links for 2010-05-31

• Information Osmosis and the case against Chief Culture Officer - MisEntropy
  Interesting push back to Grant McCracken's idea of a Chief Culture Officer... and some interesting ideas about information flow in hierarchy. Money quote: "I am inclined to be skeptical of any idea that introduces a) a new job title and b) an expensive kludge to stand in for the natural state of things."

links for 2010-05-30

• FTC protects journalism’s past « BuzzMachine
  Jeff Jarvis presents a textbook case of the establishment circling the wagons... the only comfort being that it does so mostly ineffectually

Show me the change

Geoff Brown has just posted a multimedia summary of the Show Me the Change conference from earlier this month. I think it gives a pretty good flavour of what we got up to and how the open space format opened up discussions.

More on brainstorming's limits

Keith Sawyer reports some more research on the limits of brainstorming. In short, you get better results if you ask participants to work alone before working together.

And then there's this:

In the brainstorming group, ideas were more likely to build off of other people’s ideas. In fact, that’s one of the standard guidelines that are given to a brainstorming group, to listen and build on other’s ideas. However, the researchers found that ideas that built on other ideas were, on average, of lower quality.

Interesting, though as always I think we're in a grey territory when we try to come up with supposedly objective assessments of the quality of ideas. Nevertheless, I think many of the "builds" in traditional brainstorming are a bit half-hearted so the result is not too surprising.

And this research fits neatly with the link I posted earlier on the value of solitude.

links for 2010-05-28

• The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People | Zen Habits
  The No 1 Habit turns out to be solitude, backed up by quotes from celebrated creative types. Makes sense to me. No 2 habit is participation. I like that too!
  (tags: creativity)

links for 2010-05-27

• Harold Jarche » Let’s talk about work
  "In a networked, knowledge-based economy where initiative, creativity and passion trump intellect, diligence and obedience; being “at” work 8 hours a day makes little sense. The Internet makes “time at work”, an antiquated notion. It also makes many of our traditional management and personnel policies irrelevant. The recession has only amplified this trend"

Supporting community

I'm not one for lists, but I liked Meg Wheatley’s 12 principles for supporting healthy community, posted by Chris Corrigan. This challenge to allow for conversation is great:

Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.

And this is good too:

Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.” How do we act when that happens? Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?

links for 2010-05-26

• Robert Paterson's Weblog: How we got fat
  Rob unearths a remarkable bit of old propaganda for the fizzy drink business in America.
• Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees - Research - Harvard Business Review
  Apparently, just the subliminal thought of a bossy significant other makes us less effective
  (tags: management)
• Crowdsourcing Moves Beyond Open Innovation | Working Knowledge ®
  Review of some newer approaches to crowdsourcing projects "Both Trada and CloudCrowd eschew the winner-take-all model of contest-oriented crowdsourcing projects. Instead, they offer well-defined incremental pay for incremental results."
  (tags: crowdsourcing innovation)

Workshop news

Just an update on workshops I'm playing with at the moment...

Crumbs!

I've been co-creating this with my friend Viv. We tried it out in raw form in Melbourne and then ran it with 25 or so enthusiastic people in Sydney earlier this month. (Kudos to Matt for organising it brilliantly.) It explores a few ideas around creativity, challenging the reverence for big ideas in favour of finding delight in the "smaller" details that make up the human experience.

It builds on the thinking in the "Notice More, Change Less" days I ran last year with Kay Scorah and mixes some chunks of content (eg Dave Snowden's thinking around complexity and Keith Sawyer's terrific research on group creativity) with exercises drawn from improv, and some simple but fascinating awareness exercises.

I really like the way this one has worked so far. Plans are afoot to offer it in Copenhagen and London at some point over the next few months, probably in a two-day format.

Difficult conversations

I've been thinking a lot about difficult conversations. The ones we dread holding. The price we pay for avoiding them. And the unfortunate consequences of overthinking them. (See this post for one of my favourite stories on that point.)

I'm thinking of offering a workshop with this theme over the summer, probably somewhere nice in Oxford or Cambridge with an overnight stay. It most certainly will not be offering a simplistic, "seven steps" "solution" to the issue, but a real opportunity for participants to explore their own challenging conversations and experiment with new ways of having them.

Ideas or caring?

As an experiment, for the last day I've been running a search for the #innovation hashtag in my Twitter app, Tweetdeck. It generates a lot of interesting material.

And this morning it strikes me, and not for the first time: there is no shortage of ideas out there. Somewhere, perhaps on the fringes, someone has likely already had the idea you may think you're looking for.

Ideas are not the problem.

Getting clear about what we really care about so we actually want to act on an idea - that may be more of a challenge.

Just throwing it out there.

links for 2010-05-25

• Open source innovation on the cutting edge | Open Source - InfoWorld
  "Think open source doesn’t innovate? Here are seven projects exploring exciting new directions in computing -- for free"
  (tags: innovation opensource)
• The Emerging Market In Health Care Innovation - Forbes.com
  "Many of the most compelling innovations we studied come not from resource-rich developed countries but from emerging markets. Two factors help explain why. First, necessity breeds innovation; in the absence of adequate health care, existing providers and entrepreneurs must improvise and innovate. Second, because of weaknesses in the infrastructure, institutions and resources of emerging markets, entrepreneurs face fewer constraints"
  (tags: innovation health)

Empathy and innovation

Tim Kastelle has a good post about Empathy and Innovation. I'm fond of talking about "relationships before ideas" and Tim seems to be in similar territory.

One of the supposed challenges of innovation is getting ideas to spread and Tim argues that empathy is pretty key to that, especially if you're into Mark's Herd worldview.

He also points out that not all innovation is good. This shouldn't need saying but innovation-bores often seem to separate innovation out as inherently wonderful and detached from the rest of life. Empathy might have some part to play in separating good from bad - and in connecting innovation to our lives and purposes.

Tim links empathic innovation to the blurring of boundaries between companies and their customers, another good point.

I think if we had more conversations about what we really care about, we might find innovation happens pretty much spontaneously.

Purpose

Another terrific RSA video: Dan Pink on what really motivates us. (I blogged more on this here.) This is the tip of an iceberg of evidence... so you have to ask: why do so many of our organisations have such a massive hierarchy of financial incentives? And what is this costing us as a society in lost productivity, purpose and meaning?

Click here if you can't see the embedded video.

Hat tips: Rob and Viv

Open space shock

I like Viv's comment on the challenge of Open Space:

We are so used to being told what to do, where to go, and when, that when faced with a self-organising system, we sometimes doubt our own ability to respond.

links for 2010-05-22

• The Diaspora Project - Only Dead Fish
  "The Diaspora Project is self-described as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" and is on a mission to decentralise the social web and put users back in control of their personal data."
  (tags: crowdsourcing socialmedia)

The benefits of having a "bad" meeting

Earlier this month I helped facilitate the Show Me The Change conference in Melbourne. We mostly used an Open Space format, with some added opening activities and the fun of playback theatre as part of the closing.

One of the participants, Ellen Regos, has written the story of her personal experience, blogged here. It's worth reading in full.

I really like its honesty, in particular about her frustration for much of the event. The more I work, the more I want to encourage people not to have a good time if they're not having a good time and get away from the insane notion that somehow everyone should be aligned, having the same experience and (especially) having a great time. Learning is non-linear and it's just stupid to imagine it should happen painlessly and on some predetermined schedule.

Keith Johnstone, one of the pioneers of improv, is (I hear) fond of telling students on his courses to blame him if they're not learning. This is genius: it completely legitimises frustration and provides a useful channel for participants to expend it... and it creates space for him to make lots of mistakes. It's a vain facilitator who colludes with the fantasy that he or she will get everyone to have a great time, and Ellen does us a great service by pointing out our shortcomings and the limits of the format, as well as clearly identifying her own self-doubts.

I think it would be good to start more meetings with the idea that it's actually ok to have a crappy time and achieve nothing - to provide an antidote to the tedious pressure to be positive and productive and make mostly fake commitments to action at the end. If we don't really embrace the possibility of failure, we may actually be killing off the space for success.

In the end, Ellen gets something really satisfying from her experience, in part because she's willing to embrace her frustration along the way. She seems to really get the simple principles of Open Space and this only underlines the importance of facilitators embodying them and then getting the hell out of the way. Out of the way of participants experimenting, having frustrations and epiphanies and making whatever meaning they want to.

Film financing crowdsourced

I liked this: Buyacredit.com. Three British teenagers crowdsource the funding of a film of a little know Jules Verne novel.

Hat tip: Neil Perkin's recent slideshare.

Re-examining the familiar

I reread something I wrote back in 2006 about Ellen Langer's work on mindful learning. She makes this point:

When people overlearn a task so that they can perform it by rote, the individual steps that make up the skill come together into larger and larger units. As a consequence, the smaller components of the activity are essentially lost, yet it is by adjusting and varying these pieces that we can improve our performance.

It's not just rote learning that's to blame here: I think any task with which become familiar tends to get chunked by the brain for perfectly understandable reasons. And it's sometimes really good to give fresh attention to the smaller components if we're looking for change.

As I said back then, it's one reason I get wary of the cult of big ideas. It's also one of the reasons I created the Crumbs! workshop: trying to find the new in the detail of the familiar is an under-rated behaviour; we don't always need high-octane "brainstorming" to improve our world.

Hat tip to David Gurteen's newsletter for prompting me to revisit Ellen Langer. (Noticing and following breadcrumb trails is another aspect of creativity...)

Own goals

I enjoyed this Harvard Working Knowledge paper: Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting. It's an engaging and welcome counterblast to much conventional BS about SMART goals etc.

Here's the authors' summary of their argument.

- The harmful side effects of goal setting are far more serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged.

- Goal setting harms organizations in systematic and predictable ways.

- The use of goal setting can degrade employee performance, shift focus away from important but non-specified goals, harm interpersonal relationships, corrode organizational culture, and motivate risky and unethical behaviors.

- In many situations, the damaging effects of goal setting outweigh its benefits.

- Managers should ask specific questions to ascertain whether the harmful effects of goal setting outweigh the potential benefits.

The chapter and verse is pretty interesting. One highlight is the suggestion that the stretch goal of creating a car "under 2000 pounds and under $2,000" is what led to the Ford Pinto. They also reckon the lack of taxis on rainy days can be ascribed to drivers hitting their daily goal early because business is good... and then heading home.

I also agree with their suggestion that goals can inhibit learning and collaboration. At the Show Me the Change conference earlier this month we had an interesting discussion about how performance targets often encouraged programme directors not to pass on interesting but non-conformist learning to funders because it risked losing them money.

This was an interesting point too:

Goal setting can become problematic when the same goal is applied to many different people. Given the variability of performance on any given task, any standard goal set for a group of people will vary in difficulty for individual members; thus, the goal will simultaneously be too easy for some and too difficult for others.

They suggest in complex environments it may be better to set learning goals rather than performance goals - a tip that sometimes helps people find ways to enjoy improv games, which I think are great examples of complex systems. (By the way, I increastingly think pretty much any system involving human beings is going to be complex if you pay enough attention to it.)

Hat tip: This tweet from Roland Harwood

"There is no empathy in heaven"

That's one of the snappy lines from this 10 min animated version of Jeremy Rifkin's talk at the RSA: The Empathic Civilisation.I liked his linking of empathy with reality. (Reminds me of Dave Snowden's distinction between naturalistic and idealistic worldviews.)

Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgement of death and the celebration of life and rooting for each other to flourish and be. It's based on our frailties and imperfections.

And (around 8m45s) there's a remarkable suggestion that every one of us are descendants of a specific mating pair in the grasslands of Africa, a modern riff on the Adam and Eve story. Whoa.

(Click here if you can't see the video embedded.)

Hat tip: Viv.

links for 2010-05-20

• Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Working On Stuff That Matters - WSTM
  Hmm, there's a bit of a theme to today's links eh?
• The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care « how to save the world
  "First, perhaps instead of asking people we’ve just met what they “do” (usually “for a living”), we should ask them what they care about. What keeps them awake at night. What they would die for. And likewise when others ask us what we “do” we should deflect the question and instead tell them what we really care about. If there’s an obvious disconnect between what we/they do and what we/they care about, that in itself should be the basis for an interesting and soul-searching conversation"

links for 2010-05-17

• How Intellectual Property Is Making Us Dumb | newmatilda.com
• Creative confidence
  "The journeys that we take students of all ages on just about always entail helping people confront and overcome their discomfort with trying to solve unstructured problems (that the faculty have not already solved -- and in most cases -- don't know how to solve). When the d.school process works right, that confidence means that, even when people aren't sure what methods to use, they have the energy and will to keep pushing forward, to be undaunted when ideas don't work, to keep trying new ideas"
  (tags: creativity education)

links for 2010-05-16

• Leaked memo reveals what Whitehall really thinks of its new masters - Telegraph
  Some of the foolishness that inevitably surrounds hierarchy is made explicit here
  (tags: politics status hierarchy)

links for 2010-05-15

• The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything - opinion - 10 May 2010 - New Scientist
  "Ever since the discovery of parity violation in the weak interaction over 50 years ago, experiments in particle physics have shown us that our hopes for perfection are just that - hopes. Symmetries are violated left and right; in nature, unlike in John Keats's famous poem, beauty isn't always truth."

Playing on the road

I've been on the road (in the air) for about 4 weeks now and will soon be heading back home. Most of the time I've been working with Viv McWaters in a variety of cities, and she's had some good reflections on our experience: much of what we did was improvised and seriously playful. Again and again I saw how much there is to learn from apparently simple, superficially trivial games.

I think it's Stuart Brown who said the opposite of play is not work, but depression. So often we confuse the merely solemn with the truly serious, dismiss playful open processes in favour of rigid rituals and fail to notice how this diminishes our creativity and true productivity.

This trip has given me lots of opportunities to opt for playful learning and I'm glad to have seized a lot of them.

links for 2010-05-12

• Ernst Fehr: How I found what's wrong with economics - opinion - 04 May 2010 - New Scientist
• Stalemate: PR and PR, Ice Cream, Bananas and Fudge « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
  (tags: democracy ge2010 media politics)
• Andrey Ternovskiy’s Web site, Chatroulette : The New Yorker
  "[Ternovskiy] sees school—and college—as a waste of time. “The last three years at school, I haven’t done anything,” he says. “I just can’t make myself. There’s so much interesting stuff in the world, and I have to sit there with textbooks?”"
  (tags: socialmedia technology culture education)

Kindergarten kids beat MBAs

Tom Wujek's TED talk explores how business training limits creative thinking. (Click here if embedded video isn't showing.)

Hat tips: Rob Paterson and Screw Work, Let's Play

Surprise

Last week I helped to host an Open Space in Melbourne, alongside Chris Corrigan, Viv McWaters, Geoff Brown and Anne Pattillo. This was the Show Me The Change conference, and a stonking list of conversation topics emerged.

Chris took the opportunity to add "Be Prepared to be Surprised" to the list of guiding principles for Open Space. This brings back a fond memory for me of the largest OS I've yet to run, several years ago now in Washington.

We had around 250 people in the room and for various reasons we were running a bit late. I had got to the end of my introductions to Open Space, explained all the principles, the marketplace etc and reached the juicy bit where you get to say,portentously, "the space is open". At this point you leave the circle open and wait for the tide of conversation offers to pour in. That's what's supposed to happen.

Instead, someone opened the doors to the room and everyone started to leave. It seemed as though my offer had been taken as a cue for a toilet break and everyone streamed out. I panicked inside - we were already running late, there weren't that many toilets available, this could take forever.... At this point, I noticed the sign I'd stuck up earlier on one of the pillars - the one that said "Be Prepared to be Surprised" - and started to laugh inside.

This was supposed to happen. The audience figured out a pee was needed before discussions, and intelligently organised to take one.

A while later we got under way, and the timing thing sorted itself out anyway. And we had an awesome meeting over the next two days.

links for 2010-05-03

• "Anatomy of an Epidemic": The hidden damage of psychiatric drugs ...
  "In the past few months, the perennial controversy over psychiatric drug use has been growing considerably more heated. A January study showed a negligible difference between antidepressants and placebos in treating all but the severest cases of depression. The study became the subject of a Newsweek cover story, and the value of psychiatric drugs has recently been debated in the pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times and Salon. Many doctors and patients fiercely defend psychiatric drugs and their ability to improve lives. But others claim their popularity is a warning sign of a dangerously over-medicated culture."
  (tags: health antidepressants)

links for 2010-05-01

• Energy drinks work as soon as they touch your tongue « Derren Brown Blog
  Strange and marvellous are the workings of the mind
• Predictably Irrational » Blog Archive » Power and Moral Hypocrisy
  More evidence of how power corrupts (via Harold Jarche)
  (tags: hierarchy power status)

Co-facilitating

I've just finished a great week co-facilitating a management meeting in Sri Lanka with my friend Viv McWaters. She's been blogging some of what we've experienced.

The theme of the event was how to operate in complex environments. We put in some theory, with a big nod to Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework but we kept the formal instructional element very light. (We're into facilitation, not training, after all). Much of the time we used Improv activities to give people live experiences of operating with others in complexity.

Improv games are often ridiculously simple at first sight, often provoking gales of laughter... but are also quite confronting. We get to see how much psychological luggage we bring to supposedly simple activities, and how it frequently messes with the success of the group. Improv puts players in a position where they powerfully influence group behaviour but have frustratingly little control. It's the land of unintended consequences.

This is probably my favourite way to work, and I enjoyed it all the more for working with a mate. That's partly because hosting improv is just as challenging as being a player, with regular reminders of the need to keep interventions light and avoid interfering too much. Several times, we relearnt that you can let the games do the teaching without laborious and often counter-productive coaching. Having a colleague to check in with made it easier to keep my owh control-freak tendencies in check.

I'm in Australia now, chilling out for a day or two before the next dollop of complexity in the shape of the Show Me The Change conference - where even more friends will be around.