Defend your mess

Half way through the life of our bulletin board at the BBC we came under pressure to make it more structured. Most of the early adopters, myself included, were happy with the really simple structure and organic growth that had helped it find its place in the organisation. But it was beginning to be noticed by other people; people who were less experienced on the web; people who liked things tidy and organised. We came under pressure to make the forum more structured. They wanted a structure that reflected the organisational structure at the time. They thought that people would find it difficult to navigate if it didn’t follow the familiar patterns.

But this wasn’t the point. The forum worked because it didn’t fit the patterns. The patterns didn't work. The silos bore little relationship to the real patterns that emerged from our day to day exchanges with each other. The structure reflected one view of the organisation, the networked conversations in our forum another. One was formal and managed, the other was informal and emergent. We needed both. Don’t let people try to tidy up your internal use of social too soon. At least let it find its feet before you start worrying about mess. Mess is in the eye of the beholder.

Part of your job as the instigator of social in your organisation is to defend it. You are there to keep reactive forces at bay until the tool achieves a robust enough culture to look after itself. This will probably take years.

Every day is a good day

On a bad day I can begin to believe that most organisations become successful through sheer scale, brute force, and luck - not by being smart. 

On a good day I can begin to believe that helping them to become smarter is  a worthwhile pursuit. 

Most of the time I remember that I'm not helping organisations at all but the people in them - and that is ALWAYS worthwhile. 

Be interested

Following on from my previous post about being interesting it occurred to me that one of the best ways of being thought of as interesting by other people to be interested in them. If you want to be remembered as interesting from a conversation with someone pay a lot of attention to them, really listen to what they have to say, don't interrupt and don't say a lot about yourself. 

This applies equally to the CEO I mentioned in my previous post. Part of their success at being deemed interesting is the degree to which they are relevant and their relevance will depend on their willingness to listen and to be genuinely in tune with their organisation. 

Let's face it the same is true of corporations' use of social tools. On the very rare occasions when they really make an attempt to be interested in their customers it works - most of the time it is obvious that they don't care in the slightest. 

Reminds me of Stephen Covey's "Seek first to understand before being understood".

Be interesting!

In an article I have just completed on the impact of mobile devices on the work of internal communications folks I suggested embracing the possibilities of the technology and, for instance, encouraging staff to take and share photos of work related stuff. One example I gave was photographing the CEO giving a talk and sharing that with your network. I can imagine a lot of people's response, including probably that of many  CEOs being "who would want to take and share a photo of something so boring".

Maybe the solution is not so much to question the desire to capture the moment as to be less boring in the first place! Maybe senior folks should be less cautious, less impersonal, less detached. Maybe we should help them.

Risk

Looking out of my window at the falling snow I keep thinking of the climbers killed by an avalanche in Glen Coe yesterday. I did my winter mountaineering training in Glen Coe many years ago and in fact was subsequently up Bidean Nam Bian in snow on my own a few years later. I love mountains, I love them even more in the snow, and I love risk. 

I used to satisfy my need for risk riding fast motorbikes, then in a more modest form playing sax in a pop band, then climbing hills in all weathers, now I get to write the odd challenging blog post and stand on stages. It's not the same. There is something deeply satisfying about competence in the face of real risk. Keeping a lid on your fears, knowing what you are doing, and managing the risk to come out alive.

The guys in Glen Coe were probably just unlucky. Some will no doubt argue they shouldn't have been there. But, odd though it may sound, I keep feeling jealous. Obviously not of the outcome - but of the endeavour.

Facebook Graph Search and your company's "digital plumage"

Reading Jon Battelle's great article on Facebook's graph search got me thinking about its impact on brand given my big thing that Organizations Don't Tweet - People Do

Once you can search your friends, or your friends friends to see who works at, let's just say Tesco, suddenly you can not only find out who works there, which admittedly you can also do in Linkedin, but unlike Linkedin you can get to see much more of what sort of people they are and what sort of lives they live. 

Batelle sees this as a good thing in terms of individuals:

And to me, this is a Very Good Thing. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post titled  The Rise of Digital Plumage in which I predicted that we’d all become habituated to “dressing” ourselves in structured data, so as to best present ourselves to the world at any given time. Graph Search is another important tool in our ever-growing digital wardrobe, one that motivates us to understand and manage the implications of our ever-expanding digital footprint.

I reckon it is also a good thing as we collectively work out whether we can trust certain companies - or not.

Quiet voices and the Tesco horse

Lively and active internal social platforms enable an organisation's small quiet voices to be heard who otherwise get drowned in the noise and corporate bluster. When someone thinks "that's odd - not seen that before - I wonder what it means?" they can share it. Others can react. The organisation can become more self aware and self correct. 

I thought this during the banking crisis. Sub-prime mortgages happened because those thinking "Eh? Are you kidding?" never got heard. 

It's hard to believe that nobody in Tesco or their supply chain noticed the horse. Maybe if their small quiet voice had been heard...

Google Author Rank

Although I don't claim any expertise in marketing I do, increasingly, get drawn into conversations with clients about how to do it on the social web. Given my grumpiness about the way marketing has hijacked the phrase social media and turned it into so much less than it could be this is ironic! 

However my position is always the same. Organizations Don't Tweet - People Do! The best way to market your product or build your brand is to be genuinely interesting and passionate about what you do. The best way to do that is to allow your staff to become more open about their work and get better at being your advocates online. 

I am currently in the process of setting up my Google Authorship and was recommended this article by a friend. It explains the thinking behind Author Rank and the fundamental impact it is likely to have on how we find things on Google. This feels like a significant step towards my ideal of real people having real conversations about real products. 

Overcoming inertia with love

Over coffee yesterday David Tebbutt was telling me of a social web initiative that had been successful but then gone backwards and he used the word entropy (gradual decline into disorder) to describe the cause. We got into conversation about how often social tools can make progress but then lose traction and I said I wasn't so sure that it was a decline into disorder that we were talking about. Disorder, or at least emergent order, is in the nature of social tools. I think the problem is more inertia (a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force). Social tools need some sort of external force, some source of energy, to keep them alive and moving. They don't just continue to grow under their own steam.

A comment from a friend still working at the BBC leads me to believe that talk.gateway, the bulletin board we put in there, is on its last legs. To be honest I am amazed that it is still going given the fact that, as I understand it, little attention has been paid to it since we left. It takes energy to keep things moving and alive otherwise they return to their previous state. It takes care and attention. Someone described me at the time of starting talk.gateway as an animateur, (someone who gets things animated) and I rather liked the description.

I worry when I see businesses investing loads of money in social platforms without considering the energy and commitment required to make their implementation successful. It will take lavish care and attention and dare I say it love. It is no mistake that the last chapter in my book is devoted to this old blog post about love in the workplace as it is the most important, and most often ignored, ingredient in making this stuff happen. If you are going to be successful with social in your business someone has to care. Someone has to invest enough passion and "love" to overcome the considerable forces of inertia that are inevitable, indeed cultivated, in our organisational lives.

Most social media marketing advice is rubbish

While reading Robert Scoble's excellent advice on how to improve your social media presence I noticed this related question:

I immediately thought "just get as many as possible of them to do what Robert recommends". It's a simple as that. Anything else is smoke and mirrors. There's a whole industry built on making people think either a) it's harder b) they can't do it themselves or c) getting someone else to do it for you works. Sadly all three are often combined.

I guess the truth is that while what Robert recommends is simple, it is also hard work - and it relies on remembering that Organizations Don't Tweet - People Do!

Making the leap

It is interesting reading the reviews of last year in social media and noting how much they still focus on the marketing use of the platforms. It is also interesting watching people using the social web for more and more interesting and "grown up" activities. 

But it has also interesting in conversations with people at various functions over the Christmas period how few of them make the leap to seeing a use for the tools in the workplace. It comes as a surprise to many when you suggest it. Almost as if they are thinking "what has connecting and sharing stuff with people I trust and want to help got to do with work?"

This the biggest hurdle to overcome. We have been so conditioned to see work as being just about processing stuff, doing our bit and no more. Focussing on sustainable transactions rather than improving things. Seeing conversations about what we are doing, and why, as time wasting. Not wanting to rock the boat or stick our heads above the parapet. 

Intellectual plankton and increasing my I/O

I sometimes feel like an old cheap computer whose I/O just isn't up to snuff. I just can't process stuff fast enough. I usually have at least two "real" books on the go and Kindle books that I am reading on my phone in snatched moments. I also listen to audio books and am about to re-instate my evening walking habit as much for the increased "reading"  time as for the exercise!

I am a sucker for enticing references online to books I want to read and, thanks to Amazon Prime, have a queue of books in all formats waiting to be read. Having crammed all of this stuff in faster I need to get it out faster. I make notes all the time on my iPhone or in my trusty Moleskine, squared, black cover cahier. I also need to process faster and to write for my blog more often.

I sometimes think that faster isn't necessary better. I feel the urge to read more poetry and to invest the effort required to read more classics. But then I am more and more aware as I get older of the fact that I inevitably have less time left to read and need to get a move on! 

But why? Isn't this bit of meat between my ears going to be rotting in, if I am very lucky, about forty years time? Am I just a piece of intellectual plankton sucking in knowledge like protein and passing it through my system barely processed? All I know is that I attack the problem with more vigour than almost anything else in my life so hopefully it is not entirely wasted time!

Changing our stories

Until The First World War there was the "big story" of the church and the establishment. Everything was in God's ordained order and those in power could be trusted. Darwin and the trenches blew a hole in that story. This was then replaced by two other big stories, Communism and Fascism, meeting mankind's need for a replacement for the God/Establishment story. The Second World War put a dent in these two stories which were largely replaced by Materialism, the "buy stuff 'till you die" story, which is beginning to look a bit frayed at the edges. 

Do we need another big story? Is it inevitable that we need single sense making stories? Don't these invariably put power in the small group who tell the stories? Isn't this where we are currently with the media and politics? Small groups controlling our sense making stories and having disproportionate impact on how we understand and react to our circumstances. 

What if we became less lazy and less willing to accept the stories fed to us? What if we noticed more and thought more? What if we all made sense of the world with our own stories? What if we told these stories online and shared them better and faster than ever before? 

Could we become a collective sense making network that removes the ability for small groups to abuse gatekeeping power? Could we work out how to work together to solve the complex problems that we are increasingly aware are inevitably shared? Could we do this with enough tolerance and compassion to avoid falling out with each other?

Dumbing down and victimhood

I have to confess I get frustrated when people complain about technology dumbing us down. The fear is often expressed that short attention spans will be forced on us by Twitter's 140 character updates or that we will all succumb to mob mentality as memes sweep through Facebook. Writers like Nick Carr and Andrew Keen appear to be making successful careers out of fuelling these fears. 

What a bunch of wimps. Are we really that out of control? Do we just blindly gravitate to the lowest common denominator of what technology makes possible? I don't think so. 

Yes people will play and tinker and possibly become obsessive when they first discover the delights of the internet. We all do. I did twenty years ago with Usenet. Part of this is that we have been trained to see our entertainment and education as other people's responsibility. We are not used to taking responsibility for ourselves but the internet forces this on us eventually. Eventually most of us get bored. Most of us decide to grow up and take responsibility for our time and attention. Most of us discover that the internet is the biggest, best, learning machine we have ever had. It is collective learning on steroids. 

Most of us will be all right.

A rant about IT and losing our grip on reality.

<rant>

Foursquare just gave me extra points for having checked in at airports continuously for the last eleven weeks. This is a dubious distinction. In that time I have been to Riga, Amsterdam, most major cities in Australia, Hong Kong, Washington and Dubai. As a result I have gradually lost my grip of reality. My circadian rhythms are no longer disrupted by jet lag as they have no idea any more what they are meant to be. I have seen so many amazing things, and met so many interesting people, that life is starting to blur. It is in this context that I am awake at 4.00 am writing this rant!

My travels finally brought me to Dubai - a place that has a very dubious grip of reality. Outrageous building projects; ex-pats chasing the beach front idyll and wandering round shopping malls in their spare time; and multinational corporations and ubiquitous international brands swamping any remaining indigenous culture. A nightmarish vision of a future protecting itself and removing itself from the rough edges of the real world. 

I am clearly particularly attuned to this loss of a grip on reality at the moment due to my personal circumstances but it is also what troubles me generally about modern life. It is what troubles me about corporate culture. The gradual loss of a grip on reality, the slow anesthetization of staff through endless obsession with process, the loss of passion and true engagement. I saw this in the well oiled machine that was my hotel in Dubai. Superbly efficient systems and impeccably professional staff but soulless and inhospitable in a deeply unsettling way. While writing this blog post I have been engaged in an email exchange with the hotel reception. Despite me being on a pre-paid half board basis, and despite the provision of complementary water in their rooms, they sent me an invoice just for the water I had with my meal, They then and end their contribution to the ensuing time wasting email exchange with the salutation "be re-energized" - give me strength!

This feeling of unreality culminated in an encounter with my daughter's ICT teacher at a school progress evening last night. It would be indiscrete to go into the details of the conversation, but both he as an individual, and those setting the ICT curriculum, have clearly lost their grip of reality. They are lost in the anesthetized world of Microsoft Office based process. This issue is endemic. He is not alone. My work for the last seven weeks has been with those involved in the provision of corporate IT in various forms and at various levels in all sorts of organisations. It was clearly "the good guys" who were going to self select and bother to turn up and hear me but their stories of working in IT left me troubled. As a community they are losing, or have lost, the plot. They are buried in process, banging on about Big Data, remote from the realities of the web based world their organisations now inhabit, and like those crazy buildings in Dubai soaking up energy and costing millions in a way that merely exacerbates our increasing divorce from the reality of the world around us. 

If we don’t find a way to recover our grip on reality we will come a cropper. Remember how in the eighties the financial sector sneered at those of us sensing the unreality of their claims to be fueling growth of the economy? Look what happened to that. We need to break out of this advertising fueled running away, this buffering ourselves from the harshness of the physical world, wrapping ourselves in psychic cotton wool, kidding ourselves that our ever more complex and ever more pervasive systems are going to protect us. They are part of the problem. They are the boiling water that the frog is sitting in. We are deluding ourselves and fiddling while Rome burns.

</rant>

Tips for using software

• Make the effort to learn it - not by reading the manual but by tinkering.
• Watch kids - they keep pressing buttons until they get what they want.
• Always assume it is you who are being stupid rather than the software.
• If it doesn't work for you it's not personal - move on and find a better app.

Thanks Australia

I reckon I can write that title as it does feel as if I have "done" all of it - or at least a lot of it. Twenty individual events in thirty six days, four long haul flights within Australia crossing the country from all angles, and lots of small flights and car drives. 

My main reason for being in Australia was a speaking tour of branches of The Australian Computer Society, an association of IT professionals. I spoke in venues ranging from large auditoria, to offices, to even an RSL club (the Australian equivalent of a Royal British Legion Club) and to audiences that ranged from people who were still studying IT at university to others who had retired. I had many really good conversations with really interesting and committed people in all sorts of positions in IT in all sorts of organisations. In addition to the ACS events I carried out several others, including workshops, for other organisations in Sydney and Melbourne thanks to friends and connections I have made there over the years.

Due to the nature of the timetable I also had the chance to see some of the countryside in most of the places I visited - from climbing Mt. Wellington in Hobart, to trips up crocodile rivers in Kakadu, to swimming on the beaches near Perth. Actually Western Australia was the only chance I got to do this due to the warnings of deadly jelly fish, crocodiles and sharks in the sea everywhere else!

Thanks to all the wonderful people I met and who went out of their way to help me along the way. It's been a helluva trip.

[I am writing this on the plane to Hong Kong where I am doing a couple of workshops and then off to Washington for a meeting of The World Bank's Knowledge Management Commission which isn't really on the way home!! Fours days to try to make amends to my family then off to Dubai. I must be mad!]

When the BBC lost the plot

Reading this section of Maureen Gaffney's excellent book Flourishing I was reminded of  Jon Birt's leadership at the BBC and the moment when the organisation forgot this important point.

To flourish, people need to make a connection between the practical things they are doing and some deeper value that motivates them.

So too with organizations. Organizational values such as compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, internal trust and optimism may seem remote from profitability, productivity, quality, customer retention. Yet, studies of organizations across a number of sectors have shown that those which score higher on such values perform significantly better than other organizations on precisely those practical things. Having a sense of goodness is just as important for organizations as for individuals.  

The power of the unassuming web

There is so much bluster and marketing push around the whole social thing. But it is just the web, the internet, gradually creeping into our lives and into our work lives. Modest aspirations, modest claims. That's the way to make social happen. Let it creep at its own pace. Be interested in its twists and turns. Let it find its level and pace - but don't force it. It's like water, stronger than rock. It takes time and it is similarly modest and unassuming. 

The importance of context

I had a bit of a challenging day yesterday. A total of 300 miles of driving through some of the remotest countryside I have ever been in. 

I drove to Kakadu National Park and back from Darwin to visit the aboriginal homelands, see the rock  art at Ubirr, and take a cruise down the East alligator River. Our aboriginal guides on the cruise were superb, sharing some amazing knowledge about the local plants, how to eat them or make weapons from them, how to find water when none appears to be available, and how to kill various animals for food.

I ended up leaving the area later than I intended and realised that this meant driving much of the 150 mile return journey in the dark. Several locals warned me of the dangers of driving at this time of day due to the abundance of significantly large wildlife that can leap out onto the road. I was also very aware of the fact that on the journey out I had only passed two filling stations and nothing else in between. Even other road traffic was scarce having only seen a maximum of 30 other vehicles (including the police car that did me for speeding) all day. The prospect of running out of fuel, hitting some bloody great animal, or even just getting a puncture, seemed very real and intimidating. It struck me that even with the car and my mobile phone (which had no signal most of the time) I could end up in real trouble.

To me this was an unfamiliar, bleak, and intimidating landscape. Yet to our aboriginal guides it is a land full of abundance. All of my accumulated knowledge, and the potential if my phone had a signal to access even more knowledge, meant little or nothing in the circumstances I found myself in. Don't worry I am not going to turn into Ray Mears but it did make me think how useless I could be in the wrong context!