Monthly Archives: July 2009

Internal Creative Commons Licensing

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One of the things that has irked me throughout my career has been the way that people have used and abused my work inside the organisation.Glen Coe

I’ve often seen my work passed off as someone else’s, on the flip side I’ve always tried to give credit where credit is due.

Sometimes I’m sure that people have passed my work off as theirs for self-serving reasons, on most occasions I’m sure that they don’t do it deliberately (at least that’s what I tell myself).

The way that I feel about different pieces of work varies. Some pieces of work are derivatives of someone else’s work and I’m not overly protective of my part in it; other pieces require a significant amount of effort and I’d like to be rewarded for the effort by, at least, being recognised for it.

Within the organisation in which I work there really isn’t a framework for marking the difference between the types of work. What I think I want is something similar to Creative Commons Licensing, but run at a personal or team level within the organisation.

There are some things I would like to mark as “Share Alike”, but there are other elements that I would prefer “Attribution” for, and yet others where I would like to define a “No Derivatives Work” label.

I’m not talking about a legal framework here, I’m talking about internal recognition. If each piece of work was labelled in this way we would be able to glean all sorts off value from a piece of work beyond what we can currently. As an example, we would know what it genesis was and who the thinkers were behind it.

What do you think?

Team Development: Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing

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There are times when I discover that something I thought was widely known – isn’t. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I blog.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three separate conversations with people about the phases of team development. Swans, swans, swans

These conversations have mostly been within the context of teams that are virtual.

In one particular case the conversation was about a team that is clearly in the “storming” phase. When I said this people looked at me blank, so I went on to explain the process of team development. Once I’d done that people started to understand what needed to be done.

I work across a number of virtual team, quite often these teams get to a phase where they don’t progress, and nothing gets resolved, they get stuck in “storming”.

The main reason for this, in my opinion, is because the technology we use to support such teams is particularly poor during this phase. It’s very difficult to work through the conflicts of a storming phase on a teleconference, if not impossible. People tend to do one of two things; they are either over-aggressive, or passive, neither of which actually resolve the issues. Teams, therefore, languish in the “storming” phase and never get to “norming”.

Another reason is that people don’t understand that they need to go through these phases, because they don’t know that the phases exist. So here’s my summary:

  • Forming – Everyone is on their best behaviour, no-one wants to be the one to step out of line, but neither do people get anything of any real value done.
  • Storming – The first conflict arrives and the team members show their true colours.
  • Norming – Members are getting to know each other. People start to make allowances for each other and realising where everyone’s skills are.
  • Performing – The team runs like clock-work, the leaders don’t have much to do because everyone knows what they are doing.

I have rarely been in a team that is truly “performing”, it takes time and effort to get there.

It’s interesting to note that when I get together with the members of one of the teams that did get to “performing” we quickly move to “norming” with only the minimum of “forming” and “storming”. It’s also interesting to note that one of the teams where we got to “performing” became regarded as a threat by managers and was actively shut down. It’s not always, necessarily, in everyone’s best interest to have a high performance team.

These things are never precise, but I’ve found it a useful model for understanding situations.

Some more information:

Trying out Wordress for BlackBerry

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This post isn’t going to say anything of any real value other than to say that I’m trying out the WordPress Client Beta for BlackBerry.

It looks like it will be a really tidy little application for blogging those ideas that are on my mind and need to be written there and then.

The problem with those ideas is that they aren’t, on consideration, normally that good.

Engaging with Paper and Interactivity

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I was at a session on Friday with a client and a number of our own people.

Blackpool Prom Scuptures at SunsetI could have presented my material (I think I knew most of the answers) and told them my opinion. But I wanted a bit of engagement and I find that people don’t engage with presented material, they become passive, sit back and just receive.

Why did I want engagement? The main reason was that I wanted them to start to own the things that we were talking about.

My solution was simple, but the impact was profound – I got A1 sized print-outs of uncompleted slides and asked everyone to get involved. Rather than starting with a completely blank piece of paper we had somewhere to start from, but there was still plenty to do.

Straight away people were engaged, they were so engaged that it took us a good 15 minutes to explain what we were doing. From the start the discussion was about “we” not “you” – “What are we doing?” Everyone was hooked in right from the beginning.

Armed with the A1 sized pieces of paper and a pen we went on to fill in the information with everyone contributing as we went along, even arguing vehemently about the content. Different people added value and it became a team effort with everyone contributing.

I don’t think that anything was put on the paper that I wouldn’t have put on the slides beforehand. What was different was the commentary that went with it, different people stating one opinion over another. I’m sure that each person who left that session learned something that they wouldn’t have done with a presentation.

The material wasn’t any different, only the media.

I’m not suggesting that we should do all sessions this way but what I am saying is that we still have a lot to understand about interactivity.

  • How would this session have turned out if we had used a 3D world?
  • What if the material had focussed on scenarios?
  • Was it the paper that made it interactive?
  • Was the interactivity partly because the set-up was a bit like a school classroom?
  • Would the session have been the same if we had interacted with a virtual piece of paper?
  • When are you best to simply present?
  • What does art have to teach us?
  • What does journalism have to teach us?

I still have a lot to learn.

Expressions – inside, outside, sideways

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I spend a good deal of my life expressing my thoughts and feelings on all sorts of online communities. Glen Coe

Some of those communities are inside the organisation that I work for, a good deal of this expression, like this blog, is done outside the organisation.

I wrote the other day about all of the ways in which I could waste my time, I did this as a bit of a joke. Truth is that all of the places of expression take time, but there are lots of other challenges to working this way. Here’s my top 10:

  1. Am I repeating myself? – it’s difficult to know what I have said where, sometimes I have to check, sometimes I’ve got it wrong.
  2. Am I saying the right thing? – there are different audiences so I need to make sure that what I say is relevant and doesn’t reference something I said somewhere else.
  3. Am I breaking confidence? – I can say things inside the organisation that I can’t say outside.
  4. Am I giving people the attention that they deserved? – I’m not writing very often on this blog because I’m spending so much time writing inside the organisation. Am I being disrespectful to my external audience, and does it matter?
  5. Are my comments relevant? – Comments are a particular challenge. If I comment inside the organisation I shouldn’t expect people to know about me outside the organisation and the same is true the other way around.
  6. Where do I aggregate information? – If I send my Twitter updates to Facebook are they relevant in Facebook?
  7. Some people will see more than others – some read only one thing that I write, others read a lot of things.
  8. Does the real me come across in a single stream? – If someone only read my Facebook what impression would it give? If they only read my blog would the impression be different?
  9. Should I consolidate? – It’s always better to do one thing well. Would I be better dropping Twitter, Blog, etc.
  10. How do I prioritise? – Is inside more valuable than outside? Is the number of readers significant?

In summary; I sometime feel like I’m in the middle of a social experiment; an experiment that will radically change the way we work over coming years.