Stronger than the strongest link?

David Weinberger has a lucid post dismantling the argument that Web 2.0 and "citizen journalism" will lead to mediocrity. Here's a snippet:

Donnacha acts as if the Web were as weak as its weakest link because we can't tell the difference between weak and strong links. In fact, the Web at its best is stronger than its strongest links, because those links get tempered through the exposure to multiple points of view.

Twitter, making big meanings of trivia, and why it matters

My twitter feed this morning was full of an exchange between Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur. It struck me as an interesting example of what happens in a world of - to quote Lisa Reichelt's phrase - ambient intimacy. Here's (the very slightly abridged version of) their exchange. Loic is talking about planning his LeWeb3 conference.

L: LeWeb3: you would not believe how some speakers consider themselves as star. It's almost if I had to cut their feet nails upon arrival

L: ok now I have a speaker who asks through his assistant to cover his cost for.... USD45 000 WTF? Some people really are full of themselves.

R: @loiclemeur: that's freaking ridiculous for a speaker to ask. That person really doesn't want to go.

R: @loiclemeur: I only know a few speakers in the industry who can command more than $5,000 per speech.

L: @Scobleizer if I told you who that is you would be amazed. And I guarantee he wants to go :)

R: @loiclemeur: if I don't want to go to your conference I'll ask for a ridiculous amount like that. Just ignore and go to next speaker.

L: @Scobleizer of course we do not pay speakers at LeWeb3 !!! Never

R: @loiclemeur: I told Maryam and she said "what?" She's a professional event coordinator. We've never paid that much.

R: @loiclemeur: there are some speakers who command those kinds of fees, but LeWeb isn't one who needs to pay that.

L: @Scobleizer will tell you in private. Can't disclose. But hey I got one wifi offer for Eur 400 000 and a speaker for USD 45 000 what a J

L: ahah seems I launched an entire Twitter conversation on these astronomical fees !

So this almost accidental conversation mushrooms... and Loic is placed in the position of looking a bit of a tease - he's going to whisper to Scoble who the mystery egomaniac is but not tell us. That's delightfully human of him even if it doesn't quite paint him as the soul of discretion. (Puts me slightly in mind of this great, possibly apocryphal, Churchill story.)

I realise I witter stuff in Twitter that I would probably not put in my blog, but it's all stuff that tells you a bit more about who I am. I write these fragmentary bits of trivia but the reader gets to interpret and contextualise. Of course the story readers make up (like the one I've made up in my head about Loic) may not be "true". And it sure as heck isn't going to be under the control of the writer. But what you lose in control, you may well gain in engagement because the story I've made up is going to excite me enough to blog about it. See?

We've come a long way from dinosaur speak.

Torture apologist

It seems that a serious candidate for the Presidency of the United States makes light of torture. Rudy Giuliani quips about sleep deprivation, and thinks that whether waterboarding is torture depends on who is doing it.

There are those who equate being President with leading the free world. I don't think that's a sustainable view at the moment.

Power corrupts

Mark at Anecdote has a telling story of how a collaboration space was successfully undermined. Here's how his client explained it:

Early on, this place was used all the time. I loved it and brought my team here for regular meetings and, with the shortage of formal meeting rooms, I had lots of my smaller meetings here as well. The place always had a great 'buzz' about it. But the design had a big flaw, the executive offices were all positioned overlooking the atrium. One day I was called into the office of an executive who told me they considered I was spending too much of my time in the atrium (collaboration space). Apparently others had similar experiences. Nowadays hardly anyone comes here. We feel we are being watched.

This reminds me of the excellent ChangeThis manifesto by Matthew May. He explains an experiment he ran.

At the off-site, there were about 75 people of varying degrees of seniority, ranging from field supervisors to senior execs. I gave the assignment, one of those group priority exercises whereby you rank a list of items individually and then as a group and compare (sort of a “wisdom of crowds” exercise to show that “we” is smarter than “me”). This specific exercise required you to rank 25 items with which you’ve crashed on the moon in relation to how important they were to your survival. NASA had compiled the correct ranking, so there was a clear answer.

I did the exercise with a twist. At each table I put a ringer. I gave the lowest-ranking person the
answer. It was their job to convince the command-control types they knew the right answer.

During the group exercise, NOT A SINGLE CORRECT ANSWER GOT HEARD .

Speaking truth to power. It ain't easy, is it?

Heading for the mountains

Well, judging by my writing style of yesterday, I need a holiday.

So it's good that I'm taking one. I've just booked my flights to Banff in the Rockies for the Applied Improv conference. It'll be a chance to catch up with blog-friends including Andrew Rixon and Patti Digh.

The best part will probably be the Open Space on the last day. I'm thinking of offering a conversation with the title "But what if we're all wrong about this...?" and seeing who shows up with what ideas.

Bourn impudent

Warning: bad language ahead.

I rarely read newspapers or magazines, but I do regularly pick up Private Eye. Lately, the Eye has done a terrific job uncovering the lifestlye - and that is the right word - of Sir John Bourn. He is the UK's Auditor and Comptroller General: in other words, he's the go-to guy for making sure that public money is spent wisely and without waste or indulgence. If the National Audit Office says a service is efficient, it would be nice to think that it is.

Over the last few weeks, the Eye has unravalled the astonishing story of Sir John's lavish expenses, all billed to the taxpayer. Wikipedia - of course! - has some of the goods here:

Records show that he has stayed almost exclusively in five star hotels[3], such as the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, the Astoria in St Petersburg, the Gresham Palace hotel in Budapest and the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh. Sir John's flights were exclusively first class on long haul and business class on shorter visits[5]. The C&AG has also travelled to Croatia, Turkey, Jordan and Bulgaria for discussions or the launch of twinning projects involving co-operation between the NAO and other state audit offices. The records show that the couple [yes, he took his wife] enjoyed a week-long stay in the Bahamas last year to attend the Caribbean Organisation of State Audit Offices Congress.

A spokesman for Sir John claimed that he normally stays at hotels which are "recommended by the host organisation"[6], however an investigation by The Daily Telegraph suggests that on several of the most expensive trips, no such recommendations were made. Sir John's expenses emerged after a freedom of information request by the Private Eye magazine.

Note the footnote references, that's auditing the way I like it. This Week's Eye catalogues more of Bourn's fine dining experiences at our expense and asks whether he's planning to pay income tax on what is transparently a form of payment-in-kind.

Here's the Eye on what strikes me as the pinnacle of Bourn's chutzpah.

Most gratifying of all, however, must have been a dinner at the Ivy hosted by the biggest consultant on the private finance initiative (happily endorsed by the NAO) and provider of services to the NAO itself, PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The occasion? A thank you for the judges, including Sir John, of PwC's, er, "Public Trust Awards".

Whilst many things bring joy to my life and confirm my faith in humanity, this kind of thing depresses and infuriates me beyond words.

The sheer shamelessness of this man is unfathomable. His casual induldgence points to a level of denial that is systemic. Do I need to spell this out: if this is the accepted behaviour of our Auditor Fucking General, what hope is there for probity in our public life?

Here's what the browntongues at Number 10 tell us about Bourn, in a press release from 2006:

As journalists no doubt recalled the Prime Minister had announced last week that he would appoint an independent figure. Sir John Bourn was the highly respected Comptroller and Auditor General and he would now advise ministers on ministerial interests and if necessary establish the facts for the Prime Minister....

Asked about the remit of Sir John Bourn and whom he reported to, the PMOS said that it was a Prime Ministerial appointment. The role would be as described last week, which was to advise ministers and their permanent secretaries on how to handle issues surrounding ministerial interests, and if necessary establish the facts of a case for the Prime Minister.

The old cliche about lunatics and asylum feels inadequate. I doubt very much that our new Prime Minister is capable of any better judgement.

I was momentarly heartened to learn that today, Bourn has resigned. But then I read this pofaced explanation from the NAO, as reported on Reuters:

Bourn said in a statement he would retire on January 31, 2008, in order to avoid any conflict with his post as chairman of the Professional Oversight Board, a body that has a corporate oversight role.

Because the National Audit Office recently took on new powers to audit companies, he said it would be incompatible to hold both positions at once.

It's a wonder he has the time to step off his gravy train long enough to make this shit up.

And I feel like I did as an adolescent, devouring Hamlet and identifying with his sense of helplessness in the face of "the proud man's contumely". What a fucking disgrace.

Quoting Nietzsche

I've never had any excuse to quote Nietzsche in this blog. (For someone with a a degree in Philosophy I have a hard time spelling the name, never mind reading any). But Andrew Sullivan, or more precisely one of his readers, came up with this meaty chunk that I really appreciated.

The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life. The same means in the fight against a craving--castration, extirpation--is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those who are so constituted that they require La Trappe, to use a figure of speech, or (without any figure of speech) some kind of definitive declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion. Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will--or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus--is itself merely another form of degeneration. The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner.

What's risky?

Tom Guarriello has a useful summary of what sounds an interesting talk by Dan Gilbert.

Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist who wrote Stumbling On Happiness, turned his attention to risk and the brain. His claim is that our brains have evolved to be highly sensitized to certain types of risk and totally unconcerned about others. So, while anthrax killed absolutely zero people last year, more people are concerned about its risks than are concerned about the flu, which killed upwards of 250,000 since 2001.

Gilbert has a simple 4 part acronym to highlight the biases which influence our perceptions of risk - see Tom's post for the full SP. Still more reason to hold out the possibility of being wrong in what we think about... well just about anything.

Do we need leaders?

Dave Pollard has done a podcast with Jon Husband. What's more, he's gone to the trouble of transcribing the whole thing.

I've not met Dave but I have had the pleasure of spending time with Jon and this podcast deepens my respect for both of them. These guys are among the deepest thinkers about the future that I know; and they think with the hearts as well as their heads.

Their subject is Do We Need Leaders?. Whenever I listen to or read Jon, I wish I could sometimes just channel him. And I loved this recollection from Dave:

In my last year of high school, a group of us were permitted to work independently and not attend any classes provided we kept our test grades up. Rather than working 'independently' we chose to teach each other, to learn collectively, and to learn as much as possible outside the confines of the school. It was a spectacularly successful experiment, as our group won most of the scholarships and increased our grades substantially, but it was never repeated, apparently because it was considered 'elitist'. Several of us had trouble in university readapting to the expectation we would sit in classes taking notes from droning professors.

And this from Jon seems spot on to me:

I don't think we'll get away soon from job evaluation methodology which is at the core of the gestalt in many organizations. Nobody really talks about this. I don't see people in established organizations being willing to let go of the different levels and different pay grades -- a lot of this is bound up with the notions of power and status and ego.

The core idea in this podcast, for me, is the idea of an 'intentional community': the notion that instead of following rigid hierarchies, the more natural way for humans to learn and grow is as volunteers taking care of each other.

I believe passionately in that view; in fact I think most rigid hierarchies only survive because of our human ability to make stuff work despite the rigid theories.

James and I are hatching a plot to write more about armies of volunteers, and to rehabilitate the notion of 'coalitions of the willing'. I think Dave and Jon are on a similar bus.

Maybe not so naive?

So my throwaway question from Friday generated some heartfelt comments.

Heartfelt, and - to me - heartening. I think a lot of organisations create complicated processes in an effort to systematise human relationships. These processes generate what a friend calls a "corporate nod", the kind of assent that really means "yeah, I'll play along" and not "yes, I love that idea".

Of course, any organisation needs its procedures but there seems to be an impulse to create too many of them, and too complicated. A personal peeve of mine are "evaluation forms" at the end of events. These seem to encourage an evaluative rather than participative mindset - where people are invited to assess whether it "worked" (on a 5 point scale) instead of engaging live in making it work at the time.

One fine day, I'll announce that I won't read those feedback forms - to emphasise how much more valuable it is to get live engagement from people taking risks to make things work in the here and now. Probably on the same day I'll kick off a creative thinking meeting by saying, "Could we all embrace the possibility that nothing useful may come of this meeting? That way, we can all stop trying to control what happens, relax and probably create an atmosphere that's actually more likely to see something useful emerge."

Patti Digh commented

The urge is toward neatness, clean, tight, neat lines in business--and what we are asking is for people to walk (even run!) toward messiness, chaos, those edges where real learning (and real relationship) take place.

I don't have a problem with neat lines if they act as a prompt to, rather than limitation on, creative thinking.

A naive question

Obviously, this is too simplistic.

But I have this question for anyone who's got some process to manage human beings in organisations. You know the sort of thing... a process to set and manage coaching; a format for efficient meetings; a form for 360 feedback, an assessment "tool" for interviews.

Does this process bear any resemblance to how you actually relate, in your own life, to anyone whom you love? (eg how you chose your spouse, how you treat your children etc etc)

And if not, why not?

What the web means

I agree with Euan, this is genius:

Lifecycle of a silver bullet

Dave Snowden points to the Lifecycle of a Silver Bullet. It's a painfully accurate description of how management fads get created.

It prompted me to reread my own story about management secrets, involving a consultant and a milliepede.

Why I love this stuff

Tom Guariello has just about his best post ever, and that's saying something.

We have now come to a point in history where an 80 year-old gentleman from a cottage in the English midlands can get invited to one of the most prestigious global gatherings because of his ability to connect with millions of people through a series of short stories videoed on a camcorder. What a fascinating, strange world we're creating.

Enjoy Tom's clip of his conversation with Peter Oakley (you might have to turn the volume up but stick with it, trust me on this):

I think it captures quite brilliantly what makes me feel joyful about the web's infinite improbability drive.

Simple or simplistic?

Earl commented on my last post which led to me this part of his archive. I especially enjoyed this bit:

What's more, when someone tells us about the rules, we can be pretty sure they don't know either, and very often they are our parents who, frankly, are not especially successful players.

I think Earl also captures rather well why I'm a net enthusiast:

It's another thing I like so much about the net and its associated technologies; they take away the appearance, the feeling of control from those who thought they held it. The technology doesn't give back that control to anyone else either, it just demonstrates that any feeling of control is an illusion, and then demands that we play anyway. Does that mean that I’m an anarchist? Not at all, but it does mean that for the paradigms of control; force, compulsion and exclusion, we have to substitute co-operation, collaboration and contribution. Now that, I'll take.

By the way, my take on this whole simple/complicated/complex business is probably best summed up in my More Space effort, Simple Ideas, Lightly Held.

What we're up against here

Shawn at Anecdote gives a couple of examples of complexity. He uses these to convey how difficult it is to make reliable predictions of complex systems.

When I talk about complexity to clients I mention that complex systems are impossible to predict in detail especially as your forcast extends into the future. I point out that there are so many connections among the objects affecting the system and many of the cause and effect relationships are non-linear (a small thing can have a big impact and vice versa). Every now and then someone will say, “but if you could work out all those connections you could predict the outcome.” And this is where I will tell them the chessboard story.

The legendary information scientist, Claude Shannon, calculated how many possible moves there are on a chessboard. It's a finite system of 64 squares, 32 pieces, 6 movement patterns. The number is big and equates to the number of milliseconds the world has been in existence. And that's for a simple system. Imagine the possibilities in a social system where the objects have free will.

One aspect of human complexity is that our brains are highly developed to simplify what we see - giving rise to an impressive series of cognitive biases. So we usually don't recognise the complexity of what we're up against...

The leadership delusion?

Phil Dourado also says research shows that bad leaders score themselves highly for leadership on self-assessment tests. Not so surprsing, and it makes me wonder: how much of this is their personal capacity for self-delusion, and how much is a failure - for whatever reason - of people around them to put them right?

I might even ask whether the label of "leadership" really is anything other than a fancy way of giving approval? I'm interested in what Gabriele Lakomski says here, summarising her book Managing without Leadership.

Our everyday experience tells us that organisational life is messy and complex and that those in positions of leadership are neither omniscient nor infallible. Why, then, do we quite readily believe that there is a causal link between organisational functioning and leadership? Why do we not believe our own experience that how things work in organisations is much more complicated?

...In a naturalistic redescription of the phenomenon, we might view it as an emergent, self-organising property of complex systems. There would then be no need for engaging in more leadership studies: instead, we could redirect our attention to the study of the fine-grained properties of contextualised organisational practice.

Accident

Thanks to Phil Dourado for this question:

What do the elements of this list have in common?

Anesthesia
Cellophane
cholesterol lowering drugs
cornflakes
dynamite
the ice cream soda
Ivory soap
artificial sweeteners
nylon
Penicillin
photography
Rayon
PVC
Smallpox vaccine
stainless steel
Teflon

Answer: all discovered by accident. Hmm. I wonder how many organisations that claim to want innovation have thought about how they react to accidents?

Small causes

The last few days have really reconfirmed my preference for getting my news online. The mainstream media, more than ever, offers only bread and circuses. The endless politics-as-horse-race coverage is matched only by endless obsessing about someone who died in a car accident linked to alcohol ten years ago.

Ah well, at least the latter has provoked a good post by Mark, who concludes that

Big things can have small causes, but we're programmed to believe otherwise

. And you don't get David Hume quoted on Breakfast TV very often:

It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends

Makes me cry

I found this performance of the Pearl Fishers Duet on YouTube. This piece always makes me want to cry, and hearing these voices from the past seems even more poignant. Part of what makes this so thrilling is the sense of the connection in the spaces between the two voices. People bandy about the phrase creative tension but I think the phenomenon it names transcends that. Play this at my funeral, please.

Bored at Berkeley

A tweet from David Smith led me to this post by Alan Cann. Alan shows this soporific video; it's from an extensive range published by UC Berkeley on YouTube.

I feel a bit guilty picking on this particular lecturer as there are plenty of others there who are comparable. And, of course, I welcome Berkeley making its content freely available in this way. But, oh dear, it's a reminder that lectures really suck as a way of engaging an audience in a learning journey. I never went to any after my first week at Uni.

And it makes me wonder even more what role universities imagine they are going to play in a networked world. Because if they think their old content will cut the mustard, they'd better get a new education.

Incidentally, Berkeley's home page on YouTube has an amusing video running. It says that there you see (UC, geddit?) a place alive with purpose and passion. Hmm, nice lipstick but what's that oinking sound?

Bonus link: Rob wonders if another promotional mainstay of University 1.0 is looking a bit flaky too.

Speaking a thousand words

I loved this, from Dustin Rivers, via Chris.

I don't know

Chris Corrigan regularly reminds me of why I admire his work. Here's the latest reason.

Today I ran into an interesting situation. I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner. She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation.

That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected. I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I don’t know. What would you do if you were in my situation?” She wasn’t expecting this answer, but to her credit she stopped and thought about it. We stood next to each other in silence for a few moments.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Well then,” I said. “That makes two of us. Let’s think about this together.”

Appreciating innovation

Euan says:

The biggest challenge facing organisations is not so much coercing people into being more innovative as getting themselves out of the way when people try to innovate.

Innovation almost always comes out of frustration with the status quo and is almost inevitably disruptive. If you don't let people find fault with how you do things currently or begin to disrupt your perfect systems then you are unlikely to experience innovation.

Yes, I'm a big fan of getting out of the way. When organisations talk about driving innovation I wonder if a better conversation would be about recognising it.

Podcast: Shadow in Organisations (part 2)

Here's part 2 of my podcast conversation with Annette Clancy and Matt Moore. You'll find part 1 here.

Our chat about the shadow side of organisations branches off here into looking at the role played by Knowledge Management (and Human Resources) in organisations. What part do they play in managing the shadow side of the business?

Annette starts this off with some teasing questions about Knowledge Management which provokes a little outburst from me against some of its pretensions. For those who enjoy my Dr Rant posts, here's a chance to hear what he actually sounds like.

For me, the best bit comes about 7 minutes in, when Annette asks: what's useful to an organisation about having a department to bully? Another highlight is Matt's suggestion of Knowledge Courtesan as an alternative name for a Knowledge Manager.

Download the Podcast - 16m - MP3 (5.6 MB)

Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.

Show notes

Here are the show notes with the same caveat as for part one: The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.

0.00 Annette asks Matt, with what I’d say is a slight sense of irony in her voice, what knowledge management really is. Is it a gatekeeper? It sounds like a very powerful position…

1.00 Matt says knowledge managers don’t wield a lot of power but they do wield influence. It’s about linking people together. Matt toys with the alternative label of “knowledge courtesan”. Some of the best knowledge managers were those women who ran the salons in eighteenth century France, who created environments for others to have conversations in.

2.50 It struggles with issues of control and secrecy.

3.05 Johnnie and Annette banter before Johnnie slips into Dr Rant mode. (So that’s the connection to the shadow, then.) What’s the problem with these knowledge management people? Are they just trying to raise their status with fancy language? Johnnie drags HR into the fight too.

5.15 Annette asks if Johnnie’s feeling better now.

5.25 Matt talks about how some professions are marginalised, and adds communications/PR to the list. In organisations some divisions have the power and everyone else wants a piece of the action and get into the limelight.

6.25 Annette: how did we end up vilyfying HR etc?

6.35 Johnnie tries to put his rant in context. (Nice try.)

7.10 How could the put-upon divisions be more in their power? Annette asks (great question): what’s useful about having a department to bully? How does that contibute to the established power systems in an organisation?

Annette talks about how HR can get stuck with giving out the bad news for others. Maybe HR, marketing and KM are saddled with trying to manage the mucky stuff of relationships that others don’t want to deal with.

8.55 What role does knowledge manager take up as a gate keeper? Matt responds. Problems of managing intangibles. How KM gets saddled with document management.

10.25 Annette: so there’s some truth to my idea of knowledge managers as gatekeepers.

11.15 There’s anxiety about control of information.. is it about controlling identity?

12.00 We can create the conditions in which stuff is produced but we can’t control what happens. It’s easy to blame the gatekeeper/scapegoat than look at what’s really going on. How do you get out of being the whipping boy? Looking at both sides of this – what’s the “problem department” doing to put itself in this role, and what’s the organisation’s investment in keeping it there?

14.20 Bringing conversation to a close and marking the anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s death.

16.15 End

Wisdom of Corrigan

Dave Pollard has a great podcast he did with Chris Corrigan, include a full transcript - for which he gets a lot of kudos from me.

Among the bits I liked are Chris' thoughts about action. I'd describe them thus: there's taking action, there's taking wise action, and then there's making the wise action sustainable. In getting past first base, we need relationship - and that's where the apparent distinction between task and relationship orientation starts to look like a false dilemma. I love Chris' definition of sustainability as "a deep relationship with whatever you want to see lasting" which for him means getting selective about whatever has real heart and meaning.

Chris is also eloquent on the subject of Unschooling or life learning as he prefers to call it. When he desribes how he shares StumbleUpon finds with his daughter, I get the picture not of teaching at all, but of a relationship in which each other's curiosity is constantly nourished, appreciated and shared. Did your schooldays give you that?

I also loved these sentiments

“a well crafted invitation will attract the right people for any endeavour”

Active relationships are based not on role or control but on friendship, trust and shared passion

It ends with Chris wondering if we need to discover that we don't need leaders. Dave promises another podcast on that one... I'm looking forward to it.

Education, education...

Euan cites Richard Sambrook writing about John Chambers:

He said the current education system of grades and exams puts people in competition with each other and is a top down command-and-control model. As the leader of one of the world's biggest IT companies he believes future education should concentrate on networking and collaboration - which will support greater innovation and corss-discipline creativity. It will also, he said, attract talent.

I often think we don't realise the deepest lesson that our schools indvertently teach us - to be overly obedient to, and respectful of, authority - and not our own.

When someone walks in the room

Matt mentioned something in our podcast that gives me an excuse to refer to this YouTube clip again. We were talking about power and what happens when someone in authority walks into a room... and the atmosphere changes. It makes me laugh a lot, and reminds me of the energy that can be released when a shadow gets named, as the filmakers does here.

Show notes on shadow

I've just added a set of quite detailed show notes to the recent podcast on the shadow side of organisations. I've been procrastinating about doing this and was surprised to find the task quite satisfying, as I really had to pay attention to what we were talking about. And I think it's a great conversation, though I say so myself. So if you want to hear more about

how chicken soup might be poison
whether talking about shadow opens Pandora's box
how creativity might be about managing anxiety
whether this is all about power and control
what organisations stand to gain (or lose) by engaging with their shadows

and lot's more, go read the notes or - better still - have a listen.

Podcast: the shadow side of organisations

Last week, Annette Clancy, Matt Moore and I had a conversation about the shadow side of organisations. Sometimes when people talk about the shadow, it conjures up a scary idea of dark, unexplored nastiness. In fact, I think looking at the shadow often reveals stuff which can be very energising. The three of us kick this idea around and here is Part One. I'm uploading this now and will add show notes later. Part Two to follow.

Download the Podcast - 29m - MP3 (9.9 MB)

Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.

UPDATE: Here are the show notes. Warning: These are unreliable. The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.

The elephant in the corner

0.00 Introductions and what this is about: the Elephant in the Corner and things that don’t get talked about

0.50 Annette asks Johnnie what prompted his focus on this? Why now? Johnnie describes a client conversation that may have pointed to his own shadow side… the “deep sense of ranklement” that suggests that there’s something for him to work on…

3.25 …and prompts Annette to look at how this might also be seen as a shadow on the client side “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?” Why does the shadow need to be hidden? Do we collude in scapegoating people inside organisations, or consultants that advise them?

“Difficult” people: scapegoats and clowns

4.40 Johnnie talks about how people in groups often take on a role as “difficult” person

5.35 Matt explores this further. If it’s somebody’s job to be difficult and that person leaves, often somebody else takes over that role…

6.15 Annette explores how this affects consultants who are brought in to deal with problems that are “located within individuals”… the risk of missing the learning to be had from the scapegoat or clown or whatever archetype is used to label someone.

Incompetence

7.35 Annette expands on this with reference to an organisation she worked with. How people there kept talking about incompetence, and how the location of this incompetence seemed to move around, being attributed to one person then the next. How Annette experienced a sense of her own incompetence around them, and tried to bring this “shadow” to attention… how this showed there were not formal ways to discuss what was working and not working in the organisation.

9.15 Johnnie moves on to talk about his own experiences of feeling incompetent in client briefings – thinking I don’t understand, why have they chosen me to do this? How he’s more accepting of that now and is willing to wait. He says Annette’s point encourages him to take that further: what if this isn’t about me but what’s going on here?

10.45 Annette: And sometimes we actually are incompetent and can’t simply blame this on others! So you need to confront whether it’s just your buttons being pushed. You have to be quite brave sometimes.

Anxiety

11.25 Matt talks about research showing that being creative is linked to the ability to cope with anxiety. How people fear the blank page and how they learn to deal with it, for instance.

12.35 Johnnie prompts Annette to talk more about a point she made in her blog about the difference between fear and anxiety. When we try to fix anxiety our solutions often don’t work. Managing anxiety/uncertainty as a mark of maturation: a spirit of I really don’t know what’s going on here but I will accompany you and together let’s try to figure out what this not knowing is about…

The perils of chicken soup

14.15 Johnnie: sometimes, as one writer put it, chicken soup is poison. Importance of managing my own anxiety and the “awkward silences” (Where is this awkwardness located – it’s not in the silence, it’s in us.)

15.35 Matt talks about people looking for quick fixes and the temptation to offer them. He links the theme of personal shadows to work on edges – our edges are shown by things that make us uncomfortable. Things that are in the half-light.

Not necessarily hell

16.50 Johnnie: the trouble with talking about “shadow” is it conjures up Daliesque, nightmarish ideas of a murky unconscious… whereas in fact looking at the unexamined part of life can be very rewarding.

17.25 Annette expands on that fear of the unknown that often surrounds the idea of any kind of personal change work such as coaching or therapy. What terrible thing about me is going to be exposed here? How that’s a very real fear and we have to acknowledge that.

Another way of framing shadow work is to see that you can’t have light without dark.. the shadow is an incredibly useful and creative part of ourselves. It’s not some terrible place we’re never going to come back from, but something we can peer into. There’s loads of potentially interesting, entertaining information in there about how we are in organisations.

18.55 Johnnie: Another way of framing our shadow: a place where we’ve kept some of our energy in reserve. Think of the laughter around comedy – it’s us tapping into that energy when something unspoken gets named.

It’s a control thing…

19.30 Matt: this is partly an issue of control. How organisations want to present a happy controlled picture to people inside and outside. Shadows are messy and indeterminate, they’re fuzzy and that’s part of the challenge.

20.20 Annette talks about how organisations privilege reason over feeling. But asking people to be organised, controlled rational people is, actually, a bit irrational. Organisations aren’t antiseptic environments, they’re human systems. Talking about shadow challenges an organisational discourse about control. “An enormous amount of energy and time goes into making the shadow go away, whether that’s coaching, whether it’s change processes…” There’s a lot of energy released when we can acknowledge it isn’t all happy all the time.

21.40 Johnnie says what Annette just said but maybe not quite so well. The moment in groups when the truth is named is not like opening Pandora’s box, more the opposite.

22.15 Annette: And it tells people you’re not mad. Johnnie expands on what happens when we acknowledge our fear of not belonging and discover this fear can actually connect us.

Power and politics

23.50 Annette: This is all very well but the thing we’re not talking about here is power, power and politics. Which make it difficult for people to talk about the shadow. Because there are repercussions. A lot of energy goes into keeping the conversation quiet because it’s potentially a threat.

24.40 Matt: The deeper you want to people to get, the less surveillance they need to feel. The phenomenon of how when a particular person comes into the room, everyone shuts up.

Who’s the client anyway?

25.30 Annette talks about who hires me? Who’s the client here? How this often gives a clear message about how we’re being allowed to operate. How we’re sort of invited to do something, and also invited not to succeed. Johnnie gives an example of a friend dealing with this. (It’s worth listening to and I’m not typing it all out here)

27.50 Johnnie talks about how his sense of who is the client changes when he works with groups.

28.40 A bland invitation to join us for part two of this…