Co-creation Rules

James and I are getting to work on a new manifesto for Change This. It's called Co-creation Rules, a deliberately ambiguous title. Our aim is put together some of our insights from working with brands and organisations. These are the guys who are taking up the challenge to create stuff in real collaboration with their customers. It'll be inspired by a lot of ideas from our Open Sauce workshops and we're trying to make it a fun and practical publication. And here we are co-creating it at James' house this morning.

On solitude and thinking

I like autumn, and every year there's always a day when it clearly announces itself. Yesterday, there was a little chill in the morning sunshine that marked the end of summer and sparked a certain purposefulness that I always associate with this change of season.

There's some sadness in the transition. It may be the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, but it also triggers the seared memories of back-to-school. (By the way, if you've got kids, give them a break by joining my friends Chris, Rob and Alex and support a ban on homework.)

For me, September is looking busy which is great but it also marks the end of a month or so of unplanned solitude which I have greatly appreciated. Regular readers (all three of you) will have noticed I've had little to say here for several weeks. I have read very few blog posts and made fewer. I've actually not been mixing much with the world at all, and basically given myself permission to do almost nothing with any purpose, beyond eating and fits of playing World of Warcraft.

The experience kicked off in my days house-sitting in Cable Bay, New Zealand. This is a wonderful spot with views of sea and hills where you get to settle to a much slower pace of life. In our highly stimulating world, it's sometimes great to be understimulated. I find this is a time where I really get to observe my own mind at work. I call this solitude, a very different experience from loneliness. I've enjoyed the benefits of thinking less and witnessing more.

That word, thinking, is a little tricky though. I don't mean to dismiss thought but like David Bohm, I like to distinguish between generative new thinking on the one hand, and the mere recycling of old thoughts on the other. I find the better I am at not thinking, the more likely I am to generate something fresh, original and authentic...

Ive enjoyed reading Nancy Kline's book, Time to Think. She outlines a few very simple but powerful principles to support that kind of high quality thinking in organisations. The one that sticks most in my mind is this: don't interrupt people. As she puts it

Knowing they won't be interrupted frees people to think faster and say less

I'd probably say better rather than faster, but that's just a quibble really. Lately in conversations I've been practising not interrupting and realising what a gift it is to give someone attention instead of competing for it.

(When I close an Open Space with an open mike, I say that people can speak for as long as they wish, bearing in mind the desire of others to speak. I sometimes invite the audience, if anxious that someone is "going on too long", to give that person more attention - not the instinctive less)

I suspect most of us rarely get enough time to hear ourselves think without the rigidity that comes from anticipating challenge. In a nutshell, I think that's been my gift to myself this summer: the space to think differently. I think that this notion connects strongly to the Trusted Space that Rob has been so eloquent about lately. Rob's talking about a space that we create between humans, and I think it's also something we can create within ourselves.

Go read this

And on the subject of love... if you can spare five minutes go read Jeff Risley's post, I can only imagine. In fact, go read it even if you can't spare five minutes.

Teams

Rob Paterson quotes William Manchester, describing why he jumped hospital ship to rejoin his wartime unit and face near-certain death:

And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understood at last, why I had jumped hospital 35 years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front line and almost certain death.

It was an act of love.

Those men on the line were my family and my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than my friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have survived them.

Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, the the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for each other. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or whom he is willing to die for, is not a man at all. He is truly dammed.

Rob was prompted by his frustration with a discussion about teamwork. A discussion that sounded like it focussed on the sort of abstractions Manchester's insight confronts.

I'm with Rob on this. I often feel bored of the sports team analogies about teams. I distrust generalisations like "great teams have to agree on a common goal" (values/mission etc etc). I've been in a few teams that have worked well and it struck me that they were made up of diverse people, each of whom was pursuing something different. An agreement on missions and goals for such teams could be half-hearted. It could be a denial of what really motivates the participants and of the value of diversity. Yes, you can rationalise out the differences but you then end up with... well the sort of bland platitudes that permeate most mission statements.

No, I think Manchester evokes a rather braver and deeper truth: it's about love. This reminds me of the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, offered in a comment by Alex Kjerulf

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but Iwould give my life for for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

I'm not saying this needs to be love on the scale described by Manchester. it may be an everyday variety that means we humans want to play together. By reducing this to a series of statements on a piece of paper risks missing the point entirely. Or am I overstating the case?

Consistency

Lisa Haneberg quotes Carl Rogers:

I have come to recognize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.

Lisa has the fuller version. I tend to avoid how to lists for things like facilitation because they tend to suggest consistency is key... whereas I am increasingly realise that each facilitation is diffierent and I do better to show up to whatever is really happening, rather than try to apply some consistent theory.

Bitten...

Jackie Huba and Jake McKee have interesting takes on the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon. I think Jake's hits the nail on the head when he talks about having fun. I think that folks are have seized on this movie and decided to have some fun and see what happens. And it looks like Samuel L Jackson has figured that out, as per the YouTube of him that Jake points to.

Speed of conversation...

David Weinberger writes:

There must be a mathematical way to express the Law of Conversational Overclocking: As the acceleration of conversation increases past the maximum speed of thought, the quality of conversation deteriorates.

In fact, isn't there a sweet spot, which varies by topic, medium, number of participants, and personality? Conversations improve as they approach a certain velocity, and then deteriorate rapidly, until they break the Unsound Barrier (where the laws of logic go through a singularity), at which point the conversation just is no more?

I think changes of pace are key; there is no magic speed.. sometimes fast is fun and engaging; sometimes slow and reflective is luxurious...

Iomart and Ufindus update

A few months I ago, I blogged about a dispute I was having with Iomart (which also trades as Ufindus). Eventually, I resolved it.

I notice there have been several comments from other dissatisfied customers which led me to this rather extraordinary posting: Class Action against Ufindus. It's a catalogue of customers' tales of woe about the company, including many allegations of dishonesty and general shabbiness.

I don't know whether to celebrate the power of the net for allowing us to find each other... or despair that such a company carries on like this.

Open Space in 30 seconds

My friends at the BBC had the neat idea of putting a time lapse camera in the room when I hosted an Open Space conference for them earlier this year. I've just uploaded it to YouTube. It compresses a whole day of conversations into 30 seconds.

You'll see folks arriving then forming the opening circle. It was a bit tight and you'll see the moment when we all decided to push our chairs back. There's some movement as the agenda is set. Then you'll see the break out conversations being formed over the rest of the day (a few folks disappear from shot bottom right). Finally there's a closing circle to process what was learnt - and then everyone goes home.

Of course the speed gives no notion of the relaxed pace of the real event, but I hope it conveys a little of how Open Space seems to allow folks to self-organise a satisfying day.

(Thanks to Lloyd Davis for guiding me through how to do this)

Surowiecki on "fatal flaws"

Rob May spots a nice article by James Surowicki: The Fatal-Flaw Myth. Snippet:

People are generally bad at accepting the importance of context and chance. We fall prey to what the social psychologist Lee Ross called "the fundamental attribution error"-the tendency to ascribe success or failure to innate characteristics, even when context is overwhelmingly important.

Because we underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, we see patterns where none exist.

Ken Robinson

Lots of my favourite bloggers have recommended this video. Now I've seen it, I can see why.

Sir Ken Robinson at TED

Strategy cow

Having just posted about the value of doubt, I have to point to the attractiveness of certainty... as embodied in the binary wisdom of Richard Huntington's splendid strategy cow.

My eldest son has this toy. It is a cow (I think) which normally stands erect but when you push the base upwards it collapses. It perfectly describes how I feel when I come across lacklustre or cliched thinking - flacid, deflated and lacking in the strength to perform simple tasks like standing up properly.

From now on I will submit the strategies of the moment to the Strategy Cow for her to pass judgement.

V-flyer and granularity

Here's an interesting site I stumbled upon yesterday: v-flyer.com, a customer-owned site about Virgin Atlantic with over 200,000 unique visitors a month. This is how it describes itself:

Welcome to V-Flyer, the largest independent guide to flying on Virgin Atlantic. Created and maintained by Virgin Atlantic customers, V-Flyer offers advice and guides on every aspect of Sir Richard Branson's famous airline. Whether you want to find a seatmap, see which types of inflight entertainment is onboard, or just want to find out more about Virgin Atlantic - you'll find it here.

This is a pretty extensive site, which has grown over several years. I was interested to see how Virgin itself appears to have managed its relationship with it, as described the v-flyer here:

Virgin Atlantic themselves had by this point started to take notice of our little site, and supported VirginFlyer with a feature in their own customer newsletter, iFly. The attention of Virgin Atlantic also brought the attention of Virgin Group, and to stay on their friendly side it was agreed that the site would change its name to V-Flyer to avoid any confusion with Virgin Group companies.

... which sounds like a pretty sensible way to engage with your fans.

I think you'd rather have a v-flyer site about you than this one I found about United Airlines: Untied.

I also spent some time exploring flyertalk, This has extensive customer forums for each major airline. There are appear to be a lot of heavy users (one percenters) here, and I was surprised by the granular detail being exchanged, for instance on how to finesse the various frequent flyer schemes, get upgrades, avoid poor lounges etc. There's even a kind of dating service to get into airline lounges as the guest of other forum users with travel plans that overlap your own. Some particpants are employees of airlines, variously slagging off or sticking up for their employers. If you spend a bit of time here, you can learn a lot of intricate anecdotal information about what's really happening inside an airline. Fascinating.

When Hugh talks about the global microbrand, it's the micro part I like best. And these sites are helping to identify the granularity of big brands... if you like, they're showing us the microbrands inside the macrobrands.

In favour of doubt

JP Rangaswami writes about doubts and uncertainties. In short, he's in favour of them, as am I. He quotes Ben Franklin:

In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion opposition and prevent a candid attention

This reminds me of what Rock and Schwartz describe happening when we actually gain insights, which I wrote about here.

For insights to be useful, they need to be generated from within, not given to individuals as conclusions. This is true for several reasons. First, people will experience the adrenaline-like rush of insight only if they go through the process of making connections themselves. The moment of insight is well known to be a positive and energizing experience. This rush of energy may be central to facilitating change: It helps fight against the internal (and external) forces trying to keep change from occurring, including the fear response of the amygdala.

Second, neural networks are influenced moment to moment by genes, experiences, and varying patterns of attention. Although all people have some broad functions in common, in truth everyone has a unique brain architecture. Human brains are so complex and individual that there is little point in trying to work out how another person ought to reorganize his or her thinking. It is far more effective and efficient to help others come to their own insights.

It also connects with Ellen Langer's explanation in Mindful Learning (which I summarised here) that writing textbooks conditionally rather than definitively is more likely to support active learning of the material. I find that many business and self-help books don't heed this wisdom, tending towards absolutist lists of the 7 secrets and 5 steps blah blah blah. There's a kind of curse of certainty in many writings promoting excellence of various kinds.

There's a malaise in conversations where we appear too certain about things that deep down we're attached to but not truly sure about; and sometimes correspondingly slippery about some things we are pretty sure of but don't like to talk about (in particular about our feelings about some situations).

I don't want this to sound too pious, as I am the author of many rants that clearly illustrate my own failings in this regard. But I think we might all take a leaf from David Weinberger's excellent distinction between ? and !.

Brand Mel?

Laura Ries comments on the Mel Gibson story. Would I be the only person who has something to do with branding who felt uncomfortable with this line?

He began the brand healing process early which is the only thing to do after a crisis of this magnitude.

Laura talks about the "brand" as if it is a separate thing from the man; that's one way of looking at the issue I suppose. But when you juxtapose the word healing with that, I start to feel anxious. If you want to talk about brands as somehow separate from human beings, it muddies the waters if you then describe the brands as if they have some kind of soul.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of people talking about other people or themselves as brands. I have the same reaction when people talk about themselves in the third person. There's something dehumanising about it.

Patience

Chris Corrigan has a thoughtful post about patience in facilitation which resonates with me. He quotes Pema Chodron's article on the subject:

If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there.

In my various trainings I've seen anger dealt with in a variety of ways and I am increasingly drawn to this mindful approach. I connect it with what I wrote the other day about mindful learning - in particular noting how we can benefit from revisiting the automatic programmes we've created in our lives for responding to certain situations.

I think we humans often fail to notice the short cuts we create in our thinking. These can be incredibly useful at times and destructive at others. Sometimes we act so quickly on anger that we don't create the reflective space that might offer a wiser path. In recent months I have been practicing the advice embodied in the Sedona Method, and I am often astonished at what happens when instead of acting on a feeling (either literally, or in my imagination) I instead choose to simply allow it (or even, as per Sedona, to welcome it). Though counter-intuitive, this approach can be powerful. What I often find is that uncomfortable feelings like anger and anxiety, if fully witnessed in this way, seem to change to a sense of energy without the angry or anxious edge. We often act (desperately) in response to anger and anxiety in the hope of regaining our power; I increasingly find that not acting, but instead fully experiencing can lead to a more satisfying sense of empowerment. I think that is the phenomenon that Chris is picking up on, though he describes it differently. And I really liked his comment:

If you think anger is wrong, you won’t be able to be a peacemaker. If you think anger is true, you can go there.

A bit of zen...

From jack/zen via Chris Corrigan, a little bit of zen that made me laugh.

A typical example of zen practice. Put a flower on a table. Write down every word you can use to describe the flower with full analysis of it, your reactions to it, the history of the flower and flowers in general, comparisons with all other flowers and living things and speculations backed by scientifical data about the flower. Put the flower to poetry, do a drawing and sculpture on it, write a play and feature length film on it, write a song about it. Take a picture of it from every angle possible.

Now place all of this on the table next to the flower.

Look at your stack of what you’ve expressed about the flower.

Look at the flower.

Notice the difference