How to change behaviour!

Volume control on mob rule

I worry a bit about mob rule. Not a lot - just a little. 

There is huge potential to "mobilise" vast numbers of people around a particular idea or opinion in tools like Twitter. While mostly a good thing this can also turn ugly. It can easily turn into a mob and as with any mob damage can be done and people can be hurt if too many get swept up in the crowd.

However we can all play our part in putting the brakes on. Most of us who have been blogging for any length of time learn that moment when you decide whether to amplify a weak signal or turn down the volume. The decision that even if something is noteworthy you won't fan the flames. 

I am optimistic that once more people learn to recognise this moment and apply it to the newer tools like Twitter we will probably manage to stay on an even keel. 

Probably ....

Congratulations to NYK

One of my clients, the shipping firm NYK Group, have won Gold this year in the communication and collaboration section of the Intranet Innovations Awards. The following is snipped from the competition summary:

At a glance

NYK Group’s business is global shipping and it’s one of the world’s leading transportation companies with over 770 shipping vessels.

The NYK News Room is wiki-based, and thus multi-faceted in its content, subscription options and viewing opportunities. It provides numerous improvements over the existing information service used by NYK, and is cheaper and has a far more extensive ‘reach’ to employees

Why this won

• Uses wiki and RSS technology within the intranet to solve two critical business issues, on a global scale
• The News Room provides a valuable blueprint for global news communication, syndication and collaboration
• It’s achieved cost-savings through reducing the number of subscriptions to printed journals, replacing them with a wider variety of online offerings that reach more employees
• The News Room saw widespread take up by employees and encouraged further participation

Nice one guys!

A blast from my past

Another look back into my blogging past - this time to December 2001

Maybe it's just me....
I've been looking after my youngest daughter (one year old) all day today and we had a great day on our own!

But for some inexplicable reason I ended up in tears, sobbing as I sat on a seat in the bathroom as she played in her bath.

Maybe it was her unconstrained glee at splashing so much that the whole bathroom ended up soaked. Maybe it was the complete trust and optimisim in her eyes which touched a nerve in my own psyche...reminded me of the small child inside of me.

Maybe it was just the feeling of loving someone so much....so much more than myself, so completely and utterly that I forgot myself......

Maybe I cried because of the sadness of holding onto myself so much of the time, protecting myself......maybe I was jealous?

The BBC, Enterprise 2.0 and management bollocks

I have been helping my wife edit some short videos she recently made for a client. The whole thing was shot and edited on what is disparagingly called "consumer" kit but, even though I say so myself, ended up looking remarkably professional. In fact you'd be hard pushed to tell it part from output costing thousands. In terms of story telling the means of production, and indeed of distribution, is most definitely in the hands of each of us to an extent that hasn't been true for decades.  

Then I found myself watching Strictly Come Dancing last night and marvelling at the BBC's ability to pull together such a large scale, complex, and highly professional operation. I found myself lapsing back into thinking that only a big organisation like the BBC could produce something like this. But then it wasn't "the BBC" that did it. It was a collection of highly skilled individuals working together. The number of full time craft staff has been being cut back since my own early days as a manager and certainly a high proportion of the most skilled staff are freelancers. The programme will have been put together by teams assembled on the basis of recommendation -  networks of trusting and trusted professionals. Even the directors and producers may well have been freelance. The whole thing could, and indeed might, have been pulled together without the need of the BBC.

Trust me -  I know. I was a manager of half of my 21 years at the BBC, the last few at a senior level. I know the extent to which people in suits sit in meetings "playing at shops" while others get on with doing things - very often in spite of the obstacles thrown in their way by the organisation whose espoused purpose is to support them. But it isn't. It is to perpetrate itself. It is like most, if not all, organisations that get to a certain size. They lose the plot and forget that they are there to serve an original purpose. They become a self perpetuating end in themselves.

This is the root of the biggest problem I have with most Enterprise 2.0 thinking. It is really little different from the institutional, centralised, professionalised thinking that we already have. It is about large scale corporate entities with large scale corporate budgets. It is about centralised technology decisions made by professionalised managers. It is about a monster recreating itself in its own image. It is emphatically not about getting more done better for less. To do so would take too much of a radical repositioning by people brought up from kindergarten to think that what we have now is the only way to get things done.

Our sense of right and wrong needs to keep up with the speed of our technologies.

This thoughtful piece about the Fort Hood shootings by Paul Carr yet again raises the issue that our biggest chalenge with new communications technologies is not the tools themselves but our ability to make appropriate and responsible use of them. I am confident that we will collectively work this out but in the short term mistakes will be made and we need to be ready for them and learn from them.

[Warning the piece contains a link to a video of the death of Neda Agha Soltan. I haven't watched it and believe linking it to it was a mistake. Knowing the video exists is enough]

Management of the future

Sitting here watching my daughter deftly tweak her Sims - managing their complex lives, changing parameters, watching outcomes and deciding longer term strategies - it's hard not to be convinced that her generation will make much better managers than our current incumbents.

Castells on Anarchism and the internet

Anarchism’s great difficulty has always been reconciling personal and local autonomy with the complexities of daily life and production in an industrialized world on an interdependent planet. And here technology turns out to be anarchism’s ally more so than Marxism’s. Instead of large factories and gigantic bureaucracies (socialism’s material base), the economy increasingly operates through networks (the material foundation of organizational autonomy). And instead of the nation-state controlling territory, we have city-states managing the interchange between territories. All this is based on the Internet, mobile phones, satellites, and informational networks that allow local-global communication and transport at a planetary scale. This is not only my interpretation; it is also explicit in the discourse of the social movements, as Jeffrey Juris’s recent book on the topic splendidly documents. There too we see a call for the dissolution of the state and the construction of an autonomous social organization based on individuals and affinity groups, debating, voting and acting through an interactive network of communication. Is this utopia? No, it is ideology. Consider the distinction: utopia prefigures a desired world. Ideology configures practice. With utopia one dreams. With ideology one struggles. Anarchism is an ideology. And neo-anarchism is an instrument of struggle that appears commensurate with the needs of the twenty-first century social revolt.

from negations via Pat Kane

We want more control not less

But not of others - of ourselves!

I am more and more convinced that while command and control becomes less effective as a way of getting things done it doesn't mean that things get sloppy. We will all need to exercise more control of ourselves. Of our time, of our knowledge, even of our excesses. This will take more discipline not less but of a different kind. It is something many people will need to learn.

Small people loosely joined

Apologies to David Weinberger for mangling his "Small pieces loosely joined" description of the internet but I have been meaning to post for a while about the "people power" aspects of the web.

Lots of things have come together to trigger this post so bear with me as I go through them: 

• People's inclination to describe the business use of social tools as "bottom up". I always resist these attempts, preferring to argue that they are of as much interest to middle and senior people as those lower down the organisational ladder. Everyone has a need to communicate more effectively and everyone is a node in the network whatever their hierarchical status.
• The use of the word social in social media is always problematic and makes people jumpy especially when it is used in conjunction with business. Americans seem particularly sensitive to this assuming some vague association with socialism or even worse communism!
• Dave Snowden has over the years chided me for being anti organised religion while at the same time being evangelical for my own particular world vew. I counter this by saying that I don't care what people think. I don't want them to think what I think. I just want them think and to talk to each other about what they are thinking more than they do now on the assumption that if we all do that we will get somewhere better than where we are now.
• Someone once described me as an organisational anarchist and while I was quietly chuffed at this, and while anarchism originally meant the ultimate in democracy, it still carries negative connotations for most.
• Yesterday Sheryl Breuker wrote about the risks of those who she calls social media moguls getting too big for their boots (my phrase) and while I might not agree with all of her choices of examples I certainly agree with the risk.
• Also yesterday at a conference I was speaking at Jonathan MacDonald coined the phrase involvisim and while I appreciate where he is coming from I don't warm to the word. 

In fact I don't warm to any of the "ism" words. Neither communism, socialism, anarchism nor libertarianism are right. There is something else going on here that is to early for an ism but that is really interesting. It is not grandiose enough to support an ism. It is about small people loosely joined. It is small and personal in essence but powerful in combination. It is not about people being insignificant but about being unassuming.It is not about being individualistic but about being loosely joined.

It is probably worth an ism but not just yet!

My Messiness Spectrum

I have loads of precise contact categories in Daylite (my CRM), twelve in Google Reader, five in Facebook and will continue to have no lists in Twitter.

Facebook in regulated environments

Interesting to read this story from Reuters about the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in the US taking the use of Facebook seriously and working out how to make it work in highly regulated industries.

FINRA has set up a task force comprised of industry representatives "to explore how regulation can embrace technology advancements in ways that can improve the flow of information between firms and their customers without compromising investor protection."

Pay attention!

Interesting reading Gretchen Ruben's interview with Maggie Jackson over at The Happiness Project . Maggie has a book out called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.

I am not sure that the internet or technology necessarily makes us more easily distracted. I can remember finding all sorts of pointless things to do whenever I had an essay to write at university. Maybe it makes the distractions feel more useful but nonetheless distracting? 

I am also not sure about any coming Dark Age but I do believe that people have to take more responsibility for where they put their attention and their efforts.So much more is possible and so much more takes up our attention. Making the most of that scarce resource is going to matter more and more.

Genies still stuck in bottles.

Johnnie Moore wrote today:

All this inventive technology is being made available to just about anyone with a web connection. How does it compare for engagement and collaboration with anything inside the firewall of organisations? I've argued before that, over the last few years, the technological advantage has shifted massively away from companies to individuals. I think we may only have scratched the surface of the impact this will have.

On a daily basis I am reminded just how constrained people still working in corporate environments are compared to what is possible, and indeed easy and cheap, for me as a freelancer. This is not only in terms of technology but also in terms of use of time and productivity.

It is madness that we burden the clever people in our organisations in these ways and the bigger the organisation the worse it gets! 

Blasts from my past

Given that I now have nearly nine years worth of blogging to draw on I thought it might be interesting to reach back to some of my better posts and bring them back into the light of day! I am going to only do this once in a while and will tag them "pastblast".

First one is from June 2002

One step at a time
While climbing the hill last Sunday I was reminded again of how many life lessons there are in hill-walking - all those outward bound courses weren't so daft.

If when climbing a hill you are constantly looking up to see how far you have to travel and worrying about how far you have to go it can be an incredibly frustrating and enervating experience. If you are lucky each time you look up you will have seen small progress up what seems an interminably long and arduous slope. If you are unlucky that slope will have been a false summit and you will have an even bigger slope facing you after it. By constantly looking ahead and wanting to be higher up you are likely to spend the whole day annoyed and frustrated. This same effect applies to most tasks in life whether it is writing a book, managing a project at work or painting a room at home. If you worry about what you still have to accomplish and are focused on how little you have done so far then task can seem insurmountable.

The trick in all cases is to enjoy the moment. On the hill if you savour the sensations of each step - the movement of your muscles, the stretching and pulling, the warmth as they work - then the effort seems interesting and pleasurable instead of an interminable slog. If you enjoy the sensation of the environment around you - feel the crunching of the rocks under your feet, the cold slipperynesss of stone as you use your hands to steady yourself - you will be much more aware of the textures and colours around you and the infinite variety they represent. Instead of getting annoyed at the grass you are slipping on look closely at the different shades of green, the patterns of the intertwining grasses, the brightness and beauty of the wild flowers dotted in amongst the grass. All of this detail and interest focuses you on the moment and will mean that the next time you look up you will be amazed at how far you have traveled.

If you go into every event looking forward to when it is over or miss the pleasures of every moment because you are anticipating the pleasures of the next one then you will go through life incredibly frustrated. If we focus on the moment and the detail and wonder of our tasks then we can complete them with much less stress and possibly even enjoy the experience.

There's no place like home

And this is as true online as off.

I still bear the scars from when we changed the forum tool at the BBC and, despite my best efforts to take folks with us, many still reacted as if I had walked into their homes and changed the lounge wallpaper. They were right. It was as if I had. And to be honest I wasn't that keen on the new wallpaper myself anyway ...

But whatever. The point is that if you have done things right then people have a high degree of ownership of online spaces. They invest in them emotionally let alone in terms of time and effort.

Given all this I found is surprisingly moving to read this open letter to "Whoever Controls The Fate Of FriendFeed" in which a user makes a plea to keep the servers running whatever happens to the service.

It's all about finding stuff

I have written before that the usefulness of the web is about learning and finding stuff, whether people or information. This becomes clear watching people use social tools inside organsations to ask "Where can I find the right person to help me do ...." or "Which is the document I should read to learn to ..."

Interesting therefore to read today this article about Sharepoint and enterprise search; that Bing and Google are to start indexing Twitter; and that Facebook is going to make public updates available to search.

80% of everything is crap

On Leo Laporte’s Net@Night show he quoted the fact that YouTube has ten hours of video uploaded every minute of every day. He then quoted Theodore Strurgeon who claimed that “80% of everything is crap”. As Leo said, even if it is worse than that and 99% of everything is crap then this leaves one per cent of excellence. This means that every minute there are six minutes of excellent video being made available - more than we would ever be able to watch!

Stormy weather

Nice to be the cover feature in this month's Point Zero magazine with my article on cloud computing and its impact on organisational culture. I am also really looking forward to speaking on the subject at The Cloud Computing World Forum in London next week.

Liberating Management

I just came up with this as possible title for an event I am doing next year but it occurred to me that it is very much what I aspire to do.

I know I may sometimes come across as "anti" management but I am not - I am just against the debilitating and innefective ways we have expected managers to work. I was one for many years and I know what it is like!

The play on the word "liberating" is deliberate. Not only do we have the potential to free our managers from a lot of the crud we currently bury them under but it is also personally liberating for them to have a whole new way of dealing with the pressures of getting things done.