Notice more, change less

I said that at the start of the year and I still like the idea. And continued kudos to OnYourFeet for inspiring me.

Networks and lateral thinking

Adriana is on the money:

Innovation is non-linear - perhaps that is why all that networked stuff works rather well. What doesn’t work is the traditional command and control but that’s another conversation. Lateral thinking is rewarded in this day and age (actually, I believe it always has been) and a good way to get cracking when thinking about new business models. So, Amazon’s ‘unique proposition’ is reader book reviews, although it makes money on selling books, eBay ’sells’ reputation, makes money on auctions, Google’s offering is reach, though it makes money on text ads. Behind every new-ish business model is lateral monetisation struggling to get out.

She's prompted to say this by Tom Glocer of Reuters. Reading his blog, I wish more CEOs could be like him. For instance, I loved this:

I posit the Groucho 2.0 Rule: "I refuse to participate in any social networking service that seeks to capitalize on my membership."

Thought for the day - reality

Almost everything that we think is real is actually a construction of inferences and interpretations that we misinterpret as reality. And unfortunately, the belief that we are directly observing and understanding 'reality' discourages us from trying to change it. Hence our concept of 'reality' is the enemy of innovation.

Roger Martin in Businessweek, via Stephen Downes presentation via Dave Pollard

Bonus brainfood from Stephen's talk:

Learning is a process of becoming rather than a process of acquiring.

To learn is to instantiate patterns of connectivity in the mind

You do not "make meaning" or "construct meaning", you grow meaning.

Oh, and

knowledge is like finding Waldo.

I like that.

Getting into the grime with Wikipedia

I'm a fan of Wikipedia but I've been listening to one or two friends lately who aren't. They've encouraged me to look at what goes on in the discussion pages, where editors discuss the changes they're making. Then Dave Snowden posted something about his frustrations there, so I took a look at the discussion page for the entry on Knowledge Management. I must say I found it at times...

delightful: to see the effort and thought editors apply to their contributions. Well, sometimes.

fascinating: to see the controversy bubbling away below the apparent calm of the KM entry itself

funny: to witness the descent into prickliness among participants in the debate

frustrating: to find it almost impossible to understand what people are talking about half the time

I think Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia only works in practice, not in theory. Looking at this page, it amazes me that the whole project works as well as it does. And that's one of the reasons I love Wikipedia - that it manages to produce worthwhile information by somehow-or-other holding the energies and frustrations of its participants. Although it looks like Dave and his fellow participants may be close to giving up at the moment.

I also love that I can follow the breadcrumb trail of the disputes, even where some participants have rather unhelpfully deleted their comments. I also love that I can quit that trail when it all becomes too crazy making.

My friends think some of the discourtesy and controversy in such discussions diminishes the value of Wikipedia. I disagree. For me, the discussions show me more about the multiple meanings and the politics behind the phrase "knowledge management"; and like anyone else, I can take in as much or as little of that as I choose.

Thus the entry and debate on KM gives some information I didn't know. Sadly, it also reinforces my prejudice that KM has too many $10 words for 50¢ ideas.

It also provides the slim pretext I need for yet another link to a classic Python scene. This is what I think of when KM people debate what exactly a "school of thought" is. Actually, the best bit is just after this clip, when they start slagging off other revolutionaries, but I can only find that part in German!

Security, openness and biometrics

Ben Goldacre has an interesting take on the dangers of Brtain's proposed ID card scheme. This comes in the wake of the Inland Revenue losing 25m records in the post. Goldacre challenges one of the massive assumptions our government seems to make about security.

...security systems which rely on secret methods are less secure than open systems, because the greater the number of people who know about the system, the more people there are to spot holes in it, and it is important that there are no holes.

He raises serious doubts about the government's faith in biometric security, suggesting fingerprints are easy enough to fake.

every time you touch something, if your security systems rely on biometric ID, then you're essentially leaving your pin number on a post-it note... And once your fingerprints are stolen, they are harder to replace than your pin number.

Proprieception of thought

In his book, Dialog, William Isaacs tells a strange story. A woman wakes in the night to find herself being strangled by an unseen foe. After struggling in the dark, she manages to flick on a light. To her astonishment, she discovers that she is strangling herself with her other arm.

She is the victim of a rare phenomenon, loss of proprieception. Proprieception is the way we can sense where the various bits of our bodies are without having to look at them. We rely on it constantly without even thinking about it. (For instance, when driving, you don't need to look at your foot on the pedal to know how much acceleration you're applying.)

Whilst we have ready access to physcial proprieception, Isaacs suggests we have largely lost proprieception of our thinking. That is, we don't notice we're doing it or the impact it has. We take relatively small amounts of sensory input, make a big meaning and act on that meaning without much pause. In evolutionary terms, clearly a useful skill but it has its downsides.

So in meetings, we start feeling something akin to anxiety and start making a whole lot of assumptions about what others are thinking; we might be right but we can easily be wrong.

I'm increasingly drawn to processes that create a reflective space where our conversation and thinking might slow down enough to regain proprieception. I find it involves going through one or several waves of stress, discomfort and anxiety that I think go with having one of our senses restored. (I suppose it's a little like walking in from the cold to a warm room - that's when we shiver the most).

One of the interesting effects of such a shift is a different, I would say richer, sense of connection to those sharing the space with us. I contend it's a connection that is always there but often goes unnoticed. When it goes unnoticed, we default to a more mechanical notion of how to influence each other and make stuff happen. When we become aware of it, we start to realise that maybe we're not in such a position of control. That creates a few mental shivers of its own.

Facilitation or hosting?

Chris Corrigan writes about a distinction between facilitation and hosting.

Facilitation comes from a mechanistic view of organizations, that they are machines that can be fixed. Facilitators typically take a neutral stand, bring their tools and tool kits to help things run easier. The facilitator is the mechanic and the group is the machine.

Hosting, on the other hand, is a practice of leading from within a living system. It’s like entering the machine, becoming a part of it and changing it by being there. In a living system you cannot enter the field without affecting the field.

I think the distinction is important, and I'm very much drawn to the hosting model.

The notion of operating from within a living system resonates strongly. This relates fairly directly to the stuff Senge and Co have to say about presencing.

Here's some more of Chris' wisdom:

From a complexity stand point, facilitation is seen as a reductionist activity, reducing complexity to simple problems with simple outcomes and a simple path for getting there. Facilitators help groups to seek answers and end states. Hosting from within the field however is more aligned with the nature of complex systems, where there are no answers, but instead only choices to make around the next question, and the paths where those questions lead us. There are no end states. The idea of a healthy community is a vector, not a point. It is a direction to move, not something that can be acheived and then crossed off the list.

The only slight caution I have is the labelling as I'd quite like to use the word facilitation to describe what Chris calls hosting. Hosting as a word comes with its own potential for confusion.

This comes to mind if I think of a point I often like to make. I'm not David Dimbleby. (Celebrated UK anchorman type). This is not televison where the "host" hogs the mike, interrupts experts and purports to represent the audience. I think groups often have that notion of my job and sometimes get a lot of anxious eye contact during awkward silences where it seems that people want me to say something. On the whole, I want them to say it themselves. I don't see myself as the pivot around which the group moves.

Dave Snowden picks up indirectly on the ideas Chris raises and talks about another important issue.

In effect most of the material I read in articles and the blogosphere, and most the presentations I witness at conferences fit within the dominant atomistic assumptions of anglo saxon tradition: the individual is seen as primary, with communities understood as aggregations of individual self-interest and needs.

I think Chris's notion of hosting embodies a less atomistic and more connected worldview; we're not separate from the group, we are part of it.

Connecting

For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment "being productive"

Jeremy Burton via Euan and Joining Dots.

Micro

I like Hugh's latest post on The Global Microbrand. My favourite bit:

6. Again, I'll say it one more time: Blogging is just the tip of the Cluetrain iceberg. And it wasn't the tip that sunk the Titanic.

My own take on microbranding is to realise that small stuff matters. Too many brands try to bash us over the head with their fixed propositions, values statements, idealised lifestyles etc etc. (And we're just their customers, think what it's like for people who work there.)

Sitting on my personal pixel here on the bloggy tip of the iceberg, I'd also say it's an exchange. I try to influence you but you get to influence me. No-one's in control here; there is no master plan and no grand narrative. When Hugh does a wine bottle with totally different sorts of label front and back, he broke the rules of the wine business and most marketing departments. Except that those rules never existed in the real world, only in our heads. He didn't do it knowing what the impact would be, it was just an experiment. It's all an experiment.

See what happens

I've just read Dave Snowden's summary about managing complex problems. It reminds me of the principles of Improv. These are fresh in my mind from the Banff conference last week.

In Banff, there were quite a few discussions about the notion of failure. In improv, one of the biggest impediments to performance is the fear of failure - or getting distracted by perceptions of not doing well. We tried different ways to address this: should we celebrate it? fail more often? or maybe not use the word failure at all? Dave talks about safe:fail.

Anyway, the gist of this approach to complex systems - whether that's being on stage in a scene or tackling some horrendous organisational issue - is to try stuff and see what happens. It's an approach puts less emphasis on prediction or efforts to map the past onto an emerging future. "See what happens", keeps our options open. We can stay away from too rigidly predicting success or failure: those predictions tend to close our eyes to the multiple ripples from our stone in the pond. (I think of the old joke about the surgeon saying, "The operation was a complete success, although unfortunately the patient died.) See what happens is an invitation to be open to the detail of what emerges.

It's interesting to try small interventions and see a ripple effect. Sometimes when coaching, I'm tempted to give the client several ideas on what to do differently. I generally now try one thing and see what happens. For instance, if we're practicing a difficult conversation with a colleague, I might say, Try that again, only this time focus attention on how tense or relaxed your shoulders are. Very often, all sorts of aspects of the performance change.

There is some judgement about what I choose for the focus of attention: it's generally based on some intuition or experience of something which will improve the performance. I find people often do better at difficult challenges when they're less tense and not trying so hard. This closely relates to the ideas of The Inner Game, blogged the other day. After this experiment, we can reflect on what changed and see what we want to support and what we'd like to lose. That's the spirit of Dave's approach of "probing and sensing".

Open Space creates possibility

Rob Paterson linked me to this video. It's feedback from participants in an Open Space hosted by WOSU in Columbus, Ohio.

It's a pretty good advert for Open Space and its ability to really engage people around their passions.

Categories or relationships

Stuart Henshall reports a Dave Snowden keynote. Very clever stuff though I did get lost in one or two places.

What sticks with me most is Dave's question: What's the odd one out from chicken, cow and grass. Here in the West most of us would say grass but in much of the world they'd say chicken. That's because we're trained to filter by categories; elsewhere they filter for relationships. Dave then elaborates on how this profoundly affects they way organisations are run (favouring boxes and isolationism). But the world's changing, and it's relationships we need to focus on now. That's my shorthand version but see what you make of it.

Deepening friendships

One of the great things about Banff was the chance to deepen friendships with folks I know almost entirely from blogging.

Patti Digh gave a terrific presentation with her partner, David Robinson. It was very experiential and it's hard to do it justice in words. They succeeded in bringing a great deal of depth to the issue of diversity and allowed a group of people to create a deep sense of connectedness in a remarkably simple and direct way.

Andrew Rixon was also a delight to meet in person, even though he failed to persuade me to take juggling lessons with him.

Andrew came at the invitation of Viv McWaters who facilitated the Open Space on the last day. I learnt a lot watching Viv who really gets the principle of "one less thing". I really enjoyed her in warrior facilitator mode, dealing with a question about apparent confusion about spaces with the riposte, "Work it out for yourselves." It may sound harsh here, but actually, that's how empowerment works sometimes: smart people rarely need the rescues we're tempted to offer them.

Less is more

I'm blogging this from Calgary Airport on my way home from Banff.

During Open Space at the AIN conference, I started a conversation about the shadow side of improv, suggesting we sit in a circle and use a talking stick. The idea of the stick is to assure that only one person talks at a time - if you don't have the stick, you just listen.

I also pointed out the option of holding the stick and not talking, if you wanted to hold a silence. Someone made good use of that and it was a good experience. At first, I could feel my own sense of anxiety; but as I gave it my attention I realised that this anxiety was not being caused by the silence, but being highlighted by it. Sitting with it for a while, I felt able to slow my racing thoughts down and get a better sense of connection to others. In the silence, I could hear their breathing and mine, again building a sense of a deeper, more primal connection.

I find extraordinary things happen in response to the apparently simple use of a talking stick. Once people can speak with the comfort of knowing they won't be interrupted, and also with the strong sense that they are really being listened to, the whole quality of speech changes. It becomes more heartfelt, and people seem to choose to show greater vulnerability. You soon learn surprising things about your fellow participants, and realise how superficial are some of your previous judgements about them.

It was also satisfying to see a group easily holding strong emotions and charged conflicts among participants. In the spirit of open space, I confirmed that although I was opening the conversation, I was not facilitating it. I invited us all to jointly hold the space, and we did - more elegantly than I would have done had I tried to somehow take charge.

This was another occasion where no mention was made about a confidentiality agreement; it seems to me that a more sophisticated kind of trust often emerges when it's not laboured.

I come away from this particular experience, and also from the event in general, reinforced in my desire for minimalism in facilitation and intervention. Greater stuff seems to happen when you get out of the way.

Games

Here in Banff at the Applied Improv conference, it's no surprise my mind is on games. I enjoyed The Inner Game of Work on the flight over, which has a great introduction by Peter Block, who says this:

We worry about the "transfer" of learning: how to take the learning and bring it "back" into the workplace. The Inner Game resolves the tension between learning and doing by showing us that they are both part of a bigger whole.

This thought was echoed by folks from the Banff Centre who suggest it's foolish to think people learn leadership on courses: they really learn it in their everyday lives. How they learn it may merit more reflection.

There've been plenty of engaging sessions, but for me the highlight has been the impromptu game of Werewolf played by 30 of us last night. (It's basically the same game as Mafia, described here, with a few name changes.) What's so intriguing is how animated and committed the players become... suggesting that in an apparently pointless activity, something fundamentally important is going on... to do with our innate desire to learn and our preoccupations with relationships and status. We may think our business meetings are about the formal agenda, but I suspect we're really playing a version of Werewolf without really acknowledging it.

I'm sure I could explain this better, but the morning session is about to start...

Inner game?

I'm blogging this from Terminal 3 at Heathrow, on my way to Calgary (then by road to Banff). I'm looking forward to a few days hanging around with improv folks and enjoying not being in Britain for a bit.

Heathrow is busy as ever but I think they've improved the speed of security a lot, there's certainly no shortage of people offering plastic bags for my toothpaste.

I'm taking The Inner Game of Work to read on the flight. I've heard interesting things about it and want to find out for myself. I'm secretly hoping to find some games=work type rationalisation for my current intense addiction to World of Warcraft. Yeah, good luck with that one, eh?

Excusing torture and trusting authority

I agree with David Weinberger, when he says American

democracy has hit a new low, and perhaps a dangerous turning point, when the Democrats can't muster enough votes among Democrats to reject an attorney general candidate who is ok with torture.

David also cites Andrew Sullivan's superb analysis, from which I've picked out this key argument.

The point is not a subjective judgment about the intentions of the torturers. It is not about whether Cheney and Bush can be trusted. It is about whether any individual can be trusted with such power. In a republic based on the rule of law, the intentions of the torturers - whether good or bad - are utterly irrelevant. In the West, we assume that the intentions of our rulers are likely to be evil. That's what distinguishes the Anglo-American tradition from those who trust individuals to govern them, rather than those who trust the law to allow us to govern ourselves. The point is that no person in the United States should ever have the power to detain and torture another person without due process. Once you make an exception for one man, the rule of law is over. The Decider may decide out of his own benevolence not to torture again. But he can still torture. And the knowledge that he can, and the knowledge that he was never stopped, and the knowledge that he was able to distort the plain meaning of the law to mean whatever he wants it to mean is a precedent that is staggeringly dangerous.

Just knowing Bush has that power is an obvious inhibition on freedom. The torture itself is appalling; the threat of torture is - I think - where the poison really spreads to society as a whole.

Fish, meet Barrel

Matt "No Relation" Moore spotted Tom Davenport's outburst in HBR, Where's the "Working" in Social Networking?

Tom says

A popular current myth is that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are thriving with adults and companies because of their business applications... ...But for what purpose do they use them? As far as I can tell, it’s almost always social.

Tom makes his bipolar view of the world clear at the end:

Fun is fun, work is work. “Hooking up” does not have a business meaning.

Matt shoots some of the fish in Tom's barrel, so I might as well join in.

I think it's fairly daft to suggest that work is not an inherently social activity for most people. Some people seem to enjoy work, shockingly suggesting they may occasionally be having fun doing it.

And I get a lot of my work through my social networks. But maybe Tom only works for people he's never met or socialised with?