links for 2010-07-31

• Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ.com
  "Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?" (The answer's yes, apparently!) via tweet from @weaverluke
• Download the cards - Design with Intent Toolkit
  A (free) collection of cards to prompt thinking around design.

Ground rules?

Lynn Walsh is not a fan of the ritual where a group is invited to agree a set of ground rules about behaviour at the start. She indicated this to a group by writing the word "Agreements" on a flip chart and then drawinga line through it.

At the end of the two days, when everyone was reflecting on their experiences of the workshop, someone said “I really liked how we didn’t have any rules on how we should behave. It felt like we were being treated as responsible adults”

I tend to agree, though as ever it depends on context. Agreeing rules, like any intervention, is a probe into a complex system and can have unexpected consequences.

For instance, in some groups, there's a confidentiality agreement at the start and that can make for a greater sense of safety. But in other contexts, I find that discussion at the start just increases anxiety: there's pressure now to come up with stuff worthy of such confidentiality pacts. And tacit assumptions about respecting others' privacy are sometimes undermined by making everything explicit. Often groups can easily agree guidelines and rules as they go along, as the need arises.

More network innovation...

Is this a sign of the times? Villagers set up ultra-cheap broadband. The village of Northlew were informed by BT that if they wanted broadband, they'd have to come up with £600k.

In the end, they formulated a £50k solution of their own and split the running costs between 150 households.

Innovation (and execution!) alive and well, at least outside legacy organisations...

Hat tip: Tweet from @JonAkwue

Abundant innovation

I know I bang on about this, but I keep running into examples of how abundant innovative thinking is, while large organisations and their advisers wring their hands about how hard it is.

A tweet from @thomascdaly led me to this page on Redesigning the Boarding Pass. Shedloads of creative thinking and prototyping for a better boarding pass. All generated without money changing hands.

I'd bet that several airlines have spent a lot of resources writing clever briefs and getting design gurus just to pitch for coming up with ideas like this.

Maybe there is no innovator's dilemma. Just a bureaucrat's dilemma: namely, how do I maintain my narrative of scarcity in the face of such wanton abundance?

Language

David Gurteen makes some interesting connections to my post a few weeks back on willpower and its limits.

This is the kind of research that is so important as it questions ways of thinking and working, so deeply entrenched that we take them for granted. For example, how many self-help books go on and on about the importance of clarifying and focusing on your objectives. Wouldn't it be tragic if this were actually counterproductive?

Pushing this particular philosophical envelope, maybe David Bohm was right that language deceives us about the true nature of reality.

links for 2010-07-27

• The FASTForward Blog » The market IS a conversation – Why Kotex is winning vs Old Spice: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary
  Rob Paterson explains the success of the Kotex campaign. It's much more about the user than the brand.

Social glue, served with elegance. For hire.

I liked this quote:

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” - Camille Pissarro

It's used by Lloyd Davis as an introduction to his pitch for work as a social artist.

If the title social artist puts you off a bit, then you might want to reflect again on the Pisarro quote. Lloyd is available to work one day a week with an organisation over the next six months, where he'll make all sorts of connections in his brilliantly under-stated manner.

Personally, I think this is a superb opportunity for any organisation that thinks it could stand some improvement in how its people relate to each other and connect. So instead of squandering a fortune on some fancy IT or grandiose consultancy, consider this more creative alternative.

If I were an organisation, I'd jump at the opportunity. Just saying.

What makes for happiness in a business culture?

Alek Kjerulf writes about business culture. A Dutch sociologist asseses several factors, including something called a Power Distance Index (how hierarchical) and Uncertainty Avoidance Index (how scared of ambiguity).

The Danes are low on hierarchy and can handle a lot of uncertainty, which apparently makes them happy. I like the sound of that.

It's all connected

Tim Kastelle passes on this rather nice Diderot quote, from the new book Superconnect:

Everything is linked together… beings are connected with each other by a chain of which… some parts are continuous, though in the greater number of points continuity escapes us… the art of the philosopher consists in adding new links to the separated parts, in order to reduce the distance between them as much as possible.

For me it's not so much about adding links as noticing that they're there.

I recall a conversation I had with Chris Corrigan, who was describing the home schooling community of Bowen Island. A guiding principle is to allow the students' learning to be driven by their own curiosity. Concerns about the curriculum being comprehensive are often resolved, he said (as I recall) because "everything is connected to everything". Thus a child who is fascinated by astronomy will start to learn maths because it serves his interest in understanding the cosmos.

I think a lot of my work is about noticing and valuing subtle connections that are already there but that we may be missing. When we take the time to notice all the small links that make up a chain of thought we gain new insights and choices. In groups, it's often useful to bring awareness to how physical things like how we're siting or moving impact significantly on how we're thinking. Small adjustments in one area have surprising consequences elsewhere.

links for 2010-07-22

• Browsing can be more important than searching « A Man With A Ph.D.
  Wise words on the value of serendipity from Richard Gayle

The danger of safety

Stephen Adshead has a nice guest post here: Rationalise like Ford or empathise like Toyota?. He looks at risk management and what happens when rational thinking runs up against us pesky humans. For example, and referencing Gladwell:

You would expect that better brakes made for safe driving. But that is exactly the opposite of what happened. A fleet of taxis – some with ABS, the rest left alone – were put under secret observation for three years. The result? Giving the taxi drivers ABS made them drive faster, make sharper turns and turned them into markedly inferior drivers.

Apparently, more pedestrians get in accidents at traffic crossings than elsewhere; childproof lids may lead to more child poisonings. The systems to make us safe may make us dangerously complacent.

He goes on to make some broader points about the hazards of risk management and its apparent burgoning popularity. Citing this Demos paper by Michael Power he says

Power argues that a great deal of risk management activity focuses on routine system errors and malfunctions – “it is as if organisational agents, faced with the task of inventing a management practice, have chosen a pragmatic path of collecting data which is collectable, rather than that which is necessarily relevant, and in this way it is a kind of displacement; the burden of managing unknowable risks, a Nick Leeson, is replaced by an easier task which can be successfully reported to seniors’ Systems and controls and other left-brain activities are important, but to be truly ‘risk intelligent’ you must also see the bigger picture.

And he ties this to Max Weber:

Max Weber argued many years ago that the logic of bureaucracy is the tendency to privilege procedural rationality (the rationality of rules) over substantive rationality (the rationality of ends). There is a temptation – in the face of uncertainty and risk everywhere – to increase the rules and the systems; to shape human behaviour by sheer bloody effort of will.

Yep, this is the trouble with managerialism: it focuses all efforts on the theatre of what can be made explicit, and sets us on course for institutions that exist, as Clay Shirky argues, to perpetuate the problems they were meant to solve.

At the level of meetings, I think it's a real challenge to get out of routine notions of efficiency and action theatre, to make sure we have space to step into things which are not certain, measurable or manageable, but may turn out to be more important.

links for 2010-07-21

• The Trouble With Meritocracy - Ross Douthat Blog - NYTimes.com
  "Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from every race and class and population, puts all of the best and brightest through the same educational conveyor belt, and comes out with a ruling class that’s cosmetically diverse but intellectually conformist, and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. "
• Breaking the Rules of Learning « Innovation Leadership Network
  In most contexts, we're used to seeing diminishing marginal returns - on investment of money or time. This post suggests that in a networked learning environment, learning may accelerate with time.

Facilitation Camp

I've just signed up for Facilitation Camp, London on 20/21 August. Two days of Open Space, very low cost, what's not to like?

Not trying too hard

Jocelyn Glei writes about What we can learn from babies. She talks about the kind of meditative state in which a particular kind of creative thinking can happen. Edison allegedly trained himself to spend time in the twilight zone between waking and sleeping. As she writes

These a-ha moments spring not from concerted effort, but rather from deep relaxation and fully open outlook that is unconscious of “adult” workaday concerns such as: timelines, cost constraints, client expectations, or any other kind of conventional or orthodox thinking. When insight does strike, it’s usually because we’ve been able to somehow shut out all of these petty concerns – by running, meditating, napping, etc. Once we are able to forget the anticipated outcome, we are freed up to explore the full range of creative solutions.

Makes sense to me. A lot of efforts at creative thinking seem to involve getting adrenalised, overstimulated and trying too hard.

Hat tip: tweet from eaonp

Interesting times...

Geoff Brown writes about Emerging Possibilities and Collaboration.

I am sensing a shift in the work that I do. A shift from being reactive to client offers, to a more proactive space. New ventures where collaboration with others, co-learning and creating opportunities for new types of work to emerge.

Later, he adds

The work phone has all but stopped ringing. The offers from traditional clients to work with me is at an all time low. On the flip side, the offers from friends and worldwide networks to work & play is at an all time high!

What I see happening in my work is that the distinctions between boxes like "friends", "colleagues", "rivals" and "clients" are getting fuzzier. These labels have their uses but can easily lead us into boxing human beings in ways that limit possibility.

Dealing with money is getting fuzzier too. For me, this is part of a transition that is in part about the web and in part a lifestage thing. A friend once suggested that as we get older, our focus in work shifts from achievement to meaning. I used to work in advertising and it paid pretty well, but over time I found the money wasn't enough to keep me motivated. Perhaps we all have a finite amount of mutton we're willing to dress up as lamb before we stop?

Lately I've been struck by the abundance of energy and ideas friends of mine can generate around projects they really care about, where there's little or no money in it for them. At the same time, I see so many examples of squillions squandered "incentivising" people in underwhelming corporate ventures.

Going a bit deeper

Allan Kaplan has written up his experience of a five-day facilitation for development professionals: Emerging out of Goethe: Conversation as a Form of Social Inquiry (pdf). He describes their struggle to beyond conventional thinking in their discussions, and the challenge to connect with their own part in the failings easily attribted to a malign "system".

It's not light reading, but there are times when I'm up for some deeper thought about what we're actually doing when we have a conversation. And it's nice to remember that philosophers like Goethe and Wittgenstein have something to offer us.

So many meetings fall into ritual and convention. The spectrum for most of us is from obviously boring to politely successful and occasionally exciting. The most memorable experiences for me are when groups get beyond that, establishing a sense of connection and insight that feels unusual. Often that sense is difficult to put into words - and the effort to do is easily mocked.

The process Kaplan describes includes a lot of reflection, including time alone for participants, and a very active engagement with what people are actually doing in the room. One of the themes is how when this is really experienced, the group can start to get beyond safe explanations of abstract problems out there, and come to experience their own part in "the system". It put me in mind of what the Senge crew say about presencing (I wrote about that here), and also what David Bohm wrote about dialogue. Kaplan describes the difficulties of using language in this context:

We were struggling to enter a living way of thinking, which might read the world as activity, as verb, through seeing directly the ‘coming-into-being’ of the supposedly discrete ‘things or products’. We were thus disabled when it came to seeing ‘active relationship’ as the primary ground for our observations, through which organisms are formed (and through which, therefore, we can begin to understand them). If we cannot foreground activity and background the product, then we are left with the husks of things, and our world is fragmented and little more than dust.

Hence the Goethe quote:

How difficult it is ... to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word

(And if that's not enough philosophy for one day, you could relate this to Heidegger's distinction between calculative and meditative thinking)

Hat tip: Dave Pollard

links for 2010-07-13

• LEWIS 360°: You are what you Tweet
  Another case study in how not to do social meeja. In this case, Gillian McKeith. "In her programme she insists on poking around in people’s faeces to determine their health. For Gillian, this could have been a digital number two that was flushed away and forgotten about, but instead Twitter has its giant Petri dish out and now we’re all having a good hard look at her online waste."

links for 2010-07-09

• The Science of Improv Part 1: How to Fail Magnificently | Impro•gramming
  This looks at how failure tends to lead us to over-react, leading us to sweeping avoidance of things that aren't really the cause. And suggests improv trains our brains to process failure differently.
• Let’s Fix the World! A 21st Century Parlour Game « Perfect Path
  Lloyd Davis takes the mickey out of over worthy meetings. He has a point.

links for 2010-07-08

• Embracing the Chaotic: Cynefin and Humanitarian Response « WanderLust
  How the differences between the chaotic, complex and complicated affect aid organisations dealing with disasters. A view from the really sharp end.

links for 2010-07-07

• Start Before You’re Ready | Steven Pressfield Online
  "Remember, the enemy is not the work. It’s not the difficulty of the work. The enemy is Resistance."

links for 2010-07-05

• “Yourfreedom” – hit, miss or maybe? « Don't Get Fooled Again
  Good piece by Richard Wilson sticking up for this exercise in public participation. I like how he counters the tendency to focus on the cranky submissions and ignore potentially useful ones.
• Virtual veracity | Features | The Lawyer
  Interesting piece on the effects of "wikifying" a libel case - what happens when litigation gets crowdsourced input...

Willpower and its limits

Nice report on research from Scientific American: Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question. They split people into two groups for a series of experiments. One group was primed for willpower (eg by having to write out the phrase "I will" multiple times); the other for curiosity (eg writing "Will I?"). The groups primed for curiosity went on to significantly outperform the wilful group. There's a lesson there for control freaks of all stripes. As the post says,

It indicates that those with questioning minds were more intrinsically motivated to change. They were looking for a positive inspiration from within, rather than attempting to hold themselves to a rigid standard. Those asserting will lacked this internal inspiration, which explains in part their weak commitment to future change. Put in terms of addiction recovery and self-improvement in general, those who were asserting their willpower were in effect closing their minds and narrowing their view of their future.

Hat tip: Tweet from Bruce Lewin

The power of touch

I've long thought that a clipboard was a powerful prop. I only have to hold one and I start to feel more officious.

So it's good to see this research, reported by Ed Yong, that goes further, suggesting that the weight of the clipboard has a significant impact on our thinking:

Ackerman showed that holding a light or heavy clipboard can affect a person’s decision-making. In a study of 54 volunteers, those who clutched the heavier board rated a job candidate more highly based on their resume, and thought that they displayed a more serious interest in the job. They even rated their own assessments as being more important! However, the boards didn’t affect the recruits’ judgments on areas unrelated to importance, such as the candidate’s ability to get along with others.

It continues:

In a second test with 43 volunteers, those who held the heavier boards were more likely to call for government funds to be spent on serious social matters like setting air pollution standards, over more trivial affairs like public toilet regulations. Again, the mere feeling of weight appears to influence the importance we give to matters.

In fact all sorts of tactile experiences appear to change the way we judge the world. I suspect that in our wordy culture we easily lose sight of this. And more evidence of the extraordinary number of variables that no management model can ever hope to pin down in accounting for the success or failure of a system.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan