Weblog Entries for March 2006
March 29, 2006
links for 2006-03-29
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Research challenges the notion that brands have personalities just like people. Thank goodness. Via Marc Babej
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I'm a fan of Zopa, even more so as they now show a cheeky sense of humour that I suspect is beyond the reach of most financial brands, for all their millions to spend on creative agencies
March 27, 2006
links for 2006-03-27
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"I now believe that the overwhelming majority of all business training, by me and by everyone else, is a complete waste of money and time"
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Katherine Stone rounds up some remarkably uninspired efforts to brand cities/states
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Ben McConnell summarises how MIT's decision to Open Source its courses has paid off in lots of ways
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Antony Mayfield reports how a Murdoch-owned UK tabloid is offering MySun, a branded version of MySpace
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Tom Guarriello writes about Rite-Solutions and how it support innoviation - both internally and using a form of high powered outsourcing
Performing improv
For the last few weeks I've been doing a weekly improv workshop (as a participant) with a group of about 9 others, ably organised by Sprout. The good thing is that at the end, we get to put on a show in the West End. Well, in a room above a pub in the West End, to be exact.
Every session has been challenging and fun, and I've really enjoyed how the teamwork seems to get better with every session. There have been some delightful performances, and the best bits have all been the moments where someone is inadvertently funny.. where something spontaneous and unexpected happens, instead of (the big pitfall for Improv performers) someone trying to be funny. I keep relearning thiis fabulous lesson for life.
Anyone, if you want to come and watch us all try to make each other look good, the show is on the evening of April 11th. Email me for an invite. (I'm not sure what the cost is yet, but it won't be much).
Reflecting on facilitation
I enjoyed listening to Andrew Rixon's chat with Sandy Schuman. You can listen to the mp3 here. This part of the reflective practice on the language of facilitation. He's organising with my improv buddy, Viv McWaters. (I'm a participant myself). I found myself nodding to most of what Sandy said, especially on the parallels between improvisation and facilitation.
He put an emphasis on saying facilitative things, rather than emphasising facilitation as a role. This struck a chord with me even though I am paid to play that part. I think this is about not placing yourself somehow above the other participants, and recognising that anyone can play a part in supporting effective participation. He had some good examples of small ways in which facilitators can subtly open up or close off diverse viewpoints.
He told an interesting story of someone who was a top rated trainer who really struggled with facilitation. I do think there's an important distinction between training and facilitation; I've found most trainers are actually do a mixture of both but one or two really struggle with letting go of knowing the answers. For me, the difference is like the difference between standup comedy and improv. I think I've blogged on this before but anyway here's the idea: when a comic talls a great joke, he delivers the punchline and everyone in the audience is surprised. But he's not surprised, cos of course he know what was coming. In improv, the most satisfying moments are when an actor is inadverently funny - and this time, when the audience laughs, everyone is part of the surprise, including him. Training might be about surprising your audience, faciliation is about joining in being surprised.
Sandy also suggested that facilitation is more about memory than creativity, if I understood him right. I found this harder to digest as I'm quite attached to the notion of being creative. I also find that interventions that have worked in the past are not sure-fire successes the next time round; I believe each facilitation is an opportunity for everyone to be surprised and uncover something new. I don't suppose Sandy would disagree and this may just be linguistic deckchairs.
User enchantment
Kathy Sierra writes about enchanting users. She's talking about user interfaces on software, but the idea stretches further.
The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it's the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project. Even a spreadsheet has the potential to be as engaging as a game.I loved her analogy of what it would be like if movies were like software and her illustation of the point, repeated here.Until the interface comes crashing into your virtual world, throwing you back to the real one. That intense feeling of being engaged--the flow state--is interrupted. The spell is broken.
I feel the same way about facilitation. It's all to easy for the facilitator, or the facilitator's technique, to get in the way of participation. There's a certain wisdom in knowing when to use very minimal intervention in discussions.
The seaside landlady lives on
There used to be a stereotype in England of the seaside landlady who put up a list of unpleasant rules for her guests, usually including the requirement that they be off the premises during the day. Her spirit still reappears from time to time and I notice it a lot when travelling.
For instance, on the bus to the aircraft at Heathrow, I noticed a prominent sign explaining that BA won't hestiate to prosecute any passenger who attacks staff. Do they really believe that an irate passenger is going to calmly read that and think, "Oh, I was thinking of headbutting the driver but now I realise there may be consequences, perhaps I'd better not". But the effect on me is unpleasant. I feel distrusted, unwelcome. It undermines all that expensive effort to reassure me what a nice company they are.
I was on Amtrak's high speed train up to New York today. The little dot matrix indicator in the carriage was full of bossy instructions about where to put my luggage, where not to use a mobile phone or (oh the irony) talk too loud - sometimes in block capitals and flashing lights. The conductor, clearly inspired, liked to remind us that our tickets only entitled us to one seat and not to put our bags on the spare seats. Most of the onboard communication was a list of things not to do.
I don't know how they do it, but life's rulemakers seem highly efficient at taking over the conversation with travelling customers.
A bit more complexity
Ok, here's another fascinating insight from Roger Lewis' book Complexity.
Lewis reports on the work of Stuart Pimm and Jim Drake at the University of Tennessee, who experimented with computer models of ecological communities. As I understand it, these models were based on fairly simple species of herbivores, carnivores and plants using basic rules about the space they need, what they eat/prey on etc. They added species one a time and watched how the ecosystem unfolded.
One thing they learnt was that species-rich communities resisted invasion by new predators more robustly than species-poor communities. And that mature species-rich communities were more robust than younger species-rich communities. All this using only a simplified computer model.
It gets more interesting. Drake found that
...if he started all over again with the same original pool of species, he again finished up with an extremely persistent community, but one of a different composition from the first. He ran it a third time, with the same result: a persistent community, different from the first two.Drake got more excited by a second discovery which he described to Lewis:
Take one of these consistent communities with its say, fifteen species. Now reassemble the community from the beginning using only these same fifteen species, and you find you can't do it, no matter what order or combination of orders of introduction you try. You simply cannot put the community back together again once you've taken it apart. I call it the Humpty Dumpty effectI find it quite exciting that even in the relatively simple computer model success can't be got by attempting to replicate what worked before. It seems as though we must always be willing to be open to something new if we are to create successful communities.
Complexity and Disagreement
I've just flown over to the US for a few days, and I grabbed a copy of Roger Lewis' book on Complexity for the flight over. I enjoyed Lewis writing style which makes a sometimes bewildering subject accessible.
It has also thrown me into a fairly heady state and the following somewhat rambling post is the result.
I especially liked the way Lewis filled in the characters of the many scientists he interviewed. I was struck by how passionately and sometimes bluntly they disagreed with and sometimes ridiculed each other. In their reported off-hand remarks, I felt they often showed a remarkable talent for leaping to big conclusions about each other's personalities from relatively small actual factual information. They seemed to enjoy reaching what seemed definitive explanations about each other's motivations based on what seemed quite flimsy evidence. I was struck by how this contrasted with the rigour with which they pursued their own scientific investigations.
I suppose this sounds like I am finding fault here but that's not my intention. Indeed, I find myself becoming increasingly appreciative of how diverse are the meanings that we humans make of the data we are presented with, even those of us with reputations for rigorous thought. I was reminded of the slew of comments to Rogers Cadenhead's post about his dispute with Dave Winer. (I referred to it yesterday) - such a range of different meanings being made out of a limited amount of data.
I'm probably as neurotically attached to people getting along together as the next man. Somehow, I think I need to get over this and allow for a more, well, complex, interpretation of the value of heated disputes. I, for one, learnt some new things when I reflected on the comments I initially strongly disagreed with there. I let myself be changed by the debate. Maybe it's had that effect of lots of readers, though not necessarily in the same way. If I measure the value of the debate simply by its efficacy in resolving the dispute (the implicit criterion of what I said yesterday), I'd say it was horribly unproductive. But that tends to a rather circular argument in favour of politeness and people learning to agree with each other.
You see, I realise more and more than I'm quite an inconsistent and chaotic thinker. I don't experience my own mind as a particularly harmonious phenomenon, it is often troubled and muddled. I harbour the smug opinion that I have this in common with rather a high proportion of my fellow human beings.
Ok, now back to Roger Lewis' book. Here he quotes philospher Patricia Churchland who decided she wanted to understand neurobiology in order to continue her research. She has thought a lot about the human brain and how it works. I think what she says suggests that what we could call "muddled thinking" is not a flaw in our brains but actually what makes them brilliant. A good thing, not a problem.
Churchland tells Lewis:
Nature is not an intelligent engineer... It doesn't start from scratch each time it wants to build a new system, but has to work with what's already there... the result is a system no human engineer would ever design, but it is wonderfully powerful, energy efficient and computationally brilliant... Nervous systems evolved, and that makes it difficult for neurobiologists... to look at the wiring diagram and figure out what's going on.... [Artificial intelligence researchers] tend to approach the problem within the framework of electrical engineering, and with prejudices about how they think brains should process information, instead of finding out what they do.Churchland advocates a model of the brain as a parallel processing device, which I crudely interpret to mean one that can think several inconsistent thoughts all at the same time:
The nervous system is a parallel-processing device, and this conveys several interesting properties. For a start, signals are interpreted in many different networks simultaneously. Next, neurons are themselves very complex liittle analogue computers. Last, the interactions between neurons are non-linear and modifiable. Real neural networks are non-linear dynamical systems, and hence new properties can emerge at the network level.So she concludes
When you think about brain activity, it's correct to think about emergent properties at higher levels that depend on lower-level phenomena in the system.So perhaps we can think of our apparently contradictory or chaotic thoughts as the lower-level phenomena, and the meaning we make of them or the actions that follow, the potentially more impressive emergent properties.
And I'd argue that what may be true for our own brains may be true for our communities of brains. That our disagreements are part of a bigger more impressive kind of intelligence. What we do together collectively is built not on some linear, consensus, but emerges from our diversity. The plea for politeness may be a way to close down some of our collective intelligence. Sometimes the effort to move forward based on some carefully contrived explicit agreement may actually kill off the potential genius of a group.
March 25, 2006
links for 2006-03-25
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Jack frames Snakes on a Plane as an example of Hollywood learning to play with the blogosphere
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Five soldiers in Iraq create a documentary using their own videocams. David Weinberger calls this multi-partisan reporting
Winer wars and the trouble with lawyers
I'm way behind on my blog reading after my holiday, so I've only just caught up with the hoo hah over the battle between Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead. I found out via Stowe Boyd's thoughtful post: What we can learn from Scoble's lament, which I highly recommend whether you care about the Winer/Cadenhead spat or not. It's an interesting reminder to those who crave A list status or want to be A listers that there is a price to fame.
[Warning: mini-rant imminent. I'm not even trying to be fair here. Some of my best friends employ lawyers, one or two of my friends are lawyers.]
Anyway, for those who care about the dispute, I think the terrible mistake was to put it in the hands of lawyers. This, in my own bitter experience, is a highly risky way to try to resolve an argument since many lawyers have a congenital inablity to deal with ambiguity, nuance and have no concept whatever of how to relate in a friendly way to a fellow human being. I took a look at Winer's lawyers' opening salvo and it reminded of how just how stupidly nasty, threatening and inflammatory lawyers can be. It captures their trademark mixture of mixing small elements of damp handshake reasonableness with piety, pedantry and patronising citing of sources. Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness pointed to research that showed lawyers' unique status among professions for inbuilt pessimism. It's a trade for miserable people who like to share.
However, I think the legal profession does a terrific job of identifying many of society's most dangerous and anti-social individuals and putting them away in secure institutions where the wise among us can do our best to avoid them: lawyers' offices and barristers' chambers.
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Sign of the times
Martin Oetting at Consumer Empowerment found this little gem.
In a local campaign in the US, GM brand Pontiac used a rather unique call to action: “Don’t take our word for it, google pontiac and discover for yourself”. To explain the approach, GM’s head of sales said in BusinessWeek: “We’re touting Google, frankly, because it stands for credibility and consumer empowerment, and we like the association.”Martin says this hardly qualifies as consumer empowerment. I see his point but I think it is at least an acknowledgement of consumer power. And it's certainly another sign of how power is shifting in the world of marketing.
Paying attention
Consumer Empowerment points to another Economist article relating to open source, partly inspired by Eric von Hippel 's Democratizing Innovation. It's a pretty helpful summary of von Hippel's arguments.
Traditionally, firms have innovated by sending out market researchers to discover unmet needs among their customers. These researchers report back. The firm decides which ideas to develop and hands them over to project-development teams. Studies suggest that about three-quarters of such projects fail. Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate.I find the Economist slant interesting, as with their other recent piece on open sourcing, their support is tempered by a little older-paradigm thinking. Here's how they end:
At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.The Economist seem a little amazed at the notion that people might be creative without extrinsic motivation (money) -as if this is some strange new phenomenon. They should read Punished by Rewards.
I'd add that the lunch may be free in the sense that money doesn't change hands; but the firms that are making user innovation work haven't got there by doing nothing. they've taken some trouble to cultivate their relationships.
For those who like to take about an attention economy, they are paying attention.
I've always thought money has always had a rather tempestuous relationship with value, sometimes they go together, often they don't. Characterising what companies like Lego have done as a kind of free lunch seems to devalue what they and their lead customers have been doing.
(I just did a google image search on paying attention. I was a bit disappointed to find a lot of pictures of students in classrooms. Somehow that doesn't seem the right way to illustrate the idea any more. Even the one I've used here smacks a bit of master-servant, but the dog looks cute.)
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March 24, 2006
links for 2006-03-24
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David Lascelles thinks the days of stock exchanges are numbered. Hat tip: Declan Elliott
Learning
Chris Corrigan wrote about his experience of unschooling a few days ago, and his post still sticks in my mind. It raises a profound challenge to many conventional ideas about how we learn. Chris is home schooling his children and talks about the value of letting them learn at their own pace and on their own initiative. His daughter came late to reading, in contrast his son started early:
My son on the other hand is the opposite. He hasn’t really cared much for audio books, but for the last year he has been intently handling Tintin books and he’s been read to, and just in the last few weeks, it appears that he can now read some pretty sophisticated stuff by himself. He hasn’t been taught to read. He has just sat with the materials, watched the practice and let it seep in. He wanted to know what Tintin and Captain Haddock were saying to one another, and now he knows.I love that notion of learning by absorption rather than being taught. Chris says his family are auto-didacts (self-teachers)... I think that probably a lot of us are, but don't quite notice as we get so distracted by the more accepted schoolroom model. When I facilitate, time and again, I realise how people make very different meanings out of a common stimulus, and we're actually a long way removed from the notion of empty brains to be filled with expert content.
I was triggered to blog this by Paul Goodison's thoughts on education, where he highlights the views of Philip Pullman:
But I think it depends on your view of education: whether you think that the true end and purpose of education is to help children grow up, compete and face the economic challenges of a global environment that we're going to face in the 21st century, or whether you think it's to do with helping them see that they are the true heirs and inheritors of the riches - the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, the literary riches - of the whole world. If you believe in setting children's minds alive and ablaze with excitement and passion or whether it's a matter of filling them with facts and testing on them. It depends on your vision of education - and I know which one I'd go for.
MRS conference
James and I put in an appearance at the Market Research Society Conference in London yesterday. We gave a short talk about Blogging and listened in on an earlier session on Word of Mouth, chaired by Mark Earls of Ogilvy.
There were some interesting ideas and insights from panel and audience and I was struck how much of the discussion was about "losing control". I found this interesting and frustrating. It's so easy to get into rather abstract notions of losing control that lose any contact with specifics. So simple suggestions for engaging customers get lost amid a more rambling discussion about semi-articulated anxieties.
At the end, Mark acknowledged that what really mattered was not what the panellists has been saying, but what people had to say about the session afterwards. Very true. But it begged an emormous question: what the hell were we doing discussing word-of-mouth in the tired old format of five "experts" talking a lot, and an audience of hundreds not talking at all? Except to chip in the odd question.
I would say the same thing about the later session when I was on the panel. I find I don't enjoy being the "expert" panellist much more than being the attentive schoolboy in the audience. However, I did enjoy the conversations I had afterwards, especially where I got some intelligent pushback on some of the ideas I'd been articulating. (For instance, contrasting the cost of focus groups with getting customer feedback free from blogs.)
I had a nice chat with blogger Paul Hutchings, including me having a go at the conference format. I said I found my chat with him much more satisfying than being a panellist.
Bonus links: Paul Marsden's Consumer Empowerment and Richard Huntington's Adliterate.
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Open Source catfights
James points to the Economist's take on Open Source business: Open, but not as usual. It's an interesting piece, arguing
New business models are being built around commercialising open-source wares, by bundling them in other products or services. Though these might not contain any software source code, the open-source label can now apply more broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals to create something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all.The tone is interesting; for me there's an assumption that open source is basically quite risky, with undue emphasis on alleged flaws in things like Wikipedea. James also points to a vigorous fisking of the article by Groklaw, which points out several factual discrepancies in the Economist piece, an ironic sidelight on its questioning of Wikipedia's factual integrity.
And Tony Goodson pointed me to this rant by Andrew Keen against Glenn Reynolds' Army of Davids. Keen is a good read but comes across to me as fairly shrill, screeching in hyperbole against hyperbole.
Part of the trouble is that we all like to use terms like Open Source to mean different things. James and I like to talk about a deep and shallow end of the pool. At the shallow end, companies get customers to collaborate in small ways, for instance to create advertising. At the deep end, customers pretty much create the product. There are lots of places in between. Choose the depth, and the sort of risk you take, according to personal taste.
I emphasise sort of there as I'm tired of people lalbelling collaborative approaches as somehow more risky than conventional ones. For me, it's a choice of different sorts of risk: for instance, the risk of "losing control" or the risk of being ignored as unengaged and boring.
March 23, 2006
links for 2006-03-23
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There are two sorts of business - the quick and the dead. That's the slightly hyper version of this Business Week story on alacrity. Hat tip: Declan Elliott
March 21, 2006
Falling to earth
I'm just back from a few days skiing in Davos, where the sun shone constantly. I took the opportunity to stay completely offline which I am sure was good for me. You may have noticed that a variety of spammers took on the task of adding content here in my absence, which I've now removed.
Skiing for me is a constant challenge to maintain the "inner game". I did much better when I wasn't attempting to compete with others and just focussed, without too much self-flagellation, on my own technique. I'm not very good at being taught skiing, especially as I am easily confused by being asked to focus on more than one thing at a time when falling down a mountain.
I was part of a group of eight people and throughly enjoyed how a bunch of diverse people collaborated to have a good time. No big master plan, no committee meetings to agree on objectives, just a good deal of inspired muddling through. Sure, a lot of the time people went off at tangents, and sometimes we nearly organised our way onto completely the wrong train from the airport... but somehow the team worked. With no-one in charge. There's a moral there somewhere.
I returned to London which felt very cold compared to Switzerland and to a mountain of email. I am trying to catch up before heading off on another adventure on Saturday.
March 14, 2006
links for 2006-03-14
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Fascinating to see how blogs are shaking up the police in Britain...
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Rupert Murdoch predicts revolution
Feed me
The Guardian has started its own version of the HuffPo, comment is free.
(They're well ahead of most mainstream media in their embrace of the digitial, so I was surprised they don't offer a full RSS feed, just extracts.)
March 13, 2006
Social capital in markets
Earl Mardle picks up on my post about MakeUpAlley and talks about SewingPatternReview and the success of Trade Me
These people come here to buy and sell stuff, where do they get off holding online conversations about everything from music to dealing with depression? Don't they know the web is about monetising something or other? Where on earth is the value in all this blabber? Well, they are doing what happens in every genuine marketplace in the world, where the trading is only half the reason for being there; and the value approximates $700 million of Fairfax money somehow.
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March 8, 2006
links for 2006-03-08
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Great example of customer-generated video, spotted by Anders Gronstedt
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Clever little application spotted by Tom Coates
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Rushkoff is such an interesting voice on the notion of fun and makes a few telling points here.
Trout on word-of-mouth
Olivier Blanchard and John Moore both picked up on Jack Trout's views on Word of Mouth marketing. Jack's position boils down to this:
If I go to all this trouble developing a positioning strategy for my product, I want to see that message delivered. Buzz can get your name mentioned but you can't depend on much else. Not too many mouths will do a stand-up commercial about your product vs. its competitor. Nor will they check with you in advance on what to say.Which strkes me as just another variation on the rallying cry of bores and control freaks everywhere. "I'd sooner have the thrill of talking loudly so you are forced to listen, than take the terrible risk of being affected by you."
But these days, finding the flaws in Trout's thinking is like shooting fish in a barrel.
It'll never work
Inspired by a post by Earl Mardle, I've added a new category to this blog, It'll Never Work. I'll use it to flag stories about experiments carried out in the face of scepticism. Well that's the plan... though of course the theme of unintended consequences may apply.
Earl tells the story of an Italian prisoners making their own TV show as an example of the potential for democratising the use of media, and talks about his own experiment in this area in New Zealand.
When I managed Wellington Community Access Radio, one of the first things I did was set up a school holiday programme for kids to come in and make a radio programme with the support of the staff.Some said it wouldn't work because kids wouldn't want to make radio, they would want TV. Well, we never had a spare place on the courses and the feedback from the parents ranged from comments that their kid had come home exhausted but elated to one mother who I will never forget.
She brought her boy in because she thought that, being radio, his illiteracy would not be a problem and he could take part with the other kids for a change. Of course she was wrong, radio is mostly about literacy, from research to writing, editing and reading scripts.
But she said that her son had come home that day not depressed, but full of enthusiasm for learning to read because, at last, he had figured out what the hell you could do with it that he wanted to do.
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March 7, 2006
links for 2006-03-07
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Earl Mardle shares a story "that quietly boggles my mind. It shows as well the staggering flexibility of the human brain and the mind that arises from it."
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Jake McKee reports the UN launches the first humanitarian video game about global hunger
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Danah Boyd on MySpace: "Youth are not creating digital publics to scare parents - they are doing so because they need youth space, a place to gather and see and be seen by peers."
Risk or uncertainty
This is interesting: Results of an experiment in risk and uncertainty management.
Short version: talking about risk narrows the amount of information you will gather; talking about uncertainty leads to richer (and more optimistic) conversations. My own spin is that it's really good to acknowledge, nay embrace, uncertainty. The language of risk tends to close us down to opportunity.
Slightly longer version from the report itself:
For good reasons a debate has been raging among risk management specialists about whether risk management should concern itself with unexpectedly good outcomes and favourable events as well as bad outcomes and unfavourable events. Linked to this has been a debate about what words or phrases to use to communicate this change of scope.One suggestion has been to talk about "uncertainty" management instead of mentioning "risk." In theory this should have two beneficial effects: (1) It is open about whether things are negative or positive, and (2) for some people it suggests a more general kind of ignorance than "risk" and should encourage more information gathering. Both effects help encourage people to get their mental blinkers off and see more of the possible futures.
The results of this experiment, based on 36 participants across four alternative wordings, are that asking people for "areas of uncertainty" did indeed lead to a dramatic fall in the proportion of purely negative outcomes considered. There was also a tendency to list more actions that involved finding out more, suggesting a greater interest in reducing ignorance.
The success of an ugly make-up site.
Umair at bubblespace draws attention to the success of MakeUpAlley. Here's a nice irony: a site about cosmetics that looks pretty scruffy but is hugely effective - because it provides a simple way for its participants to connect about something they're passionate about.
Umair sees big lessons here for VCs and geeks, and I see big lessons for marketing. What a stunning example of the declining value of pretty packaging and making yourself look good, in favour of helping your users look good.
Quote for the day...
Jeff Risley quotes Robert Fulghum in his book Maybe, maybe not:
"I do not believe that the meaning of life is a puzzle to be solved. Life is. I am. Anything might happen. And I believe I may invest my life with meaning. The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise. If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and wonders shall never, ever cease. I believe that human freedom may be stated in one term, which serves as a little brick propping open the door of existence: Maybe."I love that bit about the little brick propping open the door of existence... and the closing maybe, too. Although the quote is new to me, I too have sometimes interrupted my own neurotic self-talk with the statement that I'm not willing to treat my life as a problem to be solved. It often works a treat.
Microphone or talking stick
Look, blogs are a great place for half-finished ideas. It's probably one reason why I like to blog but find it an increasing ordeal to write essays, proposals etc.
In this spirit, I was thinking about talking sticks. I've been to events where we all sat in a cirle, and when someone wanted to speak, they would take hold of the talking stick. It's the sort of thing you often see hilariously mocked on TV. The actual experience was very satisfying. I especially appreciated the principle that a facilitator articulated: if you're talking, feel free to express what you want, and be mindful that others will also wish to speak. That somehow got across the idea that you shouldn't prattle on but in a much more permissive way. The second principle was that if you weren't talking, your focus should be on listening, and not sitting there planning your pithy follow up. Sometimes it works really well when the suggestion is made that we don't respond directly to what the previous person has said, which gets away from a dynamic of a small number of people having a conversation being watched by others.
Anyway, what seemed to work about the talking stick ritual was that people managed to bring some reverence to the process of sharing experience together.
So I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice to think of microphones at large conferences more this way?
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More on unconferences
Stowe Boyd: Unconferences: But Aren't There More Dimensions?
Stowe has some interesting thoughts about the idea of unconferences - efforts to get away from the general mediocrity of traditional top-down ways of doing events. I like his point about there being more dimensions to this than podium height. There's all sorts of ways in which conferences vary one from another in size, scope, technology etc etc.
Still, the more I think about this, and the more events I attend in a variety of guises, the more I think the metaphorical loss of podium is a good place to start, nine times out of ten. Although there are tons of variables in what conferences try to do, I basically resist the idea that it's the special task of a small number of people to direct the larger number in what to do - either by hogging the talking or directing how the talking should be done. Of course as a facilitator I do have a job to do and I do get to exercise influence over structure, but my ethos is go for approaches that devolve power and responsibility to participants.
Stowe hates fleabag hotels. Actually, some fleabag hotels are kind of inspring in a weird way. The ones I hate are the pseudo-luxurious ones with loud carpets and a plethora of daylight-free, marble-lined dungeons which pass for meeting spaces. But I think environment becomes secondary if the process you use gives the participants the greatest flexibility to determine what they want. I'm talking about Open Space Technology (Chris Corrigan explains it well) and hybrids of it.
March 4, 2006
What does facilitation look like to you?
Here are three pictures I found on the first page of a Google Image search for "facilitation".
I have no idea how good or bad (or staged) these particular meetings were, but they represent what I think many people's expectation of what facilitation looks like. I've been struck in the past how facilitators often have these sorts of pictures of themselves - standing in front of a group that is sitting.
Sometimes, all this may work fine. But in a lot of ways I try to avoid the notion of the facilitator spending too much time standing while others sit. I see that as a way of creating one-to-many conversation where I'm more interested in supporting more peer-to-peer conversation. I also try hard to avoid the cliche of the facilitator running around with a marker pen producing lots of flipcharts. (I also try to avoid any participant doing too much of that either). The best thing I often contribute to conferences is to hide the microphones and discourage the organisers from having too much of anyone "addressing" the whole audience. And if I end up not talking too much, even better.
One of the things I loved about some of my improv training was that the trainer played the games too, put himself as one of the players not separate from them.
Another thing, I try to cut down on is this: lots of people sitting round tables. On the whole I like less furniture getting in people's line of sight, I think it's a big physical barrier to openness. It's often taken as a given that people need to sit at tables but I dislike the impact. Hey, if folks want to write notes, there are plenty of things you can lean on.
Finally here is a picture of a baby that has not been thrown out with the bathwater. Don't take these notions as immutable.
Waiting and presence - experiment
A few days ago I blogged Chris Corrigan's post about waiting. He was talking about experiences of waiting that is not about anticipating the future but about being fully present. Jeff Risley left a comment saying he'd be reading Chris' post out at the start of his next meeting, and I did the same a few days ago.
The first thing I noticed was that this felt like a small risk. It's not perhaps the conventional way to start a meeting. The effect was rather satisfying. The first person to speak pulled out a copy of a book by Eckart Tolle and shared her thoughts about the way we adopt masks for meetings, so that they become a sort of role-play exercise. The next shared thoughts about the pressures he felt to "perform" even in relatively informal situations. Several stories were told of the experience of being present to the birth of a child (something mentioned in Chris' post). I don't think any of these engaging things would have happened if we'd just pulled out our agendas or talked about our deliverables.
It also tends to confirm my growing sense that people are really not that reluctant to converse with depth and show more of themselves, if the context is right.
I noticed how much more engaging and animated the meeting felt after this. It would be great if you felt like trying this yourself and seeing what happens.
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Careless metrics...
Rob Paterson's been thinking about the future of public radio, and has put in a wider context of services that have have their sense of vocation "transactioned" out of them. I tend to agree the the way a concept of measurement has been applied to care has become toxic.
Ironically, some of the most successful organisations do really get the idea of community building. As Rob says:
Before you think me naive as well, ask which models are thriving today? Is open source software in decline or on the rise? Is Wikipedia in decline or on the rise. Are businesses such as eBay that build community in decline or on the rise. Is the public media, blogs, podcasts etc in decline or on the rise?
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March 2, 2006
Productive meetings
I've had several conversations lately revolving around productivity in meetings. In one, a friend described his dissatisfaction with his company's awaydays. The days were ok, but nothing seemed to happen as a result. The fear of meetings not achieving anything - or not achieving what one or two people define as the optimal result - runs fairly deep in organisations.
Often, I think the efforts to make meetings productive are actually the cause of the problem. To exclude the risk of failure, a number of boxes get ticked, and action points appear to be agreed. A pleasingly large collection of post-it notes and flip charts are produced. And then not much happens. That's because people are only half-heartedly agreeing to all these actions in order to pass the test of making the meeting productive.
And I'm sorry, the tactic of really eyeballing people on their commitments doesn't work well either.
There are no universal solutions, but I often encourage people to get less attached to instant results and more interested in the quality of conversation. And if the fact that meetings aren't productive is really a big issue, then perhaps what's needed is a more honest and reflective conversation about why that keeps happening.
This relates to the theme of obliquity, elegantly explored by John Kay here:
Strange as it may seem, overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly. This is the idea of Obliquity. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people.The conversations that might lead to oblique productivity are too often dismissed as rambling.
What also gets lost in this is the value of space for reflection. Reflective types tend to get squeezed out by those who prefer lots of stimulation, so days get packed with often-frenzied activities. These aren't designed to make reflective participants close down, but it's often the effect. The result is meetings on a kind of sugar rush or caffeine high. They appear to some to have a great, buzzy atmosphere... but their longer term effect is to drain people of energy and disconnect them from reality. Which is why they disappoint when we look back on their effects.
What I aim for in my work is to encourage more space in meetings for the unexpected and for reflection as well as stimulation. I think if organisations aren't willing to risk a certain amount of boredom or emptiness, they may never really get serious creativity in meetings.
March 1, 2006
Corporates and online communities
Robert Young looks at how corporates can engage with online communities.
At the end, the lesson is one of a paradox. As the power shifts increasingly towards community, the corporation loses its grip on the traditional means of control. Yet, by letting go of control, the corporation creates an environment where the community willingly creates its own switching costs. Such changing market behavior, which is structural and permanent for any industry being usurped by the Internet, must be met with a corresponding shift in corporate mindset.(Hat tip to James.)
Blogs and Social Media Forum
I'll be playing a small part in the Blogs and Social Media Forum on 17 May in London. I'm helping Lloyd Davis to facilitate a short open space session in the morning.
This looks like quite a gathering of the blogerati, and I know Adriana has been beavering away hard to get some interesting voices in the room. I know she made a big effort to get more sociability into the format, hence our session. Personally, I wish there was more open space and fewer panels and presentations. There's something about the words "case study" and "panel session" that leave me feeling a little downhearted. Still, let's be glad there are at least a few steps towards unconferencing.
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