Is This Wisdom?

"Carry On Up The Network" - Best Network Event Ever?

2009-10-27T07:00:00.006Z

The publicity for last night's London Area Communicators' Group October Meetup was intriguing: based around social networking, it would take place in Clerkenwell Theatre and feature a group of actors. Unsurprisingly given such novelty, it filled up quickly.

Arriving early after an energising stroll up from the Thames, I was greeted warmly at the door and asked to complete a profile which I taped up on the wall. After saying hello to some familiar faces, I filled my plate and glass (several times each) ready for the show. There seemed to be a lot of new faces and it wasn't just because I'd missed the social events over the summer and the most recent meetup. Moving the group to LinkedIn seems to have increased its visibility.

Presented by London Area Communicators' Group, the evening was a collaboration between The Big Wheel Theatre Company who performed songs and sketches and Jason Buck who ran a social media/enterprise/web 2.0 workshop.

After several introductory sketches and songs with a social media theme, we moved upstairs, passing through offices where employees were engaged in amusing scenarios, for the workshop section.

Jason gave a brief introduction then we were asked to consider the different attitudes to social media tools which might be displayed by four archetypal employees of a fictional company, as exemplified by the characters associated with Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor and Sid James.

Following the "Carry On..." theme, we were encouraged to cram as many innuendoes as possible into our conversation, something for which I am proud to report our group - "Big End - we give it to you straight up" - won special recognition.

After the workshop, we returned to the ground floor where we were greeted with champagne served by a lady on stilts, which I can confidently state is a first in my experience. There were more songs and a chance to quickly discuss how much we'd enjoyed the evening before departing into the night in the direction of Kings Cross station.

Thanks to Jason Buck, The Big Wheel Theatre Company and Matt O'Neill for organising a great evening.

Intranetters: Transport for London and London Underground

2009-08-27T16:47:00.014+01:00

Two excellent presentations at yesterday's Intranetters event: Rod McLean of London Underground spoke about the challenges he's faced and what he's achieved with LU's intranet since joining in January, while Brian Dobson of Transport For London showed a slightly more mature product in TFL's "Source".

Arriving five minutes into Rod's introduction I noticed a lot of new faces. I considered blaming the tube but guessed someone might already have done that gag - and as Rod pointed out, it would be easy to find out whether I was telling the truth from LU's real time update system.

London Underground

First up Rod McLean talked about the work he'd done on London Underground's intranet since joining in January.

The intranet had grown through the use of Frontpage with little organisation or governance. Rod's initial audit resulted in the deletion of over 50% of the existing content (with surprisingly little protest), amounting to some 6GB in volume (check Rod's presentation in the attachments section for a full breakdown). Rod spoke of using Webtrends, Google Search Appliance and PowerMapper to get a sense of "what's out there", but said they had to write their own tool to find out what was on the servers.

As an example of the remaining work, Rod points out a 496 page PDF titled "Jargon Buster" which he notes is a prime candidate for a wiki.

The biggest problem, says Rod moving on to the demonstration, is navigation which he demonstrates by pointing to the tabs across the top of the screen which open different applications, all in new windows. The breadcrumb bar provides isn't as effective at orientating users as it should be and sites are intensely cross-linked, which compounds the problem.

None of this seems to have dulled Rod's enthusiasm for the job ahead. Instead you get a sense of pragmatism at work, dealing with the problems you can in a logical order without becoming overwhelmed by the size of the task.

Transport For London

Brian Dobson has been working on TFL's intranet, Source, since 2005.

Source's navigation is more mature, dispensing with the organisational hierarchy navigation still favoured by LU for more user-orientated titles relating to people's work and needs as employees.

Source's choice of imagery is based on people, London and travel rather than specific transport systems, so there are no pictures of trains or buses, which gives Source a slightly more human face.

Brian says every employee visits Source, though he experiments to engage people interactively with forums have disappointed, most lapsing into "whingeing".

An interesting warning for expertise location tools: "Don't ask people to put in their own expertise: you'll end up with 500 web developers..!"

Brian notes the challenges he still faces, including replacing lots of PDF forms which are printed out and filled in.

Thanks to Rod for organising the visit and to both Brian and Rod for enjoyable demonstrations. Check the Intranetters community for news of forthcoming visits.

Bookmap: Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

2009-08-26T10:13:00.009+01:00

I've just finished David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. From the opening story about the prototype shop stationer Staples uses to design more effective experiences for shoppers to the final coda about the lack of structure in an ephemera shop, Weinberger tells thoughtful stories to outline his ideas, most of which I hadn't heard before.

Weinberger's point is that multiple viewpoints result in multiple categorisation systems, all of which are equally valid from their own point of view. He talks about the shortcomings of attempts to categorise using Linnaean classification and the Dewey Decimal system as examples, and about the three orders of organisation: of physical objects, ideas and metadata, and the relationships between them.

I'm not blowing the final conclusion, but there are three paragraphs on the final page which seem to me to sum up the power of social computing perfectly:

"It's not who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing their gravity.

It's not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else's experience. It's how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links.

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence."

"What's my motivation?"

2009-08-25T14:00:00.006+01:00

No sooner had I composed yesterday's post when David Gurteen tweeted this TED talk in which Dan Pink talks how rewards narrow focus and restrict possibilities in creative tasks:

Dan quotes research by Dr. Bernd Irlenbusch of the London School of Economics: "We find that financial incentives... can result in a negative impact on overall performance."

Engagement "...derives from self direction", autonomy, mastery and purpose:

1. autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives
2. mastery - the desire to get better and better at something
3. purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

As Dan points out "...too many organisations are making decisions about talent and people assumptions which are outdated, unexamined and rooted more in folklore than in science."

Now if Dan would just close his talk by telling us the incentives which applied to his law degree...

"Trust, dignity and respect..."

2009-08-24T11:46:00.002+01:00

I read the following sentence in a recent job description : "We work to treat staff, customers and collaborators with dignity and respect..." and the more I thought about it, the more remarkable it seemed.

Imagine employees being treated as people instead of resources. You'd never hear the phrase "Can I borrow you?" (to which I am always tempted to respond "Of course, if you bring me back...")

There's so much interest in engagement within the internal communications fraternity, but perhaps the answer isn't procedural.

Ark Group: social software masterclass

2009-08-20T21:38:00.010+01:00

Spending too long inside one organisation can distort your view of reality. I like to keep my feet on the ground by meeting people from other organisations and listening to them talk about their intranets and attitudes to social media. If nothing else, listening to people talk about their KM experiences at events like Gurteen Knowledge Cafés gives you the sense you're not entirely alone.

Yesterday's Ark Group social software masterclass was a great opportunity to hear about other organisations intranets then sit down to discuss the challenges faced by some of the attendees. For me it was also a chance to catch up with David Ferrabee and Neville Hobson who presented at Melcrum's social media conference two years ago. Neville's presentation that day marked my first sight of Twitter and convinced me that I needed to be active in external social media as well as internal, so I was looking forward to seeing what's on his radar at the moment.

Neville sets the scene with a presentation about the progress of social media in 2009, before we're briefly interrupted by a fire alarm and have to file out into the blazing sunshine in Holborn. While we're standing outside it dawns on me that I've seen Denise Maskew before. In fact I missed her presentation when I had to leave KCUK 2008 early, so I finally get the opportunity I'd been hoping for to catch up with her work.

United Utilities

Denise talks about the challenges involved in introducing social media tools at United Utilities and the drivers behind the strategy. They're experimenting with a wider range of tools than we are, so it's interesting to hear about podcasts and wikis along with more familiar applications like commented news and blogs. I note they're using Red Dot for content management,

Pfizer

Pfizers' Ben Gardner is next, talking about their Project Collaborate aimed at increasing team interactivity. They're also using technology I'd like to be experimenting with internally, including wikis and RSS. I suggested at a brainstorming meeting earlier this year that we might consider replacing the intranet with a wiki in the long term. I still think this is an excellent way forward and the views I heard expressed at July's Corporate Social Networking Forum have reinforced this.

The technology I'm not familiar with today is Microsoft OneNote, a tool for unstructured note taking which Pfizer are using as a front end to Sharepoint. (Indeed, I'm so unfamiliar with it, I later refer to it as iNote.) Ben also shows us some of the cultural and communication efforts used to engage users, including Meet Jessica, Pfizer's own variation of Meet Charlie - what is enterprise 2.0?.

(I had to make a note during Ben's presentation as I didn't know Google Chrome can be installed on locked desktops. It installs without updating the registry, which is great... as long as I don't want to use any sites with Flash. It also highlights some problems with the CSS on the intranet.)

British American Tobacco

My presentation on the cultural impact of social computing tools (slides available here) looked less at the technology, more at the internal landscape, design and cultural impact of the tools.

We've focused on communities, blogs and social networking, all of which are still gaining acceptance. Our efforts to encourage knowledge sharing in online communities foundered for seven years with five different technologies, until we started looking at more creative ways to build social networks between the participants.

The blogging experiment has run for five years now and we've just had two directors begin blogging in the past twelve months. (Neville laughs at one point, saying out that ours is the twelfth instance of "BlogCentral" he's heard of!)

Looking at other organisations' work always gives me ideas for where we can go next. I've felt for some time that we need to move social computing further on and seeing what other companies are achieving always reignites that passion. I'm looking forward to the meeting of the Intranetters group next Wednesday, 26th August.

The Winter's Tale 2009: Rehearsals finished

2009-07-14T09:34:00.002+01:00

in situ:'s Winter's Tale group reassembled on Saturday to put the performance back together in a weekend. One actor not returning had been replaced with another member of the group who was unavailable for Saturday, so we spent most of the day revising the order of scenes and remembering the transitions.

Having spent two weeks revising lines, it was pleasing to note how well they were embedded in long-term memory, returning with a little coaxing, though many of the cast did two weeks of Twelfth Night a couple of weeks back and are finding another two weeks of performance more taxing.

On Sunday our new actor joins us, proving to have learned her lines to perfection, resulting in a collective sigh of relief which boosts the cast's confidence measurably. We run through the whole performance twice and there now is a definite collective sense that we can do this. I make several annoying mistakes, but console myself with the knowledge it's better to make them now than later. It gives me a sense what I still need to do to get my performance up - mainly relax, take my time and speak more clearly, not race through the lines.

On Monday evening there is time for a final dress rehearsal which goes well, boosting confidence further. We've done our best and must now open the doors and let the crowd in, but there is a strange lack of any sense of quanitifiable improvement. Last year's revival of Oedipus was very different, though we began with several specific improvements we wanted to make, resulting in a more cohesive production.

We'll just have to see what the public think..!

Interviewing senior business leaders for e-learning

2009-06-26T15:38:00.002+01:00

I spent much of May and June either pointing video cameras at senior executives or huddling over an editing suite to enhance their ruminations on career management. We've collected stories we'll share through an internal on-line elearning tool whose goal is to encourage people to take responsibility for managing their own career.

Coming from the knowledge management angle, I couldn't help slipping in the odd KM-related question, such as "what mistakes have you made and what did you learn?" Only one person dared to answer directly, admitting that you never stop making mistakes and you have to learn how to deal with them. Most instead preferred to brush the question off with an answer along the lines of "well I wouldn't want to talk about specific instances..."

One director was brave enough to admit that luck had played a part in his own career choices - being in the right place at the right time - so we hope that including these stories will help to open people's minds about the potential opportunities available rather than being seen as a "recipe for managing your career".

Bookmap: The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

2009-06-12T16:00:00.008+01:00

Legend has it this book originated as a seven-page memo outlining mythic structure for Hollywood studios.

In the memo, Christopher Vogler interpreted Joseph Cambpell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", the book in which "Campbell explores the theory that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth."

Vogler simplifies Campbell's more scholarly work into a practical handbook for writers. In a new preface to the second edition he answers critics who called The Hero's Journey formularic by saying it is a form, not a forumula. He goes on to make some interesting contextual points about its reception in "herophobic" cultures such as Australia and Germany. "Australians," he says, "distrust appeals to heroic virtue because such concepts have been used to lure generations of young Australian males into fighting Britain's battles..." while "...the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis has tainted the concept... distorted the powerful symbols to enslave, dehumanize and destroy."

A new section looking at several modern films in heroic context includes "Titanic", "The Full Monty" and oddly "Pulp Fiction". The latter doesn't naturally fit the form, so instead it's used to view the individual journeys of the three characters Jules, Vincent and Butch.

Cooperation - the future of the intranet?

2009-06-08T21:39:00.001+01:00

I spent Monday morning at the first half of Coporate Social Networking 2009 at RIBA listening to a variety of speakers talking about the impact of social networking on the way we work.

I hadn't encountered Niall Cook of Hill and Knowlton before, but I agreed with much of what he had to say. He began with some great points about emerging tools, saying that the return on investment doesn't need to be high when the investment is low. He dismissed internal systems which "don't work any more... - even e-mail" - while the traditional model of an intranet is "publishing, not collaboration".
Work, business and employees are all changing, he says. People want to work differently. Leaders should be guides, not gods - and employees will demand inclusivity rather than command and control (at which point we got a nice Child With A Laptop slide).

"It's not just about connecting", said Niall, outlining a model with the headings "Connect, Communicate, Cooperate, Collaborate". Cooperation he differentiates from collaboration using the following attributes:

no end goal
no command and control
structure emerges
requires internal versions of Flickr, YouTube, etc.

The old IT model of user needs is dead, he contests - employees need wikis supported by social networks, or - and this is the risk - they will go outside the firewall and do it. Implementation needs be demand-driven, based on what employees are using already in their non-working lives, to create value. But, he warns, don't ignore culture. There is no point using collaboration software in a non-collaborative organisation.

Lee Bryant of Headshift talks a lot of commonsense on-line, so his presentation was what originally drew me in. Beginning with the statement that existing business processes are too inefficient and businesses can't afford them, he went on to talk about a future based on simpler, lower cost systems.

"Trust is cheaper than control", he states, explaining how social tools or a social layer can "rejuvenate old, unloved systems." He touches on the evolutionary nature of innovation, based on rapid feedback - something he feels intranets lack. Social networks and weak ties, he says, create an organisational immune system, which increases network productivity, not just personal.

Lee recommends that we make hidden data shared and use it to drive collective intelligence, an example: from usage statistics you can see which are the most valuable areas of an intranet. Unfortunately, they are rarely shared.
He talks about the "ambient awareness" which small-scale status updates create and the benefits for team working, he states that "90% of project management is communication".

He finishes with a vision of the intranet based on wikis which "locate publishing into the context of doing something" supported by social networks. You don't even need to create new tools - "use your existing directories", he recommends, by which time I was sitting with a very smug grin on my face.

Conclusions
I was pleased to see more forward-looking opinions siding against static intranets with old publishing models. I remember suggesting over a year ago to our team that Interact could easily be wiki-enabled to encourage more participation, without compromising the validity of the information.

So enabling collaboration (and cooperation!) with wikis, supported by a social networks seems to be a good emerging direction for organisations who want to lead by taking the next step.

Start making sense

2009-06-02T21:02:00.010+01:00

Last time I was in Portland Place the roads were closed, 5,000 people were on the street, Bono had scaled Broadcasting House and seemed about to plant a flag to commemorate U2's takeover of the BBC. Happily, my return finds he's been coaxed down, the roads are once more full of traffic.

I'm going to RIBA to see another terrible Celt, the rather more sedentary Dave Snowden, who is equally proudly but rather less bombastically unveiling version 3.0 of Cognitive Edge's Sensemaker software suite.

Dave kicks off by showing recent projects which demonstrate the latest additions to the software. There are more triangles in the signification part of the input process in these examples. Dave explains using triangles places a greater cognitive load on the brain during signification, resulting in a more meaningful result. Formulating appropriate triangles in an exercise during the accreditation programme certainly taxed my meagre intelligence, though I'm sure it's something one develops with practice. At least I have first hand experience of their superiorityover the slider mechanism.

I was initially disappointed to hear the triangular interface element had been patented, which seems to preclude the possiblity of data collection through another tool. Much of my previous work has involved skunkworks-style prototyping of new tools, usually in Lotus Notes/Domino.

As it slowly dawned on me that attempting to demonstrate software designed to make sense of the results of complex mass-consultation exercises is unlikely to impress a handful of early adopters by merely reflecting their own responses back to them without demonstrating the formation of observable patterns, I realised a different approach is needed this time. Stories must be identified and narrative employed.

The best stories I've heard about SenseMaker centre on weak signal detection. During SenseMarker training, we were given test data which included a study of news stories in Iranian media. Signifying the stories against pre-determinted criteria and plotting against three axes creates a three-dimensional plane like that in the diagram.

Signifying new stories over time (yellow dots) and comparing them to the existing landscape can indicate the emergence of new beliefs. The cluster to the lower left of this diagram could provide early indications of new types of extremism.

In other examples, a drinks manufacturer and a Liverpool museum both use SenseMaker to obtain instant feedback on consumer experiences. This enables them to respond more quickly if action is required.

Lastly, Dave introduced an open project about gardens which anyone ca participate in here.

I'm going spend some time sitting in mine, thinking about projects where I can see SenseMaker contributing to better understanding - I've come up with about five already.

Gurteen Knowledge Café: Imagining the future of knowledge technologies

2009-05-01T09:11:00.005+01:00

If the idea of predicting the future currently seems rather foolish to me, it may be because I'm reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled by Radomness". I signed up for Tuesday night’s Gurteen Knowledge Café at the British Computer Society more in anticipation of good conversation than any hope of forecasting anything significant.

Conrad Taylor opened the event, framing technological change as "the co-evolution of tools, artefacts and environment" and suggested "science fiction, the future of personal computer and magic versions of current processes" as predictive approaches. After a video message from BCS President Alan Pollard, Chris Yapp spoke about the need for technology to augment and add to individual capabilities, "a neuro-physiological effect which increases attention-capacity" and the need for better algorithms. He made the surprising point that the technical capability outlined by Doug Englebart in his famous demonstration "A Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect" still does not exist.

Dominated by knowledge management professionals, the first group I sat with were uncomfortable purely discussing technology and the conversation quickly turned to shifts in society. Fears over security, data retention, defensiveness about intellectual property rights and reputation management appear to prevent progress.

One person commented that individual identity might be lost or changed due to mass participation and more sharing, but that younger people seemed to fear this less than older people. Since our opinions and the meanings we ascribe to things are founded on our life experience, what we learn will always reflect our previous experience and the sense we make of it.

Similar themes emerged after I moved tables. We talked about what Intellectual Property means now and considered how organisations will generate value in the future. We felt the cultural shift in ownership needed to be understood and "something like" the GPL or Creative Commons embraced more widely. The model which has served the music business for the past 100 years is no longer viable and there is a lot to be learnt from the open-source-software-and-consultancy model.

I sadly didn't share a table with Ray Shaw where the most off-the-wall conversation was always likely (and so it proved). The conversation continued over excellent food and drink which had me questioning the fact that it's around twenty years since I was a member of the British Computer Society. Perhaps it's time I renewed.

Human-Machine Symbiosis for Data Interpretation - Dave Snowden

2009-04-24T09:31:00.001+01:00

Off to University College London yesterday afternoon to see Dave Snowden's presentation for The International Society for Knowledge Organisation.

This amounted to Dave's Introduction to Complexity lecture, which I've now seen three times in the last six months, so perhaps it's time to delve a bit deeper into the material.

Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable afternoon and I found it interesting to hear the reactions of people who haven't seen it before.

Melcrum Communicators' Network London Group: "Living in a wired world; Connectedness for a better work place" with Euan Semple

2009-04-22T09:12:00.001+01:00

"The Quiet Revolution"

Despite having worked in Knowledge Management for around six years, I've never yet seen Euan Semple speak. An odd omission which was happily rectified last night at the National Audit Office which hosted April's Melcrum Communicators' Network London Meetup

Euan talks a lot of what to me seems commonsense and I find myself nodding in agreement at what he's saying... then thinking back and realising how far ahead of the curve his work at the BBC was and that for the most part we're still catching up.

His observations on organisational politics ring true, particularly where he talks about the fear which seems to pervade any discussion about social tools, when all we're doing is conducting "...self-correcting conversations in the open."

What could there possibly be to fear in that?

Bookmap: The Halo Effect... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

2009-04-20T16:20:00.008+01:00

Phil Rozenzweig's book impressed when I first read it by explaining in straightforward terms why "Five Steps..." and "Seven Habits..." type books aren't enough to ensure success in different contexts.

The explanation of the dangers of pseudoscientific approaches to studying performance is recommended to anyone working in organisational design. I also feel all business management courses should start with the story about cargo cults and coconut headsets. Learn more from this excerpt from the first chapter.

Bookmap: The Game of Chess by Harry Golombek

2009-03-24T16:43:00.006Z

Having expressed my intention to learn the game "properly", my dad kindly dug out what appears to be a classic of the game. To develop my understanding of the game properly, I needed to learn the notation quickly. Happily, this doesn't seem as taxing as I had feared.

Harry Golombek's name wasn't familiar to me. He was either slightly before my time or perhaps I read the wrong newspaper. The public face of chess to me in the 80s was Bill Hartson of Mastergame, though the show sadly went the way of Pot Black and One Man And His Dog.

Happily there are plenty of commented games available on YouTube.

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: Human Will and Human Won't

2009-03-20T22:55:00.004Z

Last night's Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was full of fascinating conversation from the word go. Kate Hopkinson led the discussions on "Human Will and Human Won't", diving straight in with little introduction posing two questions: "What do you believe helps motivation and cooperation and what suppresses or impedes it?"

The group on my table began with incentives, feedback and recognition, through leadership, authenticity, shared values and consistency, then onto necessity, relevance, line-of-sight, communication, before leaping into crisis and the question of how to help people accept and learn to cope with constant change.

As usual, the range of views represented increased the scope far wider than my own context and I quickly realised how narrowly I had initially viewed the conversation. When I observe how limiting my own viewpoint can be, I feel the value of coming along to events like these to talk to people in similar roles in different organisations and I wish I could convince more people to come along.

Kate spoke about The Landscape of the Mind, a model she has developed to help people understand each other's preferred working styles. I began to feel uncomfortable here, the voice of Dave Snowden echoing around in my head, telling me that people change their preferences as they change context. Conrad must've felt the same way, commenting wryly as he did that "I don't believe in astrology, but people with my starsign never do." My own preferences seemed scattered throughout the model, perhaps leaving me somewhere in the middle, though I identified my current colleagues on either side of my category, not unlike real life.

I'd love to better understand the working styles of the people around me, but I fear many tools we're presented in our working lives - such as Myers Briggs - aren't up to the job and there is a real need to get smarter.

I'll try to keep a more open mind.

An engaging Tuesday...

2009-02-18T22:07:00.003Z

Two engagement events on Tuesday: one highlighting the need for evolutionary change, the other examined the problems managers face every day.

Not many people get to travel to the top of the BT tower, which might partly explain why Tuesday afternoon's Gurteen Knowledge Café was so heavily oversubscribed. Add Dave Snowden speaking about complexity and you have easily the hottest KM ticket in town. I hadn't made the original cut, but my colleague Kevin was fading fast by Monday afternoon and arranged for me to go in his stead.

"How can we best keep employees engaged in their work, in the current economic climate?" – Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with Dave Snowden, Alex Wilson, Sharon Darwent – BT Tower

The afternoon began with a buffet in the revolving restaurant, which clicked into gear as we queued for dim sum, inducing a sensation faintly resembling seasickness. The restaurant completed a revolution as we sat and talked, picking out London landmarks through the gloomy haze.

David Gurteen welcomed everybody to the event and explained how the afternoon was going to work. As usual there was a great mix of first timers and regulars, which always helps get conversations started. The whole group of 80 or so were then ferried to the ground floor auditorium where we were welcomed by host Sharon Darwent and introduced to BT's HR director Alex Wilson. Alex spoke about the need for engagement during the current economic climate, stressing that BT faced its own challenges and didn't pretend to know all the answers.

Dave Snowden followed with his presentation introducing complexity, updated with some of the output from a recent Cognitive Edge engagement. His examples from the Liverpool museum project demonstrated the importance of collecting granular anecdotal fragments from children who had visited the museum and how SenseMaker helps signify, interpret and display them visually. Graphs showed how weak signal detection through the real time monitoring of anecdotes can lead to quick corrective action without the need for major interventions.

Moving back up the tower to discuss the implications highlighted some of the difficulties involved in helping people understand complexity and what it means for managers. Most people were happy to discuss their situations and propose solutions for each other's problems but were less sure about a revolutionary approach.

Many organizations carry out an employee survey every two years. It's a huge undertaking and an important input into strategy making. BT seems to be finding it needs to test the water more frequently and is taking quarterly surveys of samples of the organisation. It will be interesting to see how these more frequent inputs help the company become more agile.

As usual we decamped to a pub to make and renew acquaintances. I could’ve stayed longer, but I had another engagement.

"Newsletters are dead; Long live Engagement" – Jason Bates, David Paul

A smart walk back across Bloomsbury took me to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where Suzanne Clift of the Land Registry was hosting the Melcrum Communicators' Network's London Communicators' Group February meetup.

Jason opened the proceedings by focusing everyone in the room on the challenges facing organisations in the current climate before dividing the group into teams for a workshop. David then took over in the guise of Rupert Fotherington-Smythe (or someone similar), CEO of Gravelodge, a nationally-respected chain of motels which has grown in size, but lost something of its identity along the way. We had thirty minutes to put together a proposal aimed at reconnecting Gravelodge with its employees and reinvigorating its reputation.

Everyone in our team was keen. Jess and Beata were firing off ideas, which I managed to record and Cari structured into a proposal convincing enough for David to award us the contract! Key to his decision, he said, was our focus on getting the organisation to understand its original values.

We celebrated with a beer in the Pitcher and Piano on Kingsway and went our separate ways, all looking forward to next month's meetup.

Bookmap: "Sources Of Power: How People Make Decisions" by Gary Klein

2009-02-16T22:47:00.008Z

Recommended to me by Tony Quinlan, "Sources of Power" chronicles Gary Klein's research into naturalistic decision making - how people make decisions in fields where they possess expertise.

Cited in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", this is a deeper and more satisfying examination of the subject. It's full of stories about people who make rapid decisions in stressful situations, including chess players, surgeons and firefighters - one of whom had previously believed himself to be psychic.

Bookmap: The Minto Pyramid Principle... visually

2009-02-12T22:55:00.008Z

I had some great feedback from author Mark Earls about the mindmap of his book "Welcome To The Creative Age" which I posted recently. It started me thinking about the importance of visual memory and I wondered if plotting a mindmap of a book's chapters before reading would help the reader navigate through it. Perhaps publishers should start including mindmaps inside the covers?

Anyway, I thought I should share some of the others I've made, so here's my mindmap of Barbara Minto's "The Pyramid Principle", which I wrote about previously.

Seeing this has got me thinking about the book enough to consider journeying through it again. Perhaps I'll take a map with me...

Imprinting failure to succeed

2009-02-01T10:15:00.001Z

"When Arthur had been a boy at school, long before the Earth had been demolished, he had used to play football. He had not been at all good at it, and his particular speciality had been scoring own goals in important matches. Whenever this happened he used to experience a peculiar tingling round the back of his neck that would slowly creep up across his cheeks and heat his brow. The image of mud and grass and lots of little jeering boys flinging it at him suddenly came vividly to his mind at this moment." - The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, Douglas Adams

Failure conjures up similar images of humiliation in my own mind. Growing up, both within my family and among my friends, failure was not something to be tolerated but an opportunity to indulge in the humiliation of the offending party.

Now I'm older, if not wiser, and failure seems greatly underrated. Ideo's David Kelly talks of prototyping as a means of "failing faster to succeed sooner", while Dave Snowden sees tolerated failure as an important learning tool.

I was disappointed that the group I worked with didn't ace the Butterfly Stamping exercise at Cognitive Edge accreditation, but I've thought about it a lot since, gaining far more insight into the exercise than if we'd merely succeeded at the task we were set and moved on. Understanding the relationships between things helps us better make sense of them than merely categorising them.

As David Weinberger notes in Everything is Miscellaneous: "That was Aristotle's startling discovery: A thing standing on its own, is what it is because of the connection to other things like it and other things not like it."

Why we must take risks: success from uncertainty

2009-01-26T16:51:00.006Z

The article most recommended by Harvard Business Review readers last year was an interview with Ed Catmull of Pixar, the animation company behind Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille and WALL-E.

Catmull talks about a studio head who thinks his problem is not in finding people, but ideas. Catmull disagrees, calling this "...a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product."

His conclusion has a lot of resonance for business:

"...we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That's why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren't very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it's uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What's the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find."

Success comes from taking risks - avoiding them leads to mediocrity.

'I must accept your first answer...'

2009-01-21T16:01:00.002Z

I came across a fascinating example of counter-intuitive reasoning this morning after bumping into another father from the Cambridge parents' network as we travelled into London.

My friend has recently taken over the chair in Operations Research at the London School of Economics and since it's over 20 years since Operational Research featured in my computing degree, I referred to the internet for a slight refresher.

Operational Research emerged during the Second World War, which some would call a golden period for innovation. British scientist Patrick Blackett was one of several developing methods to improve decision making. The Wikipedia entry includes this anecdotal fragment which demonstrates Blackett's genuine ability to "think outside the box":

"…Blackett's team analysed a report of a survey carried out by RAF Bomber Command. For the survey, Bomber Command inspected all bombers returning from bombing raids over Germany over a particular period. All damage inflicted by German air defenses was noted and the recommendation was given that armour be added in the most heavily damaged areas. Their suggestion to remove some of the crew so that an aircraft loss would result in fewer personnel loss was rejected by RAF command.

Blackett's team instead made the surprising and counter-intuitive recommendation that the armour be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage in the bombers which returned. They reasoned that the survey was biased, since it only included aircraft that returned to Britain. The untouched areas of returning aircraft were probably vital areas, which, if hit, would result in the loss of the aircraft."

The answer isn't always staring you in the face.

Ticking the KPI boxes for all the wrong reasons

2009-01-20T16:57:00.006Z

Reading Tony Quinlan's observation about how organisations need diversity while managers actively seek to stifle it, I thought perhaps we should start collecting management sins.

There are similar problems with the setting of conflicting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Some managers who are rewarded for reusing existing ideas which save effort, a typical organisational approach aimed at improving the flow of ideas - but it doesn't work.

The same managers are also rewarded for showing innovation and entrepreneurial flair. But instead of proving they have adopted these principles as a general way of working, the savvy career manager needs only to show an example of each to tick the box and get their annual bonus. The fact they might have taken a costly, innovative approach when there was a reusable idea staring them in the face, begging to be reused is ignored.

It's one further indictment of the bonus culture and a good reason to consider scrapping it.

Succeeding by connecting

2009-01-19T13:31:00.000Z

A nice story about internal social networking with Connect from British American Tobacco's intranet:

Connect – joining up the business and keeping up with the times

Six months on from its revamp, Connect, our employee directory and social networking tool is basking in the glow of statistics that demonstrate its incredible success throughout the Group.

The speed at which the online networking revolution is taking place has been an enormous challenge for many corporations, but HR's Knowledge Management team and CORA have provided a leading-edge tool that has other companies and think-tanks approaching us for further information.

Connect was introduced several years ago, but it truly transformed into a social networking tool last July when two existing directories were combined and updated and the ability for people to make 'connections' and post updates was introduced.

The true value of Connect is something that reveals itself on an ongoing basis – and the benefits are manifold. It supports the Group working as a single enterprise by helping people to find their peers, build relationships, communicate and share information.

"There are also many indirect benefits to Connect," says Simon Hill, Consultant in Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0, Human Resources. "It helps with working virtually across cultures and geographical barriers. You can forget that you're 5,000 miles from the person you are connected to when you see what they are up to on a daily basis."

A positive effect on the bottom-line

A recent report from well-known think-tank Demos has endorsed the use of networking technologies to build relationships and closer links with colleagues, as they play a role in helping with productivity, innovation and democratic working.

Olivia Cook of London-based corporate social networking consultancy, SelectMinds, reinforces this. "The camaraderie that is built among colleagues through corporate social networks fuels positive views of the employer brand, and more employers are realising the real value that a more connected workforce can add to the bottom-line."

A difficult birth

The idea of transforming Connect began in 2003 when a friend of Richard Hare, Consultant in Knowledge, Communication and Collaboration, Human Resources, invited him to join a social networking site, Friendster. "That was before MySpace and social networking had really taken off, so when I first suggested the idea I encountered hostility – people didn't understand it and I wondered how I could convince them."

Richard chipped away and with the arrival of Facebook came the realisation that he was on to something big. "Simon and I began to meet up on an informal basis with a group of cross-functional, entrepreneurial and like-minded people, including Melanie Steele (CORA), Svetlana Omeltchenko (Marketing) and Julian Gibbs (Legal). Between us, the GSD development team and some CORA funding, we made this happen."

Suited to our culture

Richard Hare suggests that Connect is particularly suited to the way that the Group operates: "People in British American Tobacco move around a lot, so Connect can help them stay in touch with people they know, as well as finding people who can help them in their new learning curve. By answering the question 'What are you doing right now?' you increase the ambient awareness of what your network is doing."

"It's also in line with the emphasis on cost-consciousness and working smarter," says Simon. "Our employees represent a goldmine of information, so to exploit that great bank of internal knowledge rather than go out and pay for it, or, to do it yourself and get it wrong, makes great sense."

The future is Connect

Now, Connect is spreading on a worldwide basis. Even markets who use their own local intranet can access Connect if they are e-mailed an invite to connect.

"There's a strong viral element to Connect," says Simon, "We've released things quietly using a more exponential, contemporary approach. We've produced something that is easy and enjoyable to use. Now, Connect is built into many of the features of Interact and it spreads through its own mechanisms in a way that has exceeded our expectations."

For the future, Simon Hill would like to see every single British American Tobacco employee connected, "because we want the collective knowledge of the Group available to each and every employee", and Richard Hare would like to see Connect enabling more global conversations. "We already have plans for new features following suggestions by Connect users", says Richard.

"We're starting to achieve the kind of behaviours and excitement within the organisation that are becoming prevalent with social networking sites on the internet," observes Simon, and both he and Richard are more than happy to continue their work in this fast-moving and emergent area, to evolve new ideas that help the Group connect, collaborate and innovate.