Category: Collaboration

The Location Balancing Act

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

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.

Business Networking – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the Cigarette Shelter

I was reading  the Michael Sampson: Currents blog the other day when I read this:

Is Twitter / Yammer / Socialcast the "new cigarette?"

Your Minster in the SunshineHis question was based on a posting by Joel Stein in Business Week titled “The Secret Cult of Office Smokers”

Joel observes the power of the meetings that occurring every day in the huddles of individuals sharing in the smoking habit.

One of my first bosses was a smoker and I used to marvel at his ability to know things – it didn’t take me long to work out the source of all of his inside information. If something was going to happen he always knew way before it actually occurred, sometimes he would tip us off, but on many occasions he would leave it as a surprise. He’s always be perfectly positioned to take advantage though.

I’ve worked alongside other smokers and without exception they have been well connected, and normally connected above their station in the organisation. There are times when I’ve joined them for the chat because I’ve seen the potential.

Back to Michael’s question: are the social media tools replacing this kind of interaction?

To a certain extent I have found that my connectedness has increased through the use of social media, twitter has connected me with all sorts of knowledgeable and influential people within the IT industry.

Internal connectedness is a bit different, but similar. We run a system based on Jive internally and my ability to connect across the organisational structure has been great. I’ve written more extensively on some of the topics I write about on this blog, on the internal system, resulting in a number of very valuable connections with highly connected people in the organisation.

I have to say, though, it’s still not the smoking corner. There’s still not the serendipitous moments that you get from a chat over some tobacco in a paper sleeve, and I’m not sure why. I’m sure some of it is because the level of honest and openness on the lies of twitter is nothing like the honest we’d display in a much smaller group. But I think there are other factors too.

Playing a new game

Some wisdom from Seth Godin today:

Spring Flowers 2010A car is not merely a faster horse.And email is not a faster fax. And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard. And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex.

Play a new game, not the older game but faster.

I work alongside IT organisations who are often so focussed on getting “more for less” they completely miss the game that is changing around them.

So often the question is focussed on upgrading rather than transitioning – “if I upgrade the corporate email system will it be cheaper” rather than “what opportunities do we have for delivering communications in a better way”. People don’t want corporate email they want communication, and while they are all looking at the corporate email system this thing called social networking comes up behind them and changes the game.

Story, Biography and Metaphor

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.

The unwanted results of Social Networking

The other day I was contacted by a friend saying: “Do you know Bob McBill?” (Not his real name)

Light through a filter“I don’t think so” was my reply.

“Well he appears as one of your connections in (insert social networking tool)”

“Oh, really, why?”

“He’s just been sent to prison for (insert serious crime)”

Now it turns out that Bob McBill wasn’t actually one of my direct connections, he was a connection of a connection, but still, it got me thinking.

What does it say to other people that I have a social networking link to a criminal?

Would anyone infer something about me from this connection?

What would it do to my reputation if they did?

In what ways am I handing over control of my reputation to individuals outside my control?

How many other potentially embarrassing connections do I have out there?

Just to be clear, there isn’t anything to infer, this person wasn’t a direct connection anyway, but still…

And yes, I am going to be more careful about my social connections in the future.

Caffe Business Observations

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

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.

Social Networks – Unexpected Results in the Snow

I continue to be surprised by how deeply engrained in our day to day life social networking has become. I had another example of this last week.

Snow in the TableWe’ve been having some extreme weather in the UK over the last few weeks (just to be clear, this is extreme for the UK, it’s normal for other places in the world).

We had for the third time this year a lot of snow starting last Monday, travelling from Scotland and working its way to the South – or so I thought.

We’d already had our snow on Monday evening and Tuesday morning so continued with my plan to travel north to Edinburgh on Wednesday. Having check the weather forecast and road information I concluded that I’d be fine to travel. No more snow was expected and the roads were clear.

This is where social networking kicked in – on Tuesday I had twittered:

Tomorrow I am supposed to be in Edinburgh – what do you think the chances are?

As it happened I had a lovely drive up the M6 as far as Carlisle, enjoying the view of the snow over the Lake District. Passing Carlisle, it started to snow and by the time I’d got to Lockerbie we were down to a single lane and managing to do little more than 20mph. At that point I again twittered:

Did I get to Edinburgh ? No. I got to Lockerbie before turning back.

That evening I received a phone call from my Mum – who isn’t on any social network. She was wanting to make sure that I was OK and that I was home.

I had deliberately not twittered that I was setting off because I didn’t want some people to worry, but still my Mum had found out even though she has no simple way of seeing my updates.

How did she know? She’d been speaking to my sister, who’d seen my original update in Facebook. That wasn’t something I was expecting.

I’m going to have to be even more careful in the future.

http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=72157623171858968&text=Winter%202009/2010
Created with flickr slideshow.

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

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?

CSC and Collaboration 2.0

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

CSC C3 case-studyhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=e20-csc-c3-casestudy-final-091117181309-phpapp01&stripped_title=csc-c3-casestudy

Well done Simon and Charlie.