Everyone's a trainer

Dave Snowden is blogging a KM conference - the posts are an entertaining mix of the speakers ideas with Dave's sceptical sidenotes.

I enjoyed reading about Eva Lo, who is Knowledge Manager at the Langham Place Hotel. I was a bit surprised that a Hotel could have a Knowledge Manager, but it probably connects with the surprise that they don't have a training department. Instead, their idea is that Everyone is a Trainer.

. Training projects are sourced from the person in the hotel who does it best. Example of folding table napkins; turns out a junior waitress does it best so she does the training. Computer training is done by young people, bed sheet folding by the best chambermaid (sorry chamber attendant). I can see that this would work, and would encourage empowerment through action rather than statement.

I like the idea too, though I do know some people are good at what they do but have no talent for conveying it effectively to anyone else!

Commitment ceremonies

When facilitating, I'm keen to avoid what I call commitment ceremonies.

There's often pressure as workshops/awaydays near a close for some process that gets people to agree on what actions need to happen and who's going to be responsible for them. There's a certain amount of anxiety attached to this, often to do with having something to present to powers-that-be outside the room, to prove that the event hasn't just been a talking-shop. And it certainly confirms to a neat and tidy notion of meetings following a linear path that ends in certainty and completion.

The trouble is, in the real world, these action planning sessions often feel pretty deadly and inauthentic. They tend to assume the following:

- That action is what is needed now, as opposed to say further reflection
- That the people in the room are uniquely empowered to act, when frequently they aren't
- That everyone's nicely aligned and all are agreed on what should happen

Often, people will go along with these commitment ceremonies not because they're wildly enthused but because saying "yes" now means the ordeal will end soon. They know how these things work: what's agreed here may have only a passing resemblance to what will actually happen in the real world anyway.

What you can end up with is pseudo-agreements that mean boxes get ticked for productivity, but it's not very convincing. On the upside, it can be quite polite and conflicts may, sometimes, be avoided - for now.

Of course sometimes there is lots of agreement and a well focussed exercise in co-ordinating future actions is just the thing. But often this is just done ritualistically.

Here's what I tend to find more satisfying in a lot of contexts. Instead of focussing on actions, I try to get groups to be clear what point they have reached, in a way that means everyone speaks and gets heard. So we might have a round where everyone gets a chance to check in, perhaps responding to a very open question that let's them choose to report what they've learnt, what they're concerned about, what they see happening next... without a sense that only "action" is to be the focus.

What often happens is the groups gets a few surprises in this process, realising that a lot has been going on for people - and that people in the room are often responding in quite different ways: some are reflective, some inspired, some anxious. Quite often, it turns out the people have already agreed actions anyway, and these sound much more convincing than those you get from an action ritual.

It seems to me a more human and believable way to end a meeting. I think that's because it acknowledges the complexity and richness of people's experience instead of squashing it into boxes. It may not look so tidy or fit a spreadsheet, but it feels more real.

Model fatigue

I'm suffering from model fatigue.

It comes from attending too many talks/presentations/lectures in which experts explain the flaws of a prevailing model (often quite well), only to present some shiny new model as an alternative. Which to my sceptical eyes often looks just as limiting in its way as the one it's supposed to replace.

I'm especially wary when the various diagrams of boxes, polygons, arrows and sqiggly lines are supposed to describe some idealised notion of how we humans go about our business.

It's my repeated experience that life just isn't like this. It's way more complex - and so more challenging and interesting - than any of these models suggest.

But once someone has a model to promote, all that complexity gets filtered to fit the model.

I sometimes hear the argument that having a model, however faulty, gives people something to rally round. But I don't think people are quite that sheep like. In reality they'll be doing a variety of different things, such as:

- zealously advocating the new model but unconsciously adapting/reinterpreting it
- faking compliance while carrying on as before if they possibly can
- feeling pissed off and generating yet another equally simplistic version of reality

As I've argued before, I think the Python boys nail it better than I ever can.

Mystery

Some wise words from Richard Oliver:

Creativity is often described as a problem-solving activity. The problem with problem-solving is that it focuses on what is rather than what could be. If we want to do things differently rather than better we have to learn to search for the capabilities in any situation. Instead of identifying problems we will have to open ourselves to potentials. Instead of a world of fixed unchanging categories we will have to learn to see the world as more fluid, more open to change, and, ultimately, more mysterious.

Richard also links to this post by Ian Worley, which contains this thought, among others:

at the end of the day...creativity is about our relationship with the world...and we engage the world through a the reciprocal process of making (or asserting things into the world) and seeing how the world responds (assessing) and then thinking about a way to improve or tune the response to what we want as a result. This is the essential feedback loop between thinking and making...and it is the basis for all thought and creativity...and ultimately the underpinning of craft (or quality). Without making there can be no thinking...and without thinking there can be no making.

And yet, people often stop themselves from engaging in this most essential process because they are afraid of the uncertainty of it...they do not know what to make or think about. But a painting is not thought through before it is painted...a painting is thought through AS it is painted. And it begins with a mark...any mark. The same is true with writing or music or any other type of creative activity. One cannot wait to begin only when one knows what one is doing. One has to simply start...somewhere...and respond. Each action leads to the next...and as the work progresses...it begins to define what it needs to be as much as what it is because you come to know more about what you are trying to achieve by doing it. This is not to say that you cannot begin with an idea...but rather to say that the idea of a starting point should not be confused with the ending. Begin at the beginning...but let the end unfold through the feedback of making and thinking.

Child's play?

I found this site very thought-provoking: Give us back our game. It argues that kids' football has been spoiled by the over-active participation of adults.

Today's children learn from the grown-ups . Without the freedom of the streets, their early experiences of football are organised, supervised and coached. They have no real say in what happens, and they don't have time to develop and learn.

The problem areas are:

* No longer the children's game - it is controlled by adults
* The same children on the bench or omitted every game
* Coaches and parents screaming from the touchlines
* Winning before fun and development
* Not enough free play where children can solve their own problems
* Children are not encouraged to express themselves
* Children no longer learn about the spirit of the game for themselves

There are few things more toxic to learning than overzealous people who think they know best and who don't separate their own experience from those they are supervising.

I think it was Donald Winnicott who distinguished between parents who liked to regulate their children - basically telling them what to do - and those who facilitated, focussing on creating a safe space and on engaging with what the child was interested in. He illustrated this with his observations of how a parent and child engaged with as mundane an object as a spatula.

Hat tip: Tom Watson's tweet

Another take on the recession

Andrew Sullivan's compilation of different readers' views of the recession continues.

I'm an American in my early 20s, the ink on my Ivy League diploma not yet dry, plunging into my first job. I'm writing to say that I am doing just fine in the recession. My company is hiring, the economy is still growing at an impressive clip, and the hope and optimism that tomorrow will be even better than today is palpable.

I can say this because I didn't follow my fellow college grads to Wall Street in search of money that was so abundant and so certain that it seemed too good to be true (as it turned out to be). While my friends went to Manhattan; I went to Mumbai...

More inequality

I liked Simon Jenkins' article challenging the way the Government has handled the Baby P affair.

If you totally screw up a bank, a Labour minister will grant you a pension of £700,000 for life. If you screw up a social services department, a Labour minister will sack you without compensation. It has taken a decade for the government to mimic Animal Farm. As we peer in through the windows of Downing Street, we can look "from pig to man and from man to pig ... but already it is impossible to say which was which". Some are more equal than others. Politician and banker have become one...

From his time at the Treasury, Balls is used to dealing with bankers and ermine. As a cabinet minister he and his colleagues - Lord Myners, Lord Mandelson, Lord Turner and Lady Vadera - dispense stupefying sums in subsidy to banks. When he contemplates people like Shoesmith, her very name an echo of Labour's past, he must feel like Macmillan on finding himself at a Tory conference in Llandudno: "Good God, are there no dukes around here."

Hat tip: Alan Moore

Inequality

I was startled, and glad, to read that leading Tory thinker Dave Willetts thinks this:

The evidence has become stronger and stronger that inequality matters. That gradual accretion of the data shows that it is where you are relative to other people which matters enormously. I think that is an issue that my party had not registered, and that has now come home.

I found this quote in a post at Next Left by Sunder Katwala. That post also links to this Guardian editorial about a new book, The Spirit Level.

It is not the drop of a few points off GDP which ensures the slump will soon give rise to anxiety and crime. All that means is that average incomes will return to where they were a year or two ago. The real damage is done by the pain being unfairly shared, shouldered overwhelmingly by the minority who lose their jobs, their livelihood and their status. Wilkinson and Pickett look far and wide - from the effect of the caste system on Hindu children's exams to the tendency of subordinate monkeys to self-medicate with cocaine - to elucidate why it is that lives lived at the bottom of the pile are so often brutish and short.

The Guardian also has this pdf visualising the correlations between inequality and a wide array of social ills. I was depressed to see that while the Thatcher-Major years coincided with a big rise in inequality, a decade of New Labour has done nothing to reverse it.

For me, one of the provocative manifestations of Labour's failure is that major reports on our future, such as the recent ones on Digital Britain and Child Protection, are produced by Lords. I'm also struck by how many of the dark figures in corruption scandals in Westminster and the City are Lords or Knights. These are titles from feudal times. They give rise to phrases like "lording it over me".

I think our honours system, which seems to have been co-opted by Labour instead of reversed, is a toxic indicator of a much deeper malaise.

Call me a techno-optimist, but I think one of the most profound benefits of the net is that it starts to undermine this kind of rigid hierarchy. I've been quipping lately that Lord Carter's idea of peer-to-peer networking is having a chat with Lord Mandelson in the back of the ministerial limo. In reality, I think peer-to-peer is going to overwhelm any Canute-like urges in government, and the sooner the better.

Revoultions are chaotic

A tweet from Jeff Jarvis led me to Clay Shirky's post: Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable.

Clay looks back to Gutenberg and says that while we understand a lot about the world before printing, and even more about the world after, it's even more interesting to look at the transition: a significant period of time when things were in flux, the old model broken but the new one(s) not yet established. That's what we're going through now. He's focussing on newspapers but the parallels cover lots of other businesses.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given novelty isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Play matters

Here's a great TED talk by Stuart Brown on the serious importance of play. The opening story about how a polar bear and husky opt for play instead of predation is pretty amazing. And I loved these lines: "nothing lights up the brain like play" and "the opposite of play is not work, it's depression".

Hat tip David Smith's daily feed

Kindness

Chris Corrigan describes some insights from First Nations elders in Canada. Here's one:

I asked him about the Ojibway word “ogiimaw” which is often translated as “chief” or “boss.” I asked Ralph what he thought the word must have meant before contact, when the concept of “chief” was basically unknown. He said that word relates to the word ogiimatik which is the poplar tree, the tree that is considered the kindest of trees. Poplars are gentle, flexible, quiet and kind and are also good medicine. He said this idea of kindness is what is under the word “ogiimaw” and that influencing people through kindness is the kind of leadership that the word implies. This is very different from the kinds of leadership implied by the word “chief” which is a title now won by competition in a band election, a process that seems to engineer kindness right out of the equation. This is a great legacy of colonization - the lowering of kindness from a high leadership art to a naive sentimentality.

The white economy

I was reading how the Black Economy is booming as the banks are unable to provide finance to business.

It just made me wonder if we should also acknowledge a White Economy, which is all the great stuff that gets done without money changing hands. Stuff that quite often just stops when money gets introduced to it.

Innov, already?

Here's a suggested experiment for managers: forget about innovation.

Lots of people will be horrified at this suggestion, believing it's vital for senior managers to drive innovation in organisations.

In my experience, pressure from on high to come up with ideas usually just stops people from expressing them.

That's partly because of the corrosive effects of power, which seems to lead to all manner of uncomfortable forms of compliance and deference, as well documented by Bob Sutton here: It isn't just a myth, power turns people into assholes.

In his ChangeThis manifesto, Matthew May desciribes an experiment showing how senior people unconsciously squash the ideas of those with lower status. (Short version blogged here)

(Coincidentally, Richard Oliver has been recalling the benefits of management by absence.)

It's also because I think the demand for innovation tends to reflect a scarcity model of the world, as if there aren't nearly enough ideas out there. I'd argue there's no shortage of ideas, but a serious, if all too human tendency, not to notice them. What's more, that scarcity mindset contributes to often futile "brainstorming" games in which loads of ideas get generated that no-one actually cares about.

Instead, why not talk a little about the things you notice and care about, and listen a lot for what other people notice and care about. Once people talk about the concrete things of their experience, it's actually pretty natural for ideas for improvement to emerge.

But all this high status talk about driving innovation probably just makes people nervous and simply more reluctant to talk about real needs and concerns.

And my advice to anyone with the job title "Head of Innovation" would be: get a new job title.

Hamlet as Facebook update

One of the funniest things I've read in a while: Hamlet - Facebook News Feed Edition

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

- - - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers

Hat tip JP

Life Inc

I like the sound of Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Life Inc.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to live in a world where the market has insinuated itself into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials entreat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy.

Corporatism tells the story of how we got here, how this value system now perpetuates itself and, most importantly, how we can reconnect with the real and get ourselves out of this mess.

Hacking education

There's a good post by Fred Wilson: Hacking Education (continued). Here's a couple of snippets but I urge you to read it all.

The education system we currently have was built to train the industrial worker. As we move to an information driven society it is high time to question everything about the process by which we educate our society. That process and the systems that underlie it will look very different by the time our children's children are in school....

Learning is bottom up and education is top down. We'll have more learning and less education in the future

Hat tip: David Smith's awesome daily feed.

Ooh, little bit of politics there.

Jon Husband spotted Billy Bragg's piece in the Guardian.

Bragg suggests that our current economic crisis can be traced back to Mrs Thatcher's defeat of the miners and the ideology this established. It's worth reading in full, and (as Jon suggests) checking out the comments for a variety of endorsements and challenges.

I was in my first year at Uni when Thatcher came to power, and all of my adult life has been lived in a system where her economic viewpoint seems to have prevailed: at its worst, extreme individualism, greed-is-good, and the equation of economic failure with personal character flaws. During that time, I've certainly played the game myself but never really felt like I belonged in this system.

As the comments to Bragg's article bring out, it's not as if what she replaced was all that virtuous either.. but I think the huge downsides of what Oliver James calls Selfish Capitalism are now becoming very clear.

And, like a lot of others, I do feel pretty angry with the "leaders" both in government and business who've helped get us into this mess. I particularly loathe the notion of a system of financial rewards that seems to be based a series of absurd assumptions:

1. There are very few people talented enough to run large organisations.

2. Unlike the talented people that I meet day-to-day (mere mortals), they get so little pleasure from using their talent that they must be compensated with astronomical amounts of money.

3. That when the organisations they head are successful, it's really because of their leadership, and not the efforts of many, as well as a huge number of completely random variables.

4. Conversely, when those organisations fail, this situation is completely reversed.

5. That giving a tiny minority of people huge amounts of money is going to make for a happier society in which people feel willing to pull together for the common good.

While I'm on the soapbox, I'm also angry that our economic system treats natural resources as if they are abundant when the looming truth is that they are actually getting very scarce. Meanwhile we treat ideas as if they are very scarce and must be protected with patents and copyrights - whereas in truth ideas are naturally abundant, and the sharing of them is one of most innate social characteristics of mankind.

However, I also believe that we're in this together, and that if we go far down the path of scapegoating individuals I'm just going to perpetuate the model I want to challenge. Pointing the finger at everyone but themselves is one of things I find most infuriating about politicians and bankers. And although I think anger is a good thing and very energising, I also believe that the challenge we face in this crisis is how we channel that anger for peaceful rather than violent change. So I'll probably take a pass on blaming Mrs T (and a certain Mr B) for all this, because I think they are really emergent properties of a more complex system.

For me, all this starts with a measure of looking within, and recognising how I have bought into, and continue in some ways to buy into, the system I feel like denouncing. One thing I realise I've done that contributes to the problem is to skirt round politics on my blog. I think it's time for that to stop.

And if you're also into a little bit of politics, you might want to join me and a few others in We20.

Or Oz?

Then again, perhaps this is a metaphor for our times. Perhaps those impressive technocrats aren't either as smart as they think... or as powerful - or even evil - as we imagine?

Update: Rob continues in the same vein. I'm pretty sure it was Rob who put the Oz metaphor in my mind in the first place, quite a while back.

Casablanca

Just rambling around Youtube tonight, I came upon this wonderful scene from Casablanca.

Nothing is more terrifying to established power than courageous authenticity. A message for our times, I think.

Another view...

Andrew Sullivan has a series of posts based on his readers' varying perspectives on the recession. This one resonated for me. Here's a snippet:

Though I am still worried about providing for my child in this dismal economy, I am more confident than ever that I made the right decision when I abandoned my safe career to taste the broader glories of life. Because, as is now so overwhelmingly clear, nothing is ever truly safe.

If this recession serves as anything, hopefully it will be a reminder that you should never compromise your ambitions in favor of the chimera of financial security. If you are inevitably going to end up in the poorhouse, you might as well get there by chasing the wildest of your dreams.

Thank god for satire

A few weeks ago, some of us were wondering if Jon Stewart could maintain his success after his favourite comic target left office.

It looks like we needn't have worried. Here's his hilarious smackdown of CNBC and its laughable coverage of the financial crisis.

Over at the Huffpo, Will Bunch makes some interesting points about what the battered newsrooms could learn from Stewart about good journalism.

Over here, we don't have Stewart or Colbert, but at least we have Private Eye. Its "Supreme Leader" version of Gordon Brown gets better each fortnight.

Panic and response

I like Bruce Sterling's speech at Webstock.

Market failures have blown holes in civil society. The Greenhouse Effect is a market failure. The American health system is a market failure — and most other people’s health systems don’t make much commercial sense. Education is a loss leader and the university thing is a mess.

Income disparities are insane. The banker aristocracy is in hysterical depression. Housing is in wreckage; the market has given us white-collar homeless and a million empty buildings...

But you know, I’m not scared by any of this. I regret the suffering, I know it’s big trouble — but it promises massive change and a massive change was inevitable. The way we ran the world was wrong.

I’ve never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I’m bored with the deceit. I’m tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I’m disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I’m up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.

The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.

Hat tip:Jon Husband

Cigarette breaks and innovation

I thought this event looked quite interesting when it cost £150 to get in. Now that the good people at NESTA have made it free, it's even more so. It's a day long workshop on March 20th. Deciphering trust: How cigarette breaks, gossip and other informal networks influence your capacity to innovate

I've long felt that most useful innovation happens well outside the hygienic confines of official processes.

A day of noticing

Next month in Dublin, I'm running a workshop with Kay Scorah.

We've called it our Day of Noticing and it's on April 3rd. Here's the blurb (pdf) Among other things, it says:

We think far too many of these sorts of workshops set out tantalising shopping lists of outcomes – but as a result deny the most important factor of all: what can happen spontaneously when a group of people get together to share learning and experience.

We will encourage you to achieve a new level of attention and noticing. We’ve come to believe that developing this kind of awareness is central to our own practice when working with individuals and groups. Attention to yourself and others, to your immediate environment, to your inner voice, to what others are saying and doing. We will share tools and games that we have ourselves found useful, and that we have used with thousands of groups over decades of experience.

Kay will be bringing her own special perspective, including years of Yoga practice and I'll doing my best to manage my less-than-stellar sense of mind-body connectedness in her presence.

I think we're both aiming for a day that gets the difference between solemn and serious.

Kay's handling bookings for this one, in determinedly Web 1.0-or-less kind of way: email kay (at) havemorefun.com or phone her on (+353) 872455020. We're suggesting 200 Euros as the rate for the day but we're open to offers from anyone outside a corporate womb and feeling the chill winds etc etc.

We've also slated 26 June for running a different workshop with the same description in London. That'll be more Web 2.0 in bookings, once I've sorted out eventbrite.

Tough questions

Rob's got an excellent and provocative post on the state of the world. Here's his opening:

I find what is going on with our financial system right now a bit like watching a parent die of a terminal illness. We all lie to each other until it is too late to speak the truth or to ask the right questions.

I have a sense that we're in a kind of "phony war" phase at the moment, with a lot more hard truths to be addressed. And I think Rob's close to the mark here too:

If we will never go back to a binge society, what will we all do? Our whole society has been based on the binge - only a tiny fraction of us worked on real things. Those that did grow food, look after children, know how to make real things - did poorly. The rest of us who were employed on unreal things did better.

Relearning the fundamentals

I love improv, partly because every time I take part in an improv game, I learn things. And very often, that's a relearning of some fundamentals.

On Friday night, Remy Bertrand hosted the monthly Applied Improv Network gathering in London. Towards the end we played a game I've done before a few times. A small team has to play people in an ad agency. You have to invent and then perform a TV ad for a product suggested by the audience.

The main twist is that in devising the idea, you must accept and applaud any and every idea put forward by your fellow players. You don't get to evaluate or criticise or knock ideas, you have to accept them and celebrate.

This is a big twist for most of us, but it can mean you get an ad out surprisingly fast.

The fascinating thing here is not this rule, but seeing how you and the other players respond to it.

First, it turns out to be very difficult to stick to it. I've played the game a few times but I quickly forget how strong is the desire to take control of the scene, immediately evaluate the emerging idea and - unconsciously - block offer people's offers. Whilst deluding yourself that you're taking care of getting the outcome, you actually negate the whole notion of collective creativity.

Both playing the scene and watching others, it struck me how I and others often failed to observe the direction to celebrate each idea. What often happens is instead of celebrating, we instead try to top it. So instead of pausing to accept and acknowledge a suggestion like "Let's set it in Germany!" we just rush to "And let's wear lederhosen". Building ideas is fine, but it's fascinating how easy it is to fail to really acknowledge the offer.

Watching the scenes being created, it becomes really striking that what on one level might be an energetic brainstorm is, on another, a fight for dominance and control.

For me, this sparked some more thinking about why I'm wary of so much brainstorming. Because in championing ideas, I think it allows us to ignore relationships. But relationships are definitely there, and often they're being kind of trashed. The game I'm describing is - like all improv games - apparently silly... but in its silliness reveals some really fundamental things about how we're playing our lives.

After a few rounds, I became more aware of my inner control freak and tried much less hard. And (re)discovered that what had been a tense game suddenly became a whole let easier, and funnier.

My mantra for this year is "Notice more, change less"; less as an idea for others to follow and more for me to apply myself. Friday night was, amongst other things, a timely reminder of how easy it is to move to changing instead of noticing.