Rebooting

I'm off shortly to Copenhagen for Reboot 9, which looks like being fun, despite my giving a talk there tomorrow, supposedly about "Contact".

I'm also doing a 5 minute micropresentation with Rob Paterson on the theme of non-linearity. We've come up with a way to make our presentation itself non-linear and it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Wrong answers

Shocking research from the Onion has this as throwaway ending:

In 2002, Fultz's team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

Hat tip: Earlsy

Marketing as usual

In my email today comes a reminder that marketing has yet to be revolutionised.

American Airlines yells at me:

As Requested - Your Exclusive AmericanDreamDeals 4 Day Fare Sale

This accompanies a list of very unremarkable fares, as a quick trawl on the web demonstrates. (eg AA London-New York, 12 to 19 June "DreamDeal" = £351; or fly Delta without daydreaming for £326)

The "as requested" is a bit of an exaggeration. I just failed to tick the opt out box when I registered with AA years ago.

So what makes these "AmericanDreamDeals" worthy of the little "SM" sign? (Is SM an acronym for ShittyMarketing ?)

Whose value?

Vajra left a good comment (on my post about Twitter) questioning

the notion that any activity must have a result that is valuable to the observer, regardless of the value it has to the actor

This reminds me of Open Space when some people choose not to join an announced conversation, but choose to take a break, have a coffee or just chat casually with a passerby. Some folks look at these people and assume they're somehow boycotting or resisting the process. (Actually, the guidelines for Open Space specifically endorse their choice). We don't know what they're doing but we assume it's not valuable. What we miss in this little fantasy is that we're not taking care of our own preference for engagement and instead are thinking of trying to control someone else's.

More on dressage and facilitation

I got a great email yesterday from a horse rider who had stumbled upon my post about Dressage and Facilitation. It's the sort of contact that makes blogging great: I post a few stray ideas about a sport I know little about, and here comes an expert to flesh out the detail for me. Thanks to Beth Daniels for this:

I was surfing around in an effort to see what is on the web with regard to the discipline/art of dressage that was somehow unique and your thoughts on Andreas Helgstrand's ride on Matine in the freestyle caught my eye. I am a serious amateur dressage rider myself and train with an international caliber trainer based here in Aiken, SC. I have also done years of pilates work, meditation, rolfing, and other body aware methods. And probably most significantly, I have spent a lifetime surrounded by animals.

Woven into all of this experience has been any number of business training sessions in sales and marketing. Therefore, I was particularly intrigued by your analogy of facilitation to the riding of the dressage freestyle since for those of us who spend years perfecting this incredibly and challenging form of riding (any dressage, not just freestyles) it becomes very clear that our job as the rider is, indeed, that of a facilitator though few of us may describe our role in this manner.

But think about it...we are using a highly specialized language- albeit one that is expressed through our bodies rather than our voices- for the purpose of obtaining a very specific response from the horse whether it be a sideways movement called half-pass, or a 360 degree turn at the canter called pirouette or one of the many other moves we train the horse to execute when asked. All horses can naturally do these movements at will to a lesser or greater degree, but to execute them at a specific location and point in time and within predetermined parameters for the quality of the movement requires the presence of a facilitator, i.e. the rider.

And the better the rider the less obvious his or her role in that facilitation and the greater the expression will be from the horse executing the movements precisely because the rider as facilitator understands how to consistently ask the horse for more expression in each movement and can, in fact, ask through the proper use of his or her body. It"s brilliant, really!

I'll just add my caveat in the early post about this not being a perfect analogy. The twist with facilitation is that you're trying not to direct "the animal" with the precision that dressage (as I understand it, anyway) demands. It's more about supporting emergence and that's where it all gets a bit paradoxical...

On happiness and embracing negativity

Oli Barrett gives a good summary of In the Wild, a Channel 4 conference on the theme of happiness. This description of Nick Baylis's contribution caught my eye:

Nick’s main priority was to set straight a few minsconceptions, the first being the myth that we are somehow, as humans, hardwired to prioritize happiness. Nonsense, he says (or more accurately, a richer word beginning with B). We are hardwired to improve our relationship with life , that is to say ‘to get better at living life.’ One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to view emotions like anger, shame and loneliness as our enemy, something to be banished, to be drenched with booze. In fact these (positive, not ‘negative’ emotions) are our rocket fuel, and by learning to ride them, we can achieve incredible things.

This resonates with me. First, I like the notion of obliquity so that trying to be happy feels like a dodgy strategy. Secondly, in the course of years of therapy, I've realised more and more that being willing to embrace supposed negative emotions can be remarkably liberating. I mean embrace, rather than "act on", by the way. Nick names shame, and that's a very potent one. I would add that, for me, sadness is a good one to accept. I don't feel sad very often, and when I do it feels a blessed relief. I think that's why I love Elgar's Cello Concerto.

(Disclosure: I'm part of Policy Unplugged which organised the event, thoughI wasn't there myself)

UPDATE On a tangentially related note, Andrew Rixon enthuses about a "Postive No"

Magic roundabout and complexity

Dave Snowden has a good line for metaphors about complexity, and his latest, based on a "magic roundabout" near Swindon, is a cracker.

An unlikely friendship

Larry Flynt, millionaire pornographer was sued by moral "majority" leader Jerry Falwell over five years. Then they became friends, according to Larry.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Facilation as dressage?

I was having a chat about faciliation with Rob Paterson on Skype and he came up with the analogy of dressage. If you watch this (amazing) Youtube of a horse doing its thing, chances are you'll be watching the four-legged animal, not the two-legged one. After all, its the horse that's doing all the work, and the guy is just sitting there.

In fact, the rider is doing all sorts of small stuff with his muscles to co-create the show - but he's not drawing attention to himself at all.

It's not a perfect analogy, of course. Facilitation isn't about control but I'm focussing here on the apparent lack of activity, the discipline that requires, and allowing the other(s) to be the star, not yourself...

Compare and contrast

Thanks to David Burn at Adpulp for suggesting we compare and contrast the following YouTubes for Presidential candidates in the US.

First, this dire cliche-fest for Mitt Romney:

Second, this witty effort for Bill Richardson:

As David says, If you're going to sell candidates like toilet paper, well, it's easy to see which brand sounds better.

Jazz improv lessons

Lovely post on Presentation Zen: Jazz and the Art of Connecting. (Hat tip: Annette) This was my favourite lesson:

(1) “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)

The best communicators in the world are almost always the best listeners. Talking is easy; any dope can do that. But listening is hard. The lessons learned in life come more from when we open our ears not our mouths.

Side Effects

Annette has an excellent post about psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and his new book, Side Effects. Here's a little bit of Annette's analysis:

Phillips’ suggests that you can only be distracted if you have a plan and in attending to the distractions our plans (ones we may not even be aware of) are revealed. So when people ask me “how I work” and “what I do” I refer them to Phillips because his accessible interpretation of psychoanalysis (and indeed, pscychodynamic approaches to working in general) make sense of the ways in which my interest is captured by “oddness” and incidents and issues that somehow “don’t fit in”. Working below the surface of organisations and with people, means drawing clients attention to their plans – the ones that are unspoken and unconscious. Very often those unconscious plans derail the conscious ones and getting to the heart of that difference (very often exposing it for the first time) is the key to unlocking blockages in the system.

Yeah, that makes some sense to me. When I'm coaching, I'm often fascinated by the unfinished sentences, little incongruences - mine and other people's. Often, following up on these can be fascinating.

Annette, I'm slightly wary of the phrase "unlocking blockages in the system" because I'm not sure we should be too confident about what's a blockage and what's a system. And I suspect that's what you're saying too...

I also think this links in some way with thoughts about non-linearity in meetings. What looks like wandering off the point is actually part of getting the point.

Thoughts on contact

I love the wiki for the Reboot conference. Lots of simple features to engage and connect, flesh out ideas and get involved with the content in advance of the event itself.

My talk will be about Contact and our ambivalence about it. Here's the latest version of my summary on the wiki.

I first came across the notion of "fuck off, come closer" when doing psychotherapy training. It captured the confusing but human pattern of acting like we want to be alone when deep down we're desperate for contact.

We're caught between our need for spontaneity and our desire for control.

Ask people what they think of meetings and they'll offer variations on a theme of "waste of time". Those same people actually thrive on relationships - it's just a question of what sort of meeting we're talking about.

Likewise, most of us dread giving and/or listening to presentations. Presentations seem to have become about show rather than about being present to each other.

Research demonstrates the extraordinary influence that the quality of human contact - or the lack of it - has on the brain, on our personalities and on our behaviour. It confirms how easily we can be deceived about how we make choices and how much we influence each other. Most of this goes on unconsciously.

The individualist mindset sometimes neglects the power of what is created between people, where it's not clear who initiated or created the idea. What sort of contact is energising - and what sort dampens the possibility of co-creativity? Does technology help set up the "weak signals" that might connect us better, or does it get in the way?

I'm aiming for this to be an experiential session and not death-by-powerpoint.

Feedback welcome, here or on the Reboot page.

Opening Space

I've just returned from running an open space event in Rome with my friends at Policy Unplugged. It was great and - as ever - I continue to learn about myself from doing the work. The great joy of the open space format is the extent to which it gives power to participants... and then challenges the facilitator not to interfere with what they create.

It's so easy to look at how people spend their time and make all sorts of assumptions about what they're up to; compare these with what you assume they ought to be up to; and then interfere to "improve" things. Worse of all, you find yourself doing it without realising you're doing it. I think this time I managed myself pretty well and squelched most if not all of that kind of self-talk. Harrison Owen, who invented Open Space, has a motto of "one less thing" and I think I managed to keep to that spirit this time out.

One more thing I did do was after the event closed. I had four hours before our flight home and was tempted to crash out by the hotel pool (we were a few miles outside the city). Lloyd Davis suggested we go into Rome and just experience the city itself, even if just for an hour or two. That was a good call. We had great meal by the Colliseum, tested the underground, and rubbed shoulders with the Romans; although this was a brief experience, it really made the trip more fun. And got me away from that road-from-the-airport, air-conditioned, velvet-wallpaper, quasi-service, pseudo-comfort over-branded experience that business travel so often becomes.

Shrinking packaging

Stanley Moss emailed me this NY Times article: Incredible Shrinking Packages.

Update: Andrew Smart picks up on this and I particularly agree with him on this point:

And the guy from McDonald's quote is like a red rag to a bull.

"We’re offsetting it with other package reductions, but that white bag is important to the brand” Honestly, if you're not slightly irritated by that remark then you have a higher corporate bullshit tolerance than me. This kind of nonsense makes me foam at the mouth. What on earth does the average McDonald's user think when they get their fries delivered in a white bag?

Rageboy Reboots

I've just checked out the program for Reboot and I'm excited to see that Chris Locke, aka Rageboy is going to talk. Here's his synopsis:

"We die."
With that opening salvo, I kicked off chapter one of The Cluetrain Manifesto. While death is no joke, it does put certain aspects of our common humanity into perspective. Grandiose pretensions become laughable. Self-righteous posturing becomes transparently hilarious. Fear unpacked morphs into vulnerable compassion. People of Earth: we could be heroes.

That should be fun. There's loads of other pretty darn smart talks there, and then one by me. I've foolishly agreed to do a talk about Contact, subtitled "fuck off, come closer". I'm slightly dreading it to be honest but then I probably need to re-read Chris' perspective!

Putting the eek! into Control Freak

According to the Guardian,

The most expensive state school in Britain will have no playground. The Cambridgeshire authorities in charge of the new £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough believe a lack of outside space will avoid the danger of 'uncontrollable' groups of children running around at break time.

Hat tip: Dave Snowden who is about as thrilled by this notion as I am.

Partcipation...

A great bit of propaganda from France, 1968, and a nice sidelight on some people's ideas of user-generated content.

Hat tip: Jon Husband and Harold Jarche.

Missing the point of twitter

When people look at Twitter and say, "What's the point?", it might be better not to answer them.

It strikes me that, "What's the point?" is often what depressed people ask of life itself. I think it's a statement dressed up as a question; the statement might be "I feel miserable". From this place of unhappiness comes this apparent need for life to have a point. I guess at the other extreme, happy people often say they feel their life has purpose, but I wonder if this isn't the same kind of rationalisation of a feeling.

So many narratives of organisational life seem to start from an assumption about things having to have goals. As if without a goal, nothing happens. But there are other ways to look at life, which see actions as emergent rather than being the result of purposeful decision-making.

Rambling on here, the other thing about points is that they are sharp and focussed. Twitter isn't a very pointy product, it's more of a mesh of little connections (my velcro analogy again). It's not like being poked and prodded, it's about exposing more surface area for others to connect with.

Works in practice only

The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

- Miikka Ryokas, computer science student quoted in the NY Times.

Hat tip: John Winsor

What We're Weaving...

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy... What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is of the sort we intend.

Tim Berners-Lee, quoted by Joshua Porter.

Asking the community

Adriana spotted this comment by Thor about Digg's policy on the AACS Hex code business.

Whatever the “right” decision was for Digg regarding whether or not to delete the offending post, Digg knows it is nothing without its passionate and participating members. The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transparent with users from the beginning. Before it took any action that stripped power from users, Digg should have shared its dilemma with the community, explained the conundrum and the legal advice it had been given, and then solicited candid feedback via its forum. Debate would have ensued, but everyone would have felt like they were part of Digg’s ultimate decision, even if that was deletion of the code. More than anything, passionate users want to be heard.

These are simple steps that would have turned “us vs. them” into “us and only us”…without having to relinquish control to a “tyranny of the majority.”

That makes sense to me, and as Adriana suggests, it's a lot to do with really understanding what a community is.

It reminds me of someting I run into a lot when facilitating Open Space. Before the event, the organising group often stress themselves out second-guessing what will or won't work for the participants, and I often find the easiest path is to wait till the day and ask them; and sometimes to forget it and trust the group to figure out what it needs unprompted.