NYC

I'm in New York and getting the usual buzz from being here. Going to investigate Birdbath this afternoon, and have some free time over the weekend if anyone reading this is in the area and feeling sociable...

Inspiration from odd places

I enjoyed Viv's post describing how she uses video clips to inspire participants in her workshops to think differently about facilitation. She says she was partly inspired by the Phoric podcasts I do with Rob, which was kind of her.

Electronic concrete

Jon Husband has an excellent post on work design. Here's a taster:

companies the world over have expended tens, scores, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on large integrated systems that have required the design of long, large and tightly designed work processes ... followed by the pouring of *electronic concrete* over these work processes, in the form of the large integrated systems.

I think that processes are good and useful, leading to the standardization of work and the delivery of increased product and service quality in many instances.

I also think that standardization and the fitting of work process to the requirements of integrated information systems have also led to significant rigidities in the face of boisterous, interacting, demanding individual human beings ... rendering all too many of us *prisoners* of some companies' business processes, whether we are workers who struggle with an internal-to-the-company boa constrictor of exceptions and constraints, or customers who are left to fend with a system that won't let their needs or desires be met in appropriate or sensible ways.

Hugh and the Rabbi 6

The other day, Hugh, Pinny, Mark and I recorded another of our podcasts. It's very much in our tradition of non-linear conversation.

Sorry, no show notes for this one - I've not found time to do them this time.

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SpotRunner is an online agency selling prefab adverts for $500. You take your pick from a set of standard clips to stitch together your campaign.

This Slate video captures it all rather well.

I thought the generic political ads were funny - they're almost a parody, they're that close to the "real thing".

A few minutes browsing the ads at SpotRunner is a weird experience, I'm not sure if it's funny or grim. Are ads now this cheap? Or were they always this empty?

Hap tip: Andrew Sullivan.

In praise of fragments...

Yesterday I said this on twitter:

now suffering reading fatigue. i think this may be a chronic, rather than acute, illness

It's the sort of half-idea I often tweet out. But I have noticed that I find it harder and harder to persist with non-fiction books, essays and longer blog posts.

ksfranck tweeted this back:

A bad case of internet induced ADD? viz. Nick Carr: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

I've seen mention of that article before, and this prompted to read it (well, some of it I skimmed). It's full of interesting ideas about how our thinking can be shaped by technology. I'm guessing a sub-editor gave it the title - "Is google making us stupid?" because Carr's prose is much less dogmatic than that.

The core of his argument seems to be that we're in danger of outsourcing our thinking to systems that operate mechanically:

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

I'm the first to lament treating humans in mechanistic ways but there's a big difference between a system called Google, and a system in which human beings use Google. Google may not handle ambiguity, but I think we can.

Carr is also concerned about our shortening attention spans (this is where my tweet comes in, I guess). But I would disagree that this means we are becoming more computer-like in our thinking. I'd argue that we are inherently conversational, relational thinkers and that the net allows us to work more in a way that suits us better - finding one idea, being provoked to look for related ideas elsewhere, and joining them together.

It was older technology and distribution that gave us the more linear experience of reading long books and essays. In that world, it made sense to read to the end as there was less other stuff available. So maybe we just associated persistence with long books with intelligence, accidentally lending status to verbosity?

Carr is very concerned about contemplation. Well I'm hugely in favour of reflection and contemplation, but I don't think I'd equate contemplation with the willingness to read long books. In fact, one of things that makes me contemplate is the collision of ideas. For instance, when ksfrank tweeted me back yesterday, I was prompted to reflect quite a lot. Hence this post. I think I get more of that kind of collision in online discussion than I do reading most books.

I think the linear is overrated, and there's no inherent merit in long books and articles.

(I'm also reminded of The Alphabet versus the Goddess which I blogged about last year. The author argues that literacy itself promoted linear, abstract predominantly masculine thinking at the expense of more holistic, intuitve feminine thinking. He goes on to propose that tv and internet are shifting us back to more imagistic thinking, reversing that bias.)

Crime and wickedness

I'm disappointed by this new report on Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime, as reported here by the beeb.

The report notes that although there's pretty good evidence that crime is falling, the public fear that it is rising. Among the ideas floated to deal with this problem are devices to make punishment more visible, such as putting those on community service orders into orange jumpsuits or sending round leaflets advertising their convictions.

There seems to be no real sense of the complexity of this issue. The report reads like so many documents I see flying round organisations, with chunks of data interspersed with questionable argument and the odd provocative anecdote.

Have they thought for a moment about this puzzling, apparently inverse, relationship between crime and the fear of crime? Have they considered the fact that more obvious punishment may well only make the perception that there's a lot of crime increase?

I fear we're also seeing pandering here to the questionable notion that shame is going to be an effective way to deter crime. Have the authors of this report thought about how ASBO's have become badges of achievement for some groups?

The document seems full of confident sounding proposals but very little curiosity or respect for uncertainty. What a pity they can't propose some small scale experiments to see what impact some of their ideas have.

This strikes me as a classic case of what Jeff Conklin calls "solving" a wicked problem.

You simply construct a problem definition that obscures the wicked nature of the problem and then apply linear methods to solving it.

But if the government want a confident sounding proposal (and I fear this is really all they're after) then I propose locking the author of this report in a room with Dave Snowden for a day. She might learn something. Jumpsuit optional.

Following the follower

Regular readers will know I'm a big fan of improv and one of my early teachers was Gary Schwartz. You're not likely to meet a more passionate character, and you certainly will never encounter a performer who can mime being a French poodle quite so remarkably.

Gary was a student of Viola Spolin, one of the pioneers of improv theatre, and I first met him when he shared some of the games she used to train actors. These often revolve around the paradoxical idea of following the follower. For instance, people form pairs of A and B. A starts making some simple physical movements. B has to mirror A - following along, moving their arms, legs etc to keep up with A. Periodically, the teacher calls switch - which means the roles are reversed and A has to follow B.

The interesting bit is when the teacher calls switch so rapidly that neither A nor B remember who is leading and who is following. But they find they are still moving. And the direction now is just to follow the follower.

There are variations where two people have to make up a story watching each others faces and attempting to speak simultaneously, matching syllable for syllable.

Sounds crazy? You should try it.

Gary's just written a provocative blog post comparing the notion of following-the-follower with the somewhat more revered improv principle of "Yes, And". He argues - and I think I agree with him - that Yes, And may often be a great idea but can actually trap us in logical, next-steps, storytelling mode.

I think the follow-the-follower games are probably weirder to play but might actually be more powerful at creating spontaneous collaboration. When I've used them, some people come away with their thinking about leadership somewhat disrupted.

Travels

I'm expecting to be in New York at the end of next week and free to meet up over the weekend of 28/9 June, if anyone's interested...

2gether08

Looks like 2goether08 is coming together well. There are quite a few sessions I'll want to see, including the ones on "Data for Good", and "run your own innovation camp". I'm intrigued by this too: "Semantic (web) + Social (Problems) = Solutions (innovation)". There's a couple of familiar sounding panels I'm probably going to avoid, as well!

Good to see they're offering 1 day passes as well. Hope to see you there, in my case probably on the second day as I expect to be too jetlagged on the first!

Straws in the wind

I spent the morning at Web 2.0 Strategies which turned out quite interesting.

I was at the equivalent conference two years ago and things have clearly changed a lot since then. Then, it felt like corporates were staring at things like Blogs anxiously and often barely concealing their anxiety. Today, it like the room was full of converts to the cause, more concerned with swapping war stories on how to speed things up.

The morning panel was great (and that's the first time I've ever really enjoyed anything in panel format). Euan chaired a chat with three people at the sharp end of implementing social media in organisations. A few snippets confirmed my sense of the new normal.

Christophe Langlois revealed that he prefers to use LinkedIn as his directory for contacts inside his bank (Lloyds TSB). He said they needed an internal version of LinkedIn but I agreed with Euan who said, in effect, why bother?

Jeremy Gould is an early adopter within the Ministry of Justice. It was good to hear him explain that he's a dabbler and that his dabbling with Web 2.0 stuff, coupled with other enthusiasts, had driven adoption so far. Not a top-down initiative.

And Salvatore Reina of PwC suggested that partners there were being triggered to get into social media by their children!

Again, it feels to me that the technology and the enthusiasm to use it, is stronger outside the formal structures of organisations.

Who does 2.0 to who?

Euan has a pithy post arguing Most Companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail. He lists 8 possible reasons.

The final one is: It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals. Yeah, I rather feel that Enterprise 2.0 may be something that happens to companies, rather than something they do to themselves...

Mistakes

Dave Snowden cites this great story from a commenter to his earlier post on the perils of six sigma.

When I worked at IBM we were asked (in 1990) to 6Sigma our CICS development team. The gurus told us that the next release of CICS could only have 6 bugs (or APARs as we called them). This was ridiculous, but luckily a colleague ran a report and showed that IBM program products had extremely strong positive correlation of profitability with APAR rate. That is, the products with the most APARs were the most profitable. This is because great products, like CICS, get used for lots of things we didn't think of and for which we didn't test. Mediocre products only get used for what the tests cover. Bad products don't get used at all and so generate almost no bugs.

The being:doing gap

Viv has just written about cause and effect thinking, partly inspired by Shawn's sketch I just blogged about.

I’ve been pondering the need to be seen to be DOING, the need to produce OUTPUTS or PRODUCTS and the dilemma of the intrinsic worth of simply BEING with others and having conversations.

This.. situation often arises when I talk about or facilitate open space meetings. “It was good to talk, to have some time to explore, to slow down, BUT what did we achieve?” I wonder why talking, exploring and slowing down are not generally seen as achievements in their own right?

Thanks, Viv, I so agree and haven't quite managed to express it so directly. And, by the way, if we look at all this so-called DOING, a lot of it turns out be just "action theatre" anyway.

Cynefin Framework, down under

Shawn from Anecdote plays with a new web app called Sketchcast. He uses it to explain Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework. The result is something rather brilliant, I think:

This is a great bit of co-creation from which I learnt a lot. Dave's model is pretty awesome and Shawn's iteration helped me understand it better; the use of human drawing softens the edges of the diagram - and that fuzziness itself is very significant. It reflects a key theme that the model addresses, and it also makes the model less intimidating to the learner.

It also allows Shawn to put his own work - based around narrative - in context in a way that shifts my understanding of it. Thanks, Shawn, great job!

Marketing 0.0?

Years ago, Alan Moore showed me a brilliant clip of Bill Hicks ripping Marketing a new one. I just found it on YouTube:

(Warning: Not Work Safe!)

I used this in my first post on a new collaborative blog: Marketing 2.0. In it I wonder, if instead of promoting a rebrand of marketing, we actually embrace its demise...

There is no point

I'm quite interested in the idea of things being pointless. This fabulous bit of co-creation (South Park meets Alan Watts) delights me.

So many meetings start out with anxious lists of what must be completed by the end. I can understand the anxiety but it risks killing the energy that comes from being present to the process with enthusiasm and an openness to possibility. (Chris Corrigan had some good things to say about seeing past endings in this podcast.)

Hat tip: Euan.

Hugh, Rabbi and the Tribe

Hugh, Pinny and I invited Ben Keene of Tribe Wanted onto our podcast.

I heard Ben give a talk in London and found his story inspiring. We chatted to him for 30 minutes about his experience setting up a tribe on a pacific island, with an extended online community. It's another great example of the sort of collaboration the web makes possible, and it's also a fabulous example of how its about high touch as well as high tech.

Enjoy.

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Show Notes

You know the drill, these are rough, check against delivery, do not chew the woodwork etc.

0.00 Intros

1.00 Ben recaps the story of Tribe Wanted. Could we take an online community and give it a real world headquarters on a desert island.

2.00 How the tribal chief shook hands with Ben and turned down Survivor

3.00 Working to build a sustainable village in Fiji, where people visit for 2 weeks but sustain their membership online.

4.00 Johnnie: reading the book, it seems the idea emerged from a conversation over a beer in Manchester. How did this crazy idea happen? Ben: the idea itself was so powerful. Creating a real world community could be done; building an online community could be done; so the leap of faith was in putting the two together.

5.55 Hugh: Tourism has made visiting exotic places fairly ordinary, so this idea of participating creates more sense of adventure than just sipping cocktails on a beach. As marketing gets more sophisticated, the search for meaning gets deeper.

6.40 Ben: The range of motives of community members ranges from wanting to lie on a beach to a real search for meaning.

7.40 Pinny: Draws analogy to the shtetl in Poland or Kibbutz in Israel. What is the role of the chief in this?

8.15 Ben on the ideas of leadership in Fiji. Part of the social experiment was to create an online democracy, which - amongs other things - elects the tribe leader each month. Leaders have ranged from 19 to 60. They have to really engage with the local community, this isn't another reality TV show.

10.05 Pinny: how are people reacting to this idea. Ben answers: inital response to the idea when we threw it out was pretty big - but a lot of people said it would never work.

11.30 Hugh talks about England's native scepticism. Ben explains how the US reacted more positively.

12.55 Hugh asks how Ben met the island chief. Ben tells how someone on the island had foretold that the world would come to the island. They'd actually anticipated this, and put the island up for lease to help the prophecy come true.

14.30 Pinny asks about sustainability. (Will you end it and then do the book tour?)

15.20 Ben answers and talks about the future. The beginning of a much bigger story, extending the lease on the island and other ways to build on the idea.

16.45 Johnnie: sense that although Ben has led the project, in many ways it feels like the story itself has led Ben. Johnnie prompts Ben to tell the story of how explained his idea to the islanders. 17.30 Ben tells the story [it's worth listening to, I'm not writing it up, but it involves the local narcotic, David Beckham and the best use of a Venn diagram I'm ever likely to hear.]

20.15 Johnnie asks Ben to talk about how the community, in its very early days, coped with a major island fire. Baptism of fire indeed. There was a classic difference in the way Fijians and non-Fijians responded. The locals made tea and waited for the fire to burn itself out; some of the visitors tried to take action. How this represented different ideas of what community meant - and also notions of leadership.

22.40 Johnnie asks about how the island itself is a teacher; Ben talks about how the islanders celebrate mother's day and frame the island itself as a mother.

23.20 Pinny asks about the spiritual/religious side, how does that work out? Ben: pretty much everyone that comes seems in tune with what we're doing. The Fijians live a fairly traditional, Christian way of life. Things seem to pan out ok.

25.15 Pinny asks whether people stay engaged. Ben says this is the biggest challenge, including adapting to the fast changing technology eg things like Facebook.

27.25 Ben talks about the power of ideas, and trying to build a life around one.

28.00 Johnnie wraps up.

The power outside the company

David Weinberger points to buyitlikeyoumeanit. This site aims to aggregate people's ratings of companies on a variety of measures. You then get to set up your own scoring system based on what matters to you. They're going to create cellphone access so you can use their service live as you shop.

I don't know if this particular site will work, but the trend it has jumped on feels significant. As I've noted before, the best technology (a combination of hardware, software and - crucially - user enthusiasm) is now outside companies, not inside.

More blancmange leveraging

My last post was partly about disconnection and I just found a terrific riff on the same theme. Nick Cohen writes about a truly criminal approach to policing. It's a good counterblast to managerialism and captures a lot of the frustration I feel at how our government fails us. Dave Snowden (hat tip) picked out this quote as his highlight.

The first perverse consequence was that although the public expected the police to keep the peace, an officer who successfully stopped trouble was not rewarded because no trouble meant no arrests. More seriously, the police played the Home Office game by going for trivial offenders rather than serious criminals. Solving the case of a child who steals a Mars bar earned as many points as solving a murder. It made more sense to arrest rowdy children for 'harassing a tree' than to begin the hard work of tackling a potentially homicidal teenage gang.

2gether08

My friend Steve Moore is planning an event called 2gether08 for July 2 and 3. He's billing it as a festival rather than an event.

Steve's an ubernetworker, and a man for whom the phrase "force of nature" could have been invented. (I've also facilitated quite a few of the events he's organised in the past). He sees a big disconnect among

those who are dedicated to making, well to put it simply, the world a better place (policy makers, campaigners, social entrepreneurs, teachers etc); the brilliant creatives I encounter in television and advertising and the pioneering digital technologists, the bloggers, the entrepreneurs and investors; practical visionaries one and all.

But these worlds hardly ever collide

I think that sense of frustration and disconnection is very interesting. I'm aware of a lot of blancmange leveraging going on - in many different forms depending on one's status in the pecking order. What's exciting about the emergence of peer-to-peer models of engagement is that that pecking order gets disrupted... and maybe this leads to more anxiety and sense of disconnection, as well as a sense that so much more is possible.

Looking at the site, Steve and his team are trying to figure out how to organise a peer-to-peer event (a nice paradox). They're inviting suggestions, proposals and contributions. They're planning a mix of the conventional (setpiece speeches from important people) and the less structured. I know where I'd want to gravitate.

My two cents would be to treat plenary time as golden and precious. If you are going to ask all your participants to sit together you are assembling a huge number of brains. Such events have the potential to be awesome, even transcendent, but more often are mediocre or dire. I've been through far too many crappy speeches from supposedly interesting people and a much smaller number of really good ones. The big mistake I see is that organisers often identify the problem very loudly (we don't want to be boring!) and most speakers appear to understand (I promise to be exciting!) but we end up with same-old, same-old. Another disconnect. (I see a pattern emerging...)

I've also been to a few plenaries where we've opted out of the setpieces and shot for something more challenging, more peer-to-peer, where everyone sits in a circle and we use a quaker meeting house format. Very few organisers are willing to risk it.

I know for certain that Steve is going to pull together a lot of very interesting and interested people for this event. I'm going to give some more thought to how I might contribute... and if you're in London in early July, I'd encourage you to do so too!