Workshop next Monday

I'm running my workshop, Facilitation for Surprise, next Monday at the Islington Hilton. I'm looking forward to it. There are currently 2 spaces left if you fancy making a late booking.

The brain

Also from Chris Corrigan, quoting a friend quoting Emo Phillips:

I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ in the body.

Then I realized who was telling me this.

Keeping quiet

Chris Corrigan quotes from this piece on Facilitating Dialogue.

There are few facilitation skills more important that the ability to keep quiet... A good facilitator creates a vacuum of leadership perfectly shaped not for one individual, but for the whole group.

Our Social World

Hugh talks about why people aren't flocking to Our Social World. I agree with him that (to quote the Open Space mantra) the people who come are the right people. I also have a feeling that blogging is just starting to "tip" in the UK. James and I are finding that PR agencies are now anxious to hear about blogging; six months ago they weren't interested.

I'm looking forward to the conference and getting some sparky conversations going.

Less is more...

Piers Young spots an interesting article in Wired: Roads Gone Wild. Here's some of Piers' summary...

The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

Monderman was let loose on a junction at Drachten. Two busy two-lane roads (20,000 cars a day), plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians, and he replaced it with a roundabout. In the process he ripped out the traffic lights, the road markings and the pedestrian crossings but it apparently works well.

"Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road."

And the steps to building better junctions (for which I'm reading network hubs)

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - dictates traffic flow.
2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is.
3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas.
4. Do it in the road: Cafés extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space.
5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs.
6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color.

Do it Yourself

Piers Young quotes Ross Mayfield...

It's becoming cheaper to host your own event than attend one

Honesty in market research

I just swapped emails with Tony Hufflett of The Fat Group. They're trying to shake up the dull old world of market research; it certainly needs shaking up.

I thought this was an interesting point they make on their site about the honesty of responses to surveys.

There is room for respondent dishonesty in any questioning environment. The level of dishonesty grows with the increase in boredom or disengagment.

Our experience tells us that dishonesty (in any environment) occurs when the questioner either bores the respondent or the tone is wrong. This is even more true on the net when respondents are not having to act in an acceptable manner before another person (in a face-to-face encounter or over the phone (which creates its own artificiality)) instead they are able to be truly themselves and show how they feel straight away.

So the key to on-line honesty is to be creative, make it fun and don't ask too many questions. If you still doubt on-line honesty you have only to look at the recent U.S and U.K elections. In both instances the web research came closest to the actual result. The reason: people couldn't articulate face-to-face or over a phone something they felt the questioner might find unacceptable (such as under 35 and voting Tory in the last election) but would be honest about with their impersonal screen and in the voting booth.

Customer service woes

Francois at Emergence Marketing, partly prompted by my post about Orange, and partly by his own recent experiences, asks, "why do companies spend so little attention to the quality of their service department? He wonders if we basically default to staying with companies until they screw up.

My guess is that Orange has probably invested a lot of effort into their customer service department to make it efficient. From my recent experience, the signs of this are in the jargon of their people eg "customer-facing" and "escalation procedures". What seems to be missing is a bit of humanity and flexibility. For example, they seem to have a very rigid attitude that their billing department simply never makes a mistake; perhaps they were speaking ex cathedra on matters of doctrine but I have to say it really pushes a button for me.

And what about this "escalation" procedure? I was told that I could talk to a supervisor, but that person would only tell me the same thing. I said I was going to write them a letter and was told there was no point, it would only go to the same people I was already talking to. This seems a fairly silly system to me, one that basically attempts to make the complainant feel powerless.

And making customers feel powerless strikes me as... well let's call it a high-risk strategy these days. It basically turned this satisfied customer into a very upset one, very quickly.

I went to their website. I looked at the sitemap: no sign anywhere of a disputes procedure. I tried the site search for "dispute" and "complaint" and it came up blank. There seems to be a sort of denial of reality about this.

I went to the industry regulator, Ofcom, and quickly found that telecoms companies are required by law to offer customers a disputes procedure. The customer service people at Orange failed to tell me about this; I've written to them (call me old-fashioned) asking them to tell me which one they use.

I'll spare you the obvious line about the irony of Orange being in the communications business.

UPDATE: I notice that according to the Ofcom website Orange are only "working towards" having their metering and billing system approved under the Ofcom Metering and Billing Direction. In contrast, I see that all the other main mobile brands - O2, Vodaphone. Virgin and T-Mobile - are actually approved. Further evidence that Orange's arrogance about its infallibility seems questionable.

UPDATE Sept 16th: I've now made progress with Orange - see this post.

Orange loses customer

I've used Orange for my mobile service for something like 10 years. In that time, I suspect they've done pretty well out of me.

They just lost me.

In my most recent bill I found a charge of £33 for 13MB of data downloads. Since I have never used more than 3MB a month, I challenged this charge. Their customer service claimed that the entire 13MB was downloaded between 6pm one day and 5am the next. So by their own reckoning, I'd have had to download the equivalent of 1300 emails in that time, a neat trick given I'd have been asleep for half of it. I simply don't use my phone that way.

They were unable "for data protection reasons" to substantiate what exactly I am supposed to have downloaded in that time and the people responsible for "billing integrity" are not a "customer-facing" department.

Orange seem to be unwilling to explain or justify this obvious anomoly. And the person I spoke to said she could "escalate" my complaint but her supervisor would only tell me the same thing. So the "customer-facing" people seem to be given no flexibility or power to make customers happy - it must be a stressful job. This is not a business that I feel comfortable having a direct debit relationship with.

Oh well, when Orange can't escalate an issue, at least I can.

Faced with this kind of institutional obstinacy, I am out of here. I've cancelled the contract when it expires next month. I wonder if this abrupt thump in the tail of the corporate brontosaurus will reach some functioning part of its brain between now and then. Don't hold your breath.

UPDATE Sept 16th: I've now made progress with Orange - see this post.

How's that for an intervention?

In his book, Dialogue and the art of thinking together, William Isaacs tells of a charged meeting of Russians and Chechens.

At the first toast of the evening the negotiatior/facilitator of the session stood up and said: "Up until a few days ago, I had been with my mother in New Mexico... She is dying of cancer. I debated whether to come here at all to participate in this gathering. But when I told her that I was coming to help facilitate a dialogue among all of you, in this important place on earth, she ordered me to come. There was no debate. So here I am. I raise my glass to mothers." There followed a long moment of silence in the room.

It is in courageous moments like these that the promise of dialogue shows itself.

Blog depression

I enjoyed Jennifer Rice's recent post on Blog Depression, linking to Nonist's Public Service Pamphlet on the topic. I went through a bout of content anxiety earlier this month and decided just to stop reading and writing blogs for a while. I'm still in recovery but I notice that I have found the will to post again. No good posting just for the sake of it.

Workshop 5th September

I'm looking forward to running my Facilitation for Suprise workshop next month. Those who've commited so far sound very enthusiastic which is great, and there are still places left.

I'm recognising my increasingly familiar pattern in preparing for these sorts of events. I don't formulate a detailed plan, but I find my mind wanders to the subject at various times of the day, and I rehearse a variety of fantasies about what will happen. These vary from the disastrous (people hate it and hate me) to the pleasant and satisfying. In some ways, it might be better not to think about it at all: my intention is to respond in the moment to whoever is there and whatever they bring and want on the day. What seems to work, though, is to do this type of daydreaming, imagine various possibilities, and then let go of them. I'll probably blog some of my thinking here as the day approaches.

My intention is talk about facilitation as a spontaneous process which is not about techniques or formulae, but which is optimistic in its expectations of how people can collaborate together to create what they want. I'll be drawing on some improv exercises to illustrate this potential, as well as talking about approaches like World Cafe and Open Space.

I'm also rereading The Power of Now, which I really enjoy as a prompt to enjoy the present moment. As someone (probably many people) said, the best way to prepare for the future is to be really good at showing up in the present. I believe this kind of showing up is a vital, but often overlooked, element in succesful meetings and encounters. It's more valuable and inspring than many of the more complicated "tools" put forward for making stuff happen.

Five seconds of my 15 minutes

Not that I care about these things, he wrote disingenously, but I appear to have reached the exalted status of 251 on Feedster's top 500 this month. Funny that, as I've been much less active for these weeks than for the rest of the year. What with this and Fast Company endorsing the Brandshift blog, my head could start swelling.

(Thanks to Rob Paterson for spotting this.)

Our Social World

I'm taking part in Our Social World on Friday September 9th in Cambridge.

There's an interesting collection of speakers and topics including Hugh who argues "marketeers are going to have to act more like techies, and less like pony-tail creatives". That's handy, I've just had a crew cut so a pony tail is well beyond my reach.

Suw Charman is talking about Dark Blogs - what goes on behind the firewall. I'm intrigued by Julian Bond's idea of "The culture of the office memo". Lee Bryant has some fascinating ideas about using social tagging - and applies them practially to improve understanding between "experts" and patients in the health system and elsewhere. I'm not sure if Stowe Boyd is going to make it , but it would be nice to meet the man behind Corante.

There's lots more on the menu.

I've now got three weeks to come up with something mildly disruptive and engaging to do, which needs to be very interactive and completely free of the curse of powerpoint...

Bored of marketing?

I'm pretty bored of a lot of marketing and a lot of the conversations about it.

I enjoyed Alan Jourdier's latest post, It Really Is About (Gulp) Leadership. It resonates with me. Here's some of what caught my eye:

While I enjoy reading about metrics and convergence and all the other buzz words we marketers use and go to conferences for, the more confirmed I am that it all boils down to leadership as the marketing engine...

I know to say leadership sounds trite, but how can it not be so?.. Call it what you want but how can the way people treat each other within a group not affect the viability and effectiveness of that group and ultimately the marketing?..

I facilitated a "retreat" last Saturday where the tension and fear was thick in the air and very few truly honest thoughts were spilled so that Monday morning life would resume its usual, dysfunctional pattern. Very sad to think of those professioinals being in such a constipated environments. Fear is such a potent and detrimental process that strips away the ability to think clearly, creatively and with any passion.

It's my hunch that boring marketing is the result of boring meetings. I think strangulated internal conversations can only give rise to strangulated conversations with the marketplace. As time passes, I am less interested in discussing marketing strategies with people, and more concerned with what is happening to conversations in the moment. Let the strategy, such as it is, emerge from the engaging conversations... and let's not expect it to work the other way around.

Take a look at what we're being sold in most TV ads, with all the slippery argument by analogy. It's very hard to believe a group of people got really pumped up by the idea of foisting this stuff on an unsuspecting world. And these days, if you dodge the lively conversation inside the business, someone on the outside is going to start it for you...

Applied Improv Conference

This autumn's Applied Improv Conference (New York Sept 29-Oct 2) is looking set to be a great event.

We've just added an opening session on the Thursday evening called The Joy of Singing. This was - for me - the oustanding breakout session of 2004 and will be a brilliant way to open the main conference. I think of myself as tone deaf but I found it one of the most exhilerating experiences of my life.

I'm also looking forward to the pre-conference session, Performing the Brand. So much thinking about brands comes from a mechanistic way of thinking in which a few clever people decide what a brand is. I much prefer to think of brands as emerging from the interplay of everyone involved with them. That means they are the result of improvisation, not calculation. This session will be a chance to play with this kind of thinking.

The rest of the conference will be Open Space, though with a series of preplanned sessions as well. If you're able to get to New York at the end of September, I heartily recommend it.

The opposite of hype

Adrian Trenholm points to Bessemer Venture Partners Anti Portfolio. Essentially, a list of their big mistakes. I agree with Adrian, it's a good example of marketing that avoids the presentation of perfection.

CRM shortcomings

Earl Mardle says:

I've always thought that CRM is largely a crock because it tries to use software to make up for a failed corporate culture.

Putting down your clever

Patti Digh has another great post, relating her frustrations on a recent facilitation process. I really identify with the situation she describes. A group of people are sharing experiences with some depth, and someone hurries them into "action points". As Patti says,

The group left with SMART action steps, that bane of every thinking man's existence. Yes, indeedy, the action steps were Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. But were they inspired? Were they insightful? Were they meaningful and authentic and real and charged with the kind of passion that makes it impossible for a group of people to fail and makes it possible for them to achieve far more than they ever imagine possible? No. But they could have been, and they would have been. Instead, they were small and predictable and very, very manageable.

Is it possible that there are wicked problems in the world that cant be flip-charted, bar-charted, pie-charted, Gantt-charted or action-itemed? Are there things that charts and lists and accountabilities cant solve? Are there wicked problems that require nothing less than revealing one's own self and talking to another human being openly and honestly before checking off the boxes?

That's why...

I think it was Adam Morgan in Eating the Big Fish who noticed the absurdities of advertising containing the words "that's why". Whenever you find those words in ad copy, the stuff that comes before is never the real cause of what comes after.

The latest manifestation of this in Britain is the ad Alan Sugar is fronting for Premium Bonds. (Translation for non Brits: Alan Sugar is a downmarket Donald Trump figure; Premium Bonds are a cross between a lottery and a savings bond; the interest for all bondholders is amalgamated and issued as prizes to random holders).

Anyway, Sugar appeared on my TV this weekend endorsing the bonds. And ended by saying, I believe in them, that's why my fee for this is going to Great Ormond Street. (more translation: Great Ormond Street is a children's hospital).

So is he saying that he'll only take a fee for himself when he endorses stuff he doesn't believe in? Who writes this stuff?