Innovation – Page 21 – Graham Chastney

What would you like me to write about?

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.

Team Forming – A Personal Perspective

By far the most popular post on this blog over the last few weeks has been my recent one on team development and forming-storming-norming-performing.

I’ve been involved in hundreds of teams and, in my opinion, the most important factor in the effectiveness of these teams has been the formation phase.

If a child isn’t given the right food in its early years its growth will be stunted and it will never reach its full potential. This is the same for teams that aren’t given the right start in life.

What is the right start though?

I mainly work on technical teams and there are, from personal experience, a number of things that, if done right, put the team on a firm foundation:

Early Face-to-Face Meeting

There might not be any tangible benefits to an initial meeting, but there are a lot of intangible benefits. These intangible benefits are very important for good ongoing development.

At a good face-to-face meeting the team will start to build a rapport that will be vital in the storming phase.

We don’t have any technology, yet, that replaces the power of face-to-face meetings.

An Openness to Communicate

Secrets are a huge problem for team development. Hidden agendas are very destructive. In order to overcome these issue people need to communicate.

A Lack of Pre-conceived Ideas and an Abundance of Open Minds.

I have been in many a team where someone (sometimes me) believed that they had all of the answers and all that anyone needed to do was to get on with what they said. This might produce a quick result, but isn’t likely to produce the best result.

Where members of a team have had a previous bad experience of working together this can add to the problem.

Focussing on the Solution

Some people will always look on the bright side of life, and others will look on the opposite, negative side. Where members of a team focus, quickly, on the possible solutions the team formation is a good one.

Working Beyond the Boundaries

People are normally part of a team because they have a role, or a skill, or a position. If they only do the job that they are their to do, the team is likely to remain as a set of parts and not become a unit.

Valuing Diversity

Different members of the team will have different skills and insights. An openness to recognising and valuing these differences will let the team form more quickly.

I’m sure that there are all sorts of things that I’ve forgotten but these will do for now. Do you have some that you think are vital?

Digital Distraction

Having written about the things that I could waste my time doing I really liked this visualisation of Digital Distraction.

My New Fear of Working from Home

I have a new fear – I have become afraid of working from home. I’m not talking about a panic type fear this is more of a niggling nag that means I am more likely to choose to go into the office even when I have no need to be there. As I have done today.

As with most fear this new fear of working from home is primarily irrational.

Throughout 2008 and for much of the early part of 2009 I worked from home. This was effective, productive and in many ways less stressful. The facilities are better at home and I get to interact with the family more often. The coffee is certainly better.

So where has this fear come from? There are, as you’d expect, a number of elements.

One of my fears is a distrust of my own self-control. While the working environment at home is much better than it is in the office it is also much more distracting. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never spent days distracted on things that aren’t work, I’m just worried that I will. Everyone who owns a home knows that there are always jobs to be done. It’s an irrational fear because there are just as many distractions in the office, they just look a bit more like work.

The self control fear also works the other way though, I worry about my ability to constrain work. I can be a bit obsessive about things and it’s easier to be sucked into work when you are working from home. It’s more difficult to shut the door and to declare it finished.

Another fear is the fear of missing out. What if I am missing out on something important or exciting? If I am at home am I always going to be second choice. At the crux it’s a lack of confidence in my own abilities and the value that I bring. If I was confident in my own ability I wouldn’t worry about being left on the sidelines. The irrationality of this fear is that the people who I interact with are rarely in the same office as me even when I am in the office myself.

Loneliness is another worry. There have certainly days when I have worked from home where I have taken a walk to the shops mainly to speak face-to-face with someone.

The last fear is a bit more of a personal one and probably the most irrational. In my mind I think that I get more headaches when I work from home, and I also think that these headaches turn into migraines more often at home than in the office. It seems like I’m stating the obvious, but I don’t like migraines and the fear of them can linger at the back of my head. Going into the office lessens that fear.

Am I the only one? Is this something that other home workers feel?

Do I need to just “get back on the bike” and push away my irrational fears?

That’s amazing – Creating a photograph book

The other day I was listening to a radio programme about book binding (no, I’m not sure why I was listening, if that’s what you are thinking). This programme talked about the elaborate process that the ancient book-binders used to go through to create what would become a work of art. One particular book that was mentioned took 2 years to bind – not to create, to bind.

On returning from holidays we wanted an physical album of photographs to show people; it’s still a much better way of interacting with the images in many situations.

What did I do?

Downloaded the photographs from my camera.
Sorted through them for the ones I wanted to put in the album.
Downloaded some code from a web site where I was going to get the photos printed.
Started the code and imported the photos.
Looked a the book that it created automatically and made a few changes.
Sent the book for printing.
3 days later (because of the weekend) my photo album had arrived.

The album looks wonderfully professional and cost me less than the price of a new shirt and only about twice the price of a paperback at the local book store.

I’m not suggesting that my photograph album compares with ancient book binding – but the change in the process of creating a book is incredible. What’s more I undertook this transaction using commodity technology and a service from a budget supermarket. It’s not specialised, it’s not “out there”, it’s normal life.

Sometimes it’s good to remember how far we have come.

Internal Creative Commons Licensing

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.

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?

Engaging with Paper and Interactivity

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

I 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

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

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:

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.
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.
Am I breaking confidence? – I can say things inside the organisation that I can’t say outside.
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?
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.
Where do I aggregate information? – If I send my Twitter updates to Facebook are they relevant in Facebook?
Some people will see more than others – some read only one thing that I write, others read a lot of things.
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?
Should I consolidate? – It’s always better to do one thing well. Would I be better dropping Twitter, Blog, etc.
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.

I could spend hours doing this…

Discipline is such a key issue for productive work especially when there are so many distractions around. Let me give you my ultimate time wasting recipe:

Check your corporate email for unread items.
Read the first two emails by which time you should be bored
Wonder what is happening on Twitter.
Browse through the fresh set of updated. It is essential that you are following enough people to guarantee a fresh crop of tweets every time you look. This is easily done by following a number of news accounts.
Once bored of tweets skip over to your RSS reader to see if there are any updates. Like twitter it is vital to be following a whole stack of feeds. The syndicated and group blogs are the best for guaranteeing updates on every visit, LifeHacker and BetaNews are good examples.
Read posts until bored. The key is to never get to the end of your unread list ensuring that return visits result in further reading.
Continuing the blog theme jump over to your WordPress Dashboard. This is the first of many information sources that you are convinced give you important information each time you visit.
From your WordPress dashboard take particular interest in one or maybe two vital statistics justifying your next stop – Google Analytics.
Google Analytics will highlight some interesting searches that have reached your site – it always does. Justify to yourself a quick trip to Google Webmaster Tools for further information.
If there is any danger of you getting to the end of the statistics before you have successfully wasted enough of your valuable time you can also skip through the Bing Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Webmaster tools. Three search tools are normally enough, but if you want to waste even more time other search engines are available.
Your next stop is your personal email – again, read a few posts but never get to the end of the unread items available.
Hopefully your personal email will highlight some justification for going to Facebook, but if it doesn’t just go there anyway. Don’t waste your time on applications or silly games – that would be a real waste of time. Spend time reading status updates and looking at photos of people you have never met.
It’s time now to graze through some of the corporate tools that you have available. Portals and dashboards provide more information than you could possible consume. This can soon be justified as work even when you are only mooching around. Justifiable time wasting is the best form.
The next activity that is vital to your time wasting credibility is your ability to browse around new sites. The BBC is particularly good for this there are endless possibilities in news and Sport.

If you are in danger of having to do some real work, by getting to the end of the list, you can, at any point, return to the top of the list.

If you have followed the guidelines correctly there should always be something to do.

Also, remember that you can carry on these same distractions when away from the office by use of a SmartPhone or other such device. Location should not be an inhibitor.

Following this recipe should ensure that you always look busy and avoid unnecessary activities that may result in something being produced. Alternatively, you could just redefine these activities as work and then you will have completed everything there is to complete.

Working through this kind of distraction reaction process is what I’m sure many people do and will do, but it isn’t good for you, or for your brain. Being able to cope with the lure of these attention giving sirens will be a defining feature of the future workforce.

Working on a day of important interruptions

Interruptions have a massive negative impact on productivity. You might think that you can easily switch from one place to another but you can’t. every time you switch you have a period of time when you are not being productive at doing what you are doing.

With this in mind there are many time management and activity management philosophies around that help you to focus on the important things and to drive out the interruptions. Most of the time I would agree, but today is one of those days that is an exception.

Today the important things are the interruptions. There are a set of people who are working away on things and they need help doing it, they don’t know when they need help so they need to be able to interrupt.

That leaves me with the challenge of staying productive between the interrupts.

I don’t want to start anything significant because I’ll just spend all day being frustrated.

I can’t sit around waiting for the interrupts because I’m likely to fall asleep and then miss the interrupts.

I don’t want to go and look for the interruptions because that would interrupt the people doing the productive work.

So what do i do?

It’s a dilemma.

I’m up-to-date on my email.

I’m up-to-date on my feeds.

I’m up-to-date on my twitter.

I almost wish that i was behind on my administration.

Slow Logon v Slow Applications

I hear a lot of people complaining about the amount of time it takes them to start their device and get working. I hear this complaint a lot more often than complaints about slow applications. I’m sure that people have both problems – but they complain about one, massively, above the other.

Slow logon is an issue that is certainly very visible to people, but I wonder how much impact on someone’s days to day productivity it really has. So I’ve done some analysis comparing the impact of slow logon with the potential impact of slow applications.

It can be seen from these numbers that a 15 minute interruption for logon would be roughly equivalent to me of my applications going 4% slower.

Given the choice of slow logon or slow applications which would I choose?

I would choose slow logon over slow applications every time. Why? Because it has a lesser impact on my productivity but also I’d rather have a single 20 minute interruption at the beginning of the day.

Also, I’m not necessarily comparing apples with apples here. The numbers for application usage are times when I am really working on a computer. The numbers for slow logon are times when I might have been working, but equally, I might have been getting myself a coffee, or talking to a colleague.

Obviously, I’d rather not have either!

So how did I get to these numbers?

The logon numbers are based on the amount of non-productive time I’d have, assuming that I logon 6 times in the working week and I’m not doing any work for the duration of the logon time.

The application numbers are based on the amount of time that I have used my applications since the beginning of the year according to Wakoopa.

For all of this I’ve assumed that I work an 8 hour day, which isn’t true, but it’s near enough and doesn’t change the ratios only the absolute numbers. hence there is quite a close alignment of the application impact on overall productivity.

(Update: I noticed a mistake in my numbers so I’ve changed it a little)

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