Graham Chastney

One of the most popular blogs on this site is the one on Rich Pictures. I think that pictures are fabulous, so I really liked Dan Roam’s article on ChangeThis called Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business.

In this article Dan tells a simple story about getting directions in Moscow and the four different ways in which he could have been given the directions.

• The Narrative
• The Checklist
• The Map
• The Landmark Sketch

and Dan describes each one of them:

All four of these sets of directions are correct. Following any one of them should in theory get us to the Gagarin Museum in the same amount of time. But here’s my question: I’d like you to look over the four options again, really think about it for a moment, and then ask yourself this: if we actually were in Moscow, which option would you prefer?

The powerful communication methods are the map and the landmark sketch – without a doubt. We all know it’s true, so why do we use so many words in business?

I believe that for practical, business-oriented problem solving—when you and your team need to address something right in front of you right now, the visual options—the map and the landmark sketch are without question the way to go. The fact that we so rarely see these kinds of pictures used in business is why I write my books.

Over the last two days I’ve filled sheet after sheet of flipchart paper with diagrams. We’ve been talking through a solution with a customer, a solution that takes thousands of words to document. The documents don’t communicate, they just document. I had presentation slides and charts, but I knew that they wouldn’t communicate either. Simple blocks and lines on a chart with a commentary – that’s what communicated.

There’s something very powerful about a conversation held over a piece of paper, and I think it’s something intrinsic in who we are, but something that we suppress as adults. My reason for saying this is the difference that I see in the way that children react to paper table-cloths and the reaction of adults. What do children do with paper table-cloths? They write and draw on them, they get creative. What do adults do? They protect them, even though we know that paper table-cloth is going straight in the bin as soon as we have left. Why is that? One of the reasons, I think, is that the children’s  need to be creative is fresh and unimpaired, as adults we’ve come to suppress it so much that we don’t even think about it.

If you haven’t come across ChangeThis before then you really are missing out on a treat. I really like their manifesto.

This is a note to self – use fewer words:

This is also one of my sayings so thought I would share it:

Unfortunately in the job that I do saying these words rarely makes a difference to the outcome – and the effort that I have to put in to help someone with their “lack of planning”.

The thing is, I feel like I know the gentleman in the picture, but can’t place him?

You might be interested to see what CSC is up to internally with Enterprise 2.0 type technologies:

Well done Simon and Charlie.

I’m not sure whether this counts as a real fully fledged concept, or just an idea, or actually even whether there is a difference.

The idea comes from Jonah Lehrer over on The Frontal Cortext blog where he reflects on the diversity of music that we enjoy (his pretext is the events at the MTV awards with Kanye West and Taylor Swift).

It got me thinking, in what other ways are we culturally plastic:

• Food: The range of food available in the UK is incredible. Foods from every country in the world and even fusions of different food types. We skip between them without really thinking about it, something that my grandparents would never have done.
• Video/Television/Films: I know a few people who will only go to the movies to see a certain type of film, but there aren’t many of them. And the range of film genre is increasing all of the time.
• Reading: Looking at the book shelf beside me there is a huge variety of material. There’s no Mills and Boon, but apart from that there is practically every other type of writing.

So what impact does this plasticity have on the world of work?

Teams that accept diversity work better and produce stronger results. As people become more tolerant of, and learn to enjoy cultural differences hopefully this will be reflected in teams. This will be especially true for international teams which will become more prevalent as technology enables it.

I suspect, to, that people we start to choose the places where they work on the basis of the diversity of the culture. Places with a monolithic culture we be regarded  as stale and dull. Skilful business managers will be able to create diverse cultures that are highly productive.

Some of you who read this blog know my quite well, others of you who only read about me here are starting to know me.

So I thought I’d ask the question.

What would you like me to write about?

Not sure why I’ve never though to ask before.

I’m writing this post sitting on a full train using a Blackberry while reading an article that states "within the next few years as many as 20 million people will be choosing to work one or more days a week in third-place facilities – that is, public or private spaces built specifically for the temporary or semi-temporary business purposes of companies and individuals".

And I’ve spent most of today in a meeting in a hotel lobby…it’s a changing world of work.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks getting my head around some prices, some costs and there influence on some negotiations.

Sometime the negotiations can feel a bit like this:

Once I get out of the other side of this work I am hoping to be writing a little more often – but you never can know for sure.

I have to admit that communication is a complete mystery to me. I like to think things through logically,  but I’ve never been able to fathom communication.

I’m constantly amazed by the things that people regard as exciting because they understand it, even if it’s not really very exciting at all. I’m even more amazed by the things people regard as exciting even though they don’t understand it.

I’m sure that the answer is in communication, but that is still a mystery to me.

A little while I started out on a mission to have more meaningful conversations. My aim was to have one every day, well that has proved impractical, but I have still managed a significant number.

What I am starting to conclude is that communication is more of an art than a science. What I mean by this is that communication involves far more emotion and heart than logic. Engage with people’s feelings and they are open to communication, engage with their logic and most people aren’t. Be passionate about something and they will engage, give them the facts and they probably won’t.

Why don’t people engage with emails? Because it’s just communicating facts.

Why do people engage with video conferencing? Because it engages their feelings.

The challenge and the mystery is born out of the subjectivity of any art which means that people engage with it in completely different ways.

How you engage with the picture at the start of this blog depends on so many different things. I was there so I know what it felt like, but how the picture makes you feel depends upon your history, your upbringing, your experiences, your preferences. Each one of these will influence your emotional reaction to it.

I’d like there to be a formula for communication, but there isn’t one, I’ll just have to learn to be a better artist.

I have identities all over the Internet, and internally; blog, flickr, linkedin, facebook, etc. each one of them have some form of a personal profile where I get to talk about who I am and what I do.

There are lots of very clever people working on the problem of how I get to these things without having to authenticate everywhere. But I want more than that, I want to be able to have a single place where I have my profile information.

Why should I need to tell each of these systems the same information? If I change my job it should be updated within the relevant systems.

The emerging identity federation model probably has a lot to tell us in this area. People started from the premise that identities should be stored in one place and every other system should trust that one place. This didn’t work, because there wasn’t trust between all of the systems. The same will be true for profiles. I don’t want everyone to see all of the profile, I only want the people to see the parts of my profile that are relevant to the access that they have and the system that they are using.

Technologies like Facebook Connect go someway towards resolving this problem, but I’m not sure that they have really learnt the lessons from the identity people.

I want to be in control of what goes where, but I don’t want to have to maintain the same stuff everywhere.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in thinking that this is a problem, and as the famous quote goes: “"The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed." – William Gibson. So I’m also sure that I have missed some form of amazing development in this area that has the potential to make my winging sound like the ramblings of an idiot.

Anyone else think that this is a problem we need to get resolved?

Last night I decided that I needed to have more meaningful conversations to hone my communications skills.

I have, at least, managed it for one day.

Today’s conversation was on Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, etc. with a colleague who has been asked to write some short opinion type papers for a customer on the subjects and is only just learning themselves.

It was a good conversation because it turned out to be a real communication challenge. How do you communicate this stuff in a couple of pages and give some value. it’s easy to write a lot and still not give any value. How do you even talk about it without using buzz-words and meaningless acronyms?

It made me realise that I need to invest more time in making this stuff simpler so that any communication can be of real value. The conversation felt a bit like I was putting someone under a waterfall and asking them to drink it all in which is never very effective.

One day own, discovered some challenges, now I need to turn them into lessons.