Heroes of leadership?

I agree with Rob and Earl most of the time, and especially lately. Greed is not good.

The evaluation hamburger...

.. is new one on me. It's a euphemism for the famous "feedback sandwich". I prefer the third option which you can find in this engaging post on the Castleton blog. It's a riff on the book, Everything's an Offer, reviewed here a few days ago.

Us Now

I'm just back from a screening of Us Now, courtesy of NESTA. It's a one hour documentary, exploring the question: In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power? It doesn't so much answer it as invite the audience to think about it, provoked by some interesting examples of how folks are using the web (and some lower-tech methods) to collaborate as never before.

The scene that particularly engaged me tonight was of an experiment in participative democracy in Morecambe. The community gathered in a school hall to vote on competing proposals for investing £20,000. Voting was done on sheets of paper, not through fancy technology. The camera lingered on a guy wanting to improve his churchyard and a group of model railway buffs. The latter won no money, but their reflections on the process were quite interesting: they were not sore losers, though disappointed they respected the process. That little scene points to what feels like an important truth about the merits of transparency and participation - there are some deeper wins that people can appreciate beyond getting what they ostensibly want.

Disclosure: I'm hopelessly biassed as I've been working with both NESTA and Thinkpublic (where Ivo works when not being a film director). So you'll just have to see the film for yourself, I guess.

Python's other other operation

As regular readers know, I am a massive Monty Python fan. And having caught up with this (via Geoff Jones), now even more so!

Valuing networks

Roland Harwood at NESTA has written a really excellent post: Connecting dots and valuing networks. He manages to articulate several things I passionately believe and throws in some useful maths to boot. I recommend reading it all, but here's a few highlights.

Roland reviews three recent events. He comments

In each case many people were very excited by the events themselves (myself included) and the opportunities that the events and networks presented. However in each case there was also a significant minority asking the valid question ‘well what was the point of that?’. To be more precise, what I think they meant by this was ‘what real transactions occurred on the day?’ or ‘what commercial/social value was created?’. However I think this is possibly the right question at the wrong time, and misses the immediate value of networking...

To try to assess the value of networks or events such as Amplified, V-Jam or Learning Dreams based on the transactions that occurred on a particular day is to miss the point and value of networking. There are a variety of ways we can connect the dot, people and networks and I would argue that we must strive to maintain diversity and distribution in the networks we create, and foster, so as not to further entrench existing silos.

Amen.

Roland lifts this chart from this paper:

.. and suggests we've got too many networks modelled on A and B and not enough of C.

The problem is, c) has lots of supposedly random links that are often considered redundant and costly.

Those links are only redundant and costly viewed through a particular lens. And nature is, of couse, awash with redundancy which turns out to be rather a good thing in terms of resilience.

On a related matter (as Hannibal Lecter put it), I participated in two of the events Roland refers to. In fact, I co-hosted one. Both used open space/barcamp formats, which meant that conversations were self-organising and fluid. As is sometimes the case, this pleased some folks and annoyed a few others - who tended to go into what was the value? mode.

The other day, Stephen Fry sparked a flurry of Oscar Wilde quotations on twitter. It led me to this one:

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

This struck me as a useful bit of wisdom went taking part in open space events. First, it's really important if you want to talk about something to put it up for discussion without concern for it's popularity as a topic. And second, be wary of criticising how others choose to engage: are you in effect demanding they conform to your personal view of what's important, as if yours is the only one?

Disclosure: NESTA are a much appreciated client of mine.

Blocking and blind spots

Rob Poynton's book is also very good on the improv notion of acceptance vs blocking. To put it at it's simplest, improvisers are trained to interpret what the other players say or do as offers, which they can either block or accept. Mostly, training tries to encourage more acceptance than blocking. You've probably taken part in that exercise where you try to brainstorm ideas in two different ways. In the first, you swap ideas with a partner who has to respond to all offers with buts and in the second with yes, and (or in my preferred version, what l like about your idea is... and).

Of course,there is sometimes tremendous importance in improv (and life) in saying no and blocking. The discussions provoked about the merits of finding the right balance can be endless.

Here's the point Rob makes that really resonates for me.

.. blocks are assymetric. The emotional force of a block is directed at the person receiving, which means that when you are blocked, you feel it sorely, whereas when you block someone else, you might not even notice. Thus we tend to remember the blocks we receive, not the ones we give, which creates a blind spot.

Ain't that the truth? Any facilitator will tell you the struggle they have not to focus on the small number of critical responses they get. The Statlers and Waldorfs crash into our emotional brains and it's hard to deal with them. We want to call them difficult people.

Rob's point about blind spots is really interesting - it accounts for an awful lot of pain in disputes where each party is the martyr to the other's unconscionable behaviour. Because the real-life Statlers and Waldorfs may not even realise they're blocking, or the emotional consequences of it.

What makes people laugh at improv?

I'm currently reading Everything's an Offer, by Rob Poynton. He is probably the most articulate thinker about the value of improvisation in organisations. His book is a real treat.

When I met Rob a few years ago, he said something that lodged deeply in my mind. He repeats in in his book (my emphasis):

People laugh at improvisation not because it is funny, per se, but because it is joyful. If you go to an improv show and watch the audience rather than the players, what you will see is that they aren't laughing at jokes.

He cites the classic improv game of One Word Story, where a group of players have to make up a coherent story where each takes in turn to add just one word. As Rob explains, it might go like this:

You - should - always - surf - near - the... There is a long pause until finally, the last player says ocean. You wouldn't expect this to be funny and yet the audience goes berserk... People often laugh loudest at something that seems obvious, even banal, which might seem strange until you realise that it is the way the improvisers work together that people really respond to.

So much of what fuels interaction is not the cleverness of what people say, but their willingness and ability to genuinely play off/with each other. I've been to way too many meetings where everyone is being so-very-expert and they often suck.

Even though Rob told me this a long time ago, I still feel excited by this observation. Organisations are absolutely rife with demands for deliverables, for measurable and concrete results but take this too far and you easily miss the gigantic fuel that really keeps the whole operation alive - the interplay between participants.

I love using Improv games in my work, and it's often astounding how energising they can be, catalysing at least some of what may be otherwise unused potential for engagement. There's a very deep lesson in Rob's astute observation.