join yours. If you don't like what they're saying, rethink your business and give them something better to talk about.

Grass doesn't try to bend against the wind. Smart sailors plan their routes with the trade winds, not against them. Smart companies don't fake reality and pretend that they maintain 100% control over their brands.

Facilitation for Surprise - Free telephone and Skype seminars

I'm planning some more free seminars, by phone and Skype, to introduce and explain my theme of Facilitation for Surprise. They last one hour and are open to all. The only cost is the phone call.

You can opt for the telephone seminars at 4pm UK time (11am East Coast US) on Monday May 23rd, or Tuesday June 21st. You can register here.

There's a Skype version set for Thursday May 12th at 6pm UK time (1pm East Coast). There are two is one places left for this one. To register for this, email me (johnnie (at) johhnniemoore (dot) com ).

Bzz controversy

There's been a storm of comments about BzzAgent's deal to promote Creative Commons. Peter Caputa has written something that just about captures my own view: essentially that criticism of BzzAgent is often overdone and a bit self-righteous. And that Dave Balter went a bit OTT in response (credit to him for subsequently apologising).

I've been self-righteous myself from time-to-time, it can be very satisfying in the short run to be so damn smart and so damn right. I know the pleasure of nailing up a forensic list of the 12 fatal flaws in other side's position. This is the joy of advocacy over enquiry. But in the end, I find respectful dialogue is more sustainable. (Learning instead of problem-solving).

Peter also picks up this great insight from Kevin at Corante's Many to Many:

I think this is because BzzAgents crosses the line between the two moral syndromes that Jane Jacobs identifies in Systems of Survival - the Guardian syndrome, which is based on loyalty and social groups, and the Commercial one, which is based on honest dealing and collaboration with strangers.

Blogging and control

Shel Israel has posted Chapter 4 of The Red Couch - Direct Access. As usual, good stuff.

I like the thought he opens with: that blogging can give a company more control over how its message is transmitted than traditional PR. I like it because so many of the doubters imply that taking up blogging means a loss of control. I think the reality is more complex and interesting. Shel points out the many companies that get lots of press coverage feel frustrated by the slant and inaccuracies of mainstream media. As a more open system, blogging allows them to get their views on the record verbatim and unmediated.

Learning or problem-solving?

Chris Corrigan reviews a paper on non-linear learning. The bit that caught my eye was this:

It suggests that humans are oriented more toward learning (a process that leaves us changed) than toward problem solving (a process focused on changing our surroundings).

Darth Vader Blog

A character blog that works.

Open Sauce Surgery

James and I are running an Open Sauce Surgery on the morning of May 9th in London. This is for no more than five participants to learn about how to apply Open Source Marketing to their organisation. There's currently one place left.

Into the woods?

Patti Digh gives some feedback on those "Ropes" courses:

I remember a 'trek -in - the - woods - team - building' event years ago with colleagues from work (in the freezing rain, no less). We were on a scavenger hunt in the forest, trying to learn these lessons: 1) if we worked together more effectively, we would all succeed; 2) What we could accomplish together was more than what we could achieve alone; and 3) Etcetera.

I didn't learn what the organizers intended. What I learned instead were six things:

1) I don't like freezing rain. It makes me cranky, itchy, and very, very cold.

2) Freezing rain appears to make other people passive aggressive.

3) If you would just tell me those lessons rather than make me suffer to discover them, I would believe you. I promise.

4) Some people don't care who is left behind or who falls down in the mud.

5) People don't stop being bullies when they grow up. They just dress differently to fool you.

6) Human beings are lousy at stopping long enough to celebrate those precious moments when we find the small orange flags in the woods.

I'm a big sceptic about these elaborate team building activities too. There's no need to go out into the woods to see how a team works; you can find the dynamics in much smaller-scale activities you can do in the workplace... paying attention to the simple details of how people interact.

Patti also makes a po