Category Archives: Collaboration

The Location Balancing Act

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Yesterday I found myself I seem to be finding myself on an increasing basis.

Chatworth with the FamilyHaving received an urgent meeting request last week for an event which was taking place at a location several hundred miles away from my home and my normal office location I needed to make a decision about attending.

There was a tele-conference option available which I decided to use. On Friday afternoon, however, I received a couple of phone calls stating that my physical presence would be greatly appreciated, necessary even. As a result of the calls I planned to travel. Travel is one of the things that we control quite tightly at my place of work so that  decision meant getting approval and a good deal of messing about.

Within two minutes of being in the meeting room I knew I had a mistake.

The meeting started.

People were presented with a document to review along with some instructions.

People left the meeting room to undertake their reviews.

I was left as the only person in the room reading the document.

While I didn’t mind reviewing the document, that was my role for the day after all, I did mind the physical, financial, man-hour and environmental impact of travelling.

While this is an example of where I’ve unnecessarily travelled, but there are also plenty of occasions where I haven’t travelled but should have. I’ve also used tele-conferencing where video conferencing would have been better, and vice-versa. Sometimes I’ve used email to communicate something when I should really have presented it, and again vice-versa.

Once upon a time it would have been simple. I would have known when I needed to meet someone face-to-face, when a report was required, and when a phone called would suffice. Those few options made things a lot simpler. There was a clear demarcation between the different communications media.

Today we have the joy, and the course, of choice. The challenge is that much of this choice is overlapping in its capability – we need to be able to predict the meeting contents before we can optimise the most appropriate way of interacting.

What I don’t think we yet have is a way of establishing meetings that enables us to understand prior to the event how to make it work best.

I find that, in general, people underestimate the complexity of the interaction that they are going to engage in and in so doing struggle to utilise a technology that is wholly inappropriate to the event. This error is then compounded by our inability to abort wrongly configured interactions.

At some point I’m sure that these issues will all go away and we’ll all be able to interact in a near-real-world manner wherever we are, but for now we need to do a better job of preparing meetings so that we use the right tool for the right job.

Top 10 – Communication Tips

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Communication remains a challenge to many, including myself.

I’ve found that the following tips really help though:

  1. Listening is more important than speaking
  2. If you can, start with a question.
  3. Too many words are more destructive than too few words.
  4. Simplicity is far more difficult to achieve than complexity.
  5. When preparing a message, constantly ask yourself “so what?” and remove everything that is not answering that question.
  6. A conversation is much more valuable than a presentation.
  7. Pictures speak a thousand words, but they may not be the words that you are thinking.
  8. Metaphor and analogy form gateways to understanding.
  9. Tell people a story, they’ll remember the story much longer than they remember the point of the story. The story will then lead them back to the meaning.
  10. Just because it’s interesting to you – doesn’t mean that it’s interesting to anyone else.
  11. Lists are often the worst way of communicating.

Story, Biography and Metaphor

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I’m looking through a document today that is 744 pages long and i know one thing for sure, I’m never going to read this document.

Surveying the landAt home I have another book that I am reading, it’s quite a long document. I am definitely going to read this document.

What’s the difference between the two: story.

One is a business document talking about repositories, artefacts, entities, capability and continuum.

The other is a biography of Guinness, that’s right a biography of the Dublin based brew. It’s a story of the founder Arthur Guinness, about his children and their impact on an organisation and the broader Irish society.

I’ll wrestle with one of these documents to get to the valuable lessons that it needs to teach me; the other book will teach me things without me even knowing it.

I was watching Griff Rhys Jones in Hong Kong on ITV’s “Griff’s Greatest Cities” last night (before turning over for “Outnumbered”). He was sitting in a class doing complicated mental maths in the blink of an eye. He was staggered by the speed that these kids could add and subtract complex number strings. What was the secret of their success, it was the teaching method. Their teacher had brought them up to use a special kind of abacus. Over time the teacher had removed the abacus and told the kids to imagine it. When doing their maths the kinds just pictured the abacus and read out the answer that it gave them. He had found a very powerful metaphor and the kids were exploiting it to great effect.

The other night I noticed a book on the bookshelf that I hadn’t read in a long time. It was a set of stories about a bear. This bear has taught me a number of lessons about life. This is a bear who says that he has very little brain, but there is wisdom to be found in his dealings with the other characters.

I spend most of my life simplifying things so that people can comprehend the essence of them and sometimes it’s to help them to subscribe to the vision that is being painted. I try my hardest to find a a story, a biography or a metaphor to communicate. These analogies have two very powerful results, they allow people to comprehend, but they also live on in peoples thoughts, they allow people to explore beyond the simple into the more complex. They can venture to the end of the metaphor, even if it breaks at that point, they’ve learnt something, if it doesn’t they can venture further. It’s a bit like a seed starting to germinate, as the leaves grow skyward, so the roots grow down into the ground.

I have one simple request, lets stop writing 744 page documents of business speak, let’s tell more stories.

Caffe Business Observations

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I’ve spent this afternoon working in a Caffe and it’s been an incredibly interesting experiment in people observations.

PisaMy seat is in the corner of the room so I can see most of what is going on and I’ve been here for a couple of hours so far.

It’s a weekday in one of the UK’s larger cities and it has been busy in here all afternoon. There was a slight lull about 14:00 but other than that every table has had someone sitting at it.

Of the 13 tables I can currently see, four of them are occupied by single people (mine included). Only one of these people is doing anything “social”, everyone else is typing on a keyboard or writing in a report, or something similar. At least four other tables are occupied by groups of people having business meetings; some of them more overt than others.

The first thing I notice about this working environment is how insecure it is.

I know something about this city and something that is going to happen here that is all “hush hush” as the advertising executive said to the sales person he was dealing with. I also know how much it costs to advertise in the sales person’s magazine.

I know when the two people in the table opposite are next going to meet and where.

I haven’t had to do anything special to gain this information, I’ve just sat here and overheard.

The other thing I’ve noticed is how essential the mobile business device has become.

I’m the only person using a fully fledged laptop, everyone else is making arrangements and taking notes on either an iPhone or a BlackBerry. Contacts are being exchange, meeting arranged, even sales figures discussed, all on the small screen.

Another observation is how attentive people are.

I attend lots of business meetings where people look as if they would rather be sat on the toilet. That’s not the case for most of these meetings, people are talking, interacting, negotiating, illustrating, gesticulating even.  They are engaged in their business. It could be that the type of people who come to such a place are the type of people who are naturally engaged, but I suspect it’s more likely that the atmosphere in here is more conducive to debate and discussion.

The final observations is that I haven’t seen a single tie all afternoon.

All of the business is taking place in casual dress, some smarter than others.

Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business

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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.

Tower Bridge - Freshly PaintedIn 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.

A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Does Not Constitute An Emergency On Mine

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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?

Concept of the Day: Cultural Plasticity

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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.

PisaThe 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.

What would you like me to write about?

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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.Tuscany 2009

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.