Dave Pollard: Blogs and Blogging

Memorandum to All Employees

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:12:00 GMT

Delivered By Hand

To all employees:

Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees' time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.

A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee's work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.

Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee's calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others' time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive 'telephone tag' our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.

Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:

For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company's Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters -- if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to 'share' the contents of each other's screen while they converse.
For 'FYI' type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company's E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company's Instant Survey tool.
For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company's E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.

Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find it liberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox.

Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!

Respectfully yours,

The Management

(well, we can dream anyway)

Category: Communications Technology

Getting Rid of E-mail

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:25:13 GMT

Last year I wrote an article on when not to use e-mail. In a nutshell, you shouldn't use e-mail:

To communicate bad news, complaints or criticism: Deliver it face to face or at least by phone. Not voice-mail either.
When you are seeking information that is not simple and straight-forward: Walk down the hall or pick up the phone and ask for it directly.
When you are seeking approval on something that is involved or controversial: Same answer as #2: in person or by phone.
When you're sending a few people complicated instructions: Go visit them, or phone them, instead.
When you are asking for comments on a long document (probably attached to your proposed e-mail): Sit down with people one-on-one and walk them through it (or collaboratively using screen-sharing technology, paragraph by paragraph, with changes and corrections displayed real-time).
To request information from a group on a recurring basis: Automate it or otherwise embed it in the business processes.
To convey instructions to a large number of people: Put it in a policy or procedure manual or a self-paced e-learning module or use an interactive e-learning/videoconferencing tool.
To achieve consensus: Face-to-face, or videoconference or at least audioconference.
To explore a subject or idea: Use Open Space, or face-to-face, or videoconference or at least audioconference.
To send news, interesting documents, links, policies, directory updates and other 'FYI' stuff: Post it, where those who care about it can browse or RSS-subscribe to it.

With the exception of situations 6, 7 and 10 (where you need a 'sticky' place to post information where it won't get lost), these "no e-mail" situations are all more effectively addressed in real time. I developed a flowchart to capture this, but it takes a lot of words and takes up a lot of space.

As I've become (thanks to Gen Millennium role models) a fan and a reasonably competent user of IM (takes some practice but even we geezers can manage it), I've added an 11th situation when you should not use e-mail:

For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, requests for approval and instructions, to one or a very small group of people. IM instead -- IM lets you get an immediate response, and you can migrate to voice, and send files too, when necessary.

Recently I looked through my 500 most recent work e-mails and my 500 most recent personal e-mails. I concluded:

Over 95% of the work e-mails and personal e-mails could have been more effectively dealt with face-to-face, by phone, desktop video or IM. By effective I mean it would have taken no longer, and resulted in clearer, more personal communication.
Excluding responses (and responses to responses), I receive twenty times as many e-mails as I send. My 'sent mail' file messages virtually all begin with "re:". In other words, I almost never initiate an e-mail 'thread' (I just can't get myself to call e-mail and discussion forum threads 'conversations', because they're really not).
In those rare cases when I initiate an e-mail, I generally should use a real-time tool (phone, f2f, or IM) instead. In a few cases I use e-mail at work when the recipient is a luddite (i.e. never answers the phone, which I think is rude, arrogant, and unprofessional, and is never available f2f, and doesn't have or doesn't use IM). But that's surprisingly rare. And I send personal e-mails only when I don't have the recipient's IM.
The vast majority of work messages I receive are notifications and 'FYIs' (usually with long attachments I will never open, let alone read). In almost every case there is, or should be, some place where these could more appropriately be posted, where I (and the other multiple recipients) can browse (when we actually need to) or subscribe to them. In most other cases (when some action from me was required), a f2f visit, IM or phone call to me would have been more effective.
My personal e-mail inbox also includes a lot of notifications -- comments received on my blog posts, RSS updates, things I've subscribed to. If e-mail were to suddenly disappear, I could just as easily get all these on an RSS subscription page and browse and deal with them there. Some of my received messages are from readers and friends sending me links or articles. These are generally from people who (a) don't have blogs or del.icio.us or other feeds I can subscribe to and (b) don't use IM (or twitter). But I'll get you all over to one or the other, or both, eventually!

So, what I'm saying is that if I had no e-mail address (and for that matter, no voice-mail box), I'd get along just fine. I'd send and receive lots of spontaneous IMs (including those in skype, twitter and second life) that sometimes migrate to voice-to-voice conversations. I'd get my exercise at work walking the halls to visit with people, and learn to be a better phone conversationalist. I'd use RSS to create my own personalized newspaper of important things to read, and I'd tweak the sources and filters so the volume was just enough to be comfortably manageable in the time I have available for reading. And I'd go home from work every night with nothing in my work inbox, and to bed at night with nothing in my personal inbox.
I think a world without e-mail is completely viable, and would be incredibly liberating. After all, e-mail has only been around as the principal means of business communication for ten years (I'm told it first surpassed fax in 1998).

Many in my grandfather's generation refused to have anything to do with voice-mail when it came in -- they thought it was a waste of time. Many in my granddaughters' generation feel the same way about e-mail. Both generations realized the value of conversations -- real-time, context rich, rapidly iterative -- over asynchronous communications.

Maybe we should pay attention.

Category: Communications Technologies

Friday Flashback: What Blog Readers (and Writers) Want More Of

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:28:23 GMT

Buried at the bottom of my right sidebar is a list of what, from my experience, blog readers want more of, and what I, as a blog writer, want more of (from readers). It was initially my most popular post, and still draws a fair bit of mail. It's reproduced below, left.

The graphic below right is from another popular article I wrote back four years ago, on the Blogging Process.

Blog readers want to see more:

- original research,surveys,ideas etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- prÃ©cis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:

- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs

Since I wrote the 'what blog readers/bloggers want more of' piece, I haven't changed my mind much. What my readers love best, and what I love in other blogs, pretty much stays the same.

My blogging process has been streamlined since I began writing, though, because my readers now do much of this work (the stuff in the red and blue boxes) for me. They point me to news and blog articles they know will be of interest to me, so I only need to check out an ever-changing short list of blogs that are 'on a roll'. I confess my blogroll is hopelessly outdated -- there are over 100 dead links on it, and another 100 newer blogs I check out from time to time that are not yet on it. I read all my e-mails and blog comments (which are sent to me by e-mail) though I acknowledge I rarely reply to them. I just don't find them effective conversational media, so I prefer to engage my readers in IM or Skype conversations.

I'm hoping to get back one day to being part of a real blogging community. Maybe with Gaia.

A World Without E-Mail: Getting Our Lives Back in Synch

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:13:59 GMT

About twenty years ago, I was at a meeting of business executives complaining about a new (at that time) technology they instinctively disliked. It was voice-mail. Their view was that it wasted time: If it was important, people would call back, wouldn't they? They had assistants, of course, to sort 'important' calls from the rest and block the riffraff from reaching them. Now anyone could leave messages for anyone. What was the world coming to?

Earlier this year, I was chatting with a group of young people complaining about e-mail. Their view was that it wasted time. Far more effective to deal with issues in real time, using chat or VoIP. If it was important, people would call back, wouldn't they? Their e-mail was mostly spam and impossibly long stuff they'd never get around to reading, and probably couldn't understand without talking to someone about it anyway. So what was the point?

It is human nature to communicate through conversation in real time. This allows us to ask questions and get context quickly through interactive discussion. It is also human nature to want information just-in-time, not just-in-case. Forget your 'FYI', please give me 'WYR' (What You Requested).

The problem with both v-mail and e-mail (aside from the fact they're asynchronous, often ill-timed, and usually devoid of context) is that they shift the power from the recipient of communications (e.g. the right to decline conversation) to the sender. We are all, of course, both senders and recipients of communications, but most of us would prefer the power to remain with the recipient. The popularity of 'no call' lists and our abhorrence for spam attests to this preference.

E-mail is used for a lot more than 'conversation' of course. Last year I described 10 situations when it was not appropriate to use e-mail. In seven of these (bad news, complex information or approvals, complicated instructions, comments on a long document, achieving consensus and discussing a new idea) a conversation is called for. In two of them (recurring information requests, recurring instructions) the communication should be embedded in the business process, instead of repeated messages. And in one (FYI communications) it makes sense to instead post the information where it can be retrieved 'just in time' when needed.

In that article, I suggested the only time you would need to use e-mail is to send simple requests for info, approval or instructions, or to reply to a specific request for e-mail. IM is a better vehicle than e-mail for both of these.

But we're not going to rid the world of unnecessary e-mails by training and persuading people to use it sparingly. As long as the tool exists in its present form, and people acknowledge they have to accept e-mails, we're not going to change anything.

What if we invented a new tool, an alternative to e-mail, that would have no inbox? The chart above suggests how it could work. Here's a walkthrough:

Each of us has a calendar that we use to block out time when we're open for conversation requests. We can specify times for discussion of specific subjects, or discussion with specific communities of people, and also 'open' time when we're open to discuss anything with anyone. The rest of our calendar is 'closed': viewers see only that it's private, unavailable time.
If we want to send someone a message, we first ask: Does it require a conversation (to be meaningful)? If it does, the tool will send us to a conversation engagement calendar. If not, the tool will allow us to send it to the recipient's library, as a gift, to be used when and if it is of value. If it's a recurring information request or instruction, and the answer to the question is neither, then it boots us out -- this is not the tool to use for such systematic communications, which should be embedded in the related business process technology.
If it's an 'FYI' communication, the sender indexes it (says what topic it's about) and sends it to the recipient's library, to be used if and when it's useful. The sender gets an automatic acknowledgement of their 'gift', an instant 'thank you'.
It's now up to the recipient, whenever s/he wishes, to accept or decline this addition to her/his e-library of documents and links on her/his hard drive. The recipient can choose to automatically accept and have filed everything sent to her/him, or decline everything, or decide each time, and/or re-index these donations. The sender never knows -- it's not their business. The technology of today's spam filters could be used to facilitate this.
If it's a communication requiring conversation, the sender is logged into the recipient's calendar and shown available slots for a conversation on that subject. If none of the slots is suitable, the sender can send an IM requesting an earlier or longer slot. It's up to recipient to respond, or not. The 'status' of the recipient is ignored in this -- those of you who use IM a lot know that this status means nothing.
If a suitable timeslot is available, the tool allows the sender to book it, indicate the topic for the conversation, pick a medium for the conversation (IM/text, voice/phone/VoIP, face to face), and attach any pre-reading that will make optimal use of people's time during the conversation. Ideally this tool could allow multi-party conversations to be scheduled, finding times when all relevant parties are available. The tool might even be designed to have certain times of day (when, through an evolutionary process, we'd come to agree are optimal times for multi-party conversations) specifically allotted for such conversations, so, for example, a blog writer could allot a specific time the next day for anyone who was interested to converse, in real time, about the day's post(s).
Regardless of what it said in the calendar, the recipient has the final say -- s/he can decide to decline a request for a conversation, and a message would then be sent to the sender removing it from their calendar as well. A reschedule would likewise be accommodated by the tool.
At the allotted time(s), the calls would be placed automatically -- no need to dial. Reminders would be sent in advance at the discretion of each calendar owner. The calls could be recorded, or not, at the discretion of the participants, and the archives sent directly to the participants' e-libraries on their hard drives, indexed appropriately for later 'just-in-time' use. You could even post follow-up "to do's" to your to do lists, blocked into future time slots in your calendar, as the conversation progressed.

This tool would not be hard to build -- all of the technologies in it exist already. What is elegant about it is that it mimics our real-life behaviour in allotting our time. It is simple, intuitive, and real-time.

Imagine ending your day with nothing in your in-basket(s). Imagine beginning your day knowing exactly what conversations you are going to have with whom, so your time is organized precisely, with no phone calls or e-mails to crowd ahead of what you'd already planned to do. Imagine not having to read and listen to volumes of stuff every day just to decide what if anything needs to be done about it, now. Imagine reading what we decide we need to read, instead of what others have decided we should read.

We could start doing again what we did in the days before v-mail and e-mail -- spend our time actually doing things, and in conversations learning and understanding and consulting and making informed, real-time decisions. This tool could get our lives out of the asynchronicity that these time-wasting tools have wrought, and put our lives back in synch.

Categories: Communications Technology, and Getting Things Done

Social Fluency

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:41:24 GMT

After Nancy White pointed me to Chris Lott's articles on Northern Voice, and on love, and Chris replied to my Tuesday post on how easily we unintentionally hurt each other through our actions, I did a bit more research on Chris' work and discovered the remarkable chart above on Information Fluency. Chris put this together a couple of years ago for an IT audience and has since expanded on it, but for me it produced an immediate aha!

Our professional 'value' really is a function of the extent of, and our ability to integrate, our knowledge, our thinking competencies, and our communication competencies. Insight depends on our ability to apply critical thinking to what we know. Reportage is the application of our communication skills to what we know. Rhetoric is the articulation of our thinking. And the ability to do all of these things in an integral way is what Chris calls 'information fluency'.

I think this is brilliant, and it got me thinking about how this model could be broadened to represent our social fluency -- our ability to function socially in the modern complex world, to be of use socially to others in our communities. The chart below is what I came up with.

What this chart says is that:

Our social value to others is a function of (a) the extent of our knowledge, our thinking competency (critical, creative and imaginative), and our communication skills (conversation, presentation and demonstration), and (b) our ability to integrate these three things.
This ability to integrate these three things gives rise to insight, ideas and new perspectives (application of thinking competency to knowledge), reportage and stories (application of communication skills to knowledge), rhetoric and provocation (articulation of our thinking competency), and art (the expression of thinking competency applied to knowledge). Chris and I love the addition of art, in its broadest sense (the representation of reality), to the model.
This ability to integrate is social fluency. If we represented individuals' different social fluency graphically, those with high levels of fluency would have larger circles (more knowledge, greater thinking competency and communication skills) with greater overlap (better integration of these three things).

In thinking about this further and reading Nancy White's blog, I realized that what was missing from the model was learning. I realized that the model was from the perspective of the actor (presenter, demonstrator, creator, artist) and not the perspective of the reactor (audience, listener, student, learner).

It occurred to me that since social activity is like a dance, there should be a 'mirror' set of attributes for effective response-ability (responsibility). My first cut at these is in red brackets above:

Our ability to derive social value from others (to learn) is a function of (a) our openness to others' knowledge and ideas, our learning competency (ability to learn) and our attention skills, and (b) our ability to integrate these three things.
This ability to integrate these three things gives rise to understanding (openness to new ideas and knowledge, and the learning competency to process it), appreciation (openness to new ideas and knowledge, and the attention skills to be aware of them), and self-change (attention skills to be aware of change opportunities, and the learning competency to be able to apply them).
The reactive counterpart to art is improvisation. Social fluency requires not only the ability to integrate knowledge, thinking competency and communication skills as an 'actor', but the ability to integrate openness, learning competency and attention skills as a 'reactor', a learner. That's precisely what improvisation is about.

What's interesting to me about this is that some people are terrific 'artists' (they re-present reality well, as teachers, painters, presenters etc.) but not very good 'improvisers' (they are closed-minded and not open to new ideas and new learning). This is a terrible shame -- such people are underskilled for a peer-to-peer world where social exchange is two-way. Likewise, there are some great 'improvisers' (people who have learned a great deal) who are unskilled at expressing that learning, 'passing it on'.

It would be interesting to see a social network map that depicted individuals not just as dots (nodes) but with their six circles. This could show what people value in others in their networks/communities, and what they offer, and how that effects both their 'popularity' and the strength of the community as a whole.

So what can we do, as individuals, to improve our social fluency -- to become better artists and improvisers? I think the first step is self-knowledge -- to know what our strengths and weaknesses are in each of the six circles. And the second step is practice, with others who are both better and worse than we are at each.

What do you think of this model? Have I overloaded it? Is it useful? Is it missing something? Where does presence fit into it? Where does love fit?.

Category: Social Networking

Effortlessly and Unintentionally Causing Pain to Others

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:31:03 GMT

photo from Northern Voice last weekend by Chris Heuer

I confess to still being an insensitive guy (though some people would say "insensitive guy" is a redundant expression).

I've been trying to get better at this, but I think it's in my nature to be selfish and self-preoccupied and not spend enough time thinking about other people or their feelings. I suspect it's in most people's nature. I know what to do (spend more time listening to people, pay attention with your whole body, respond promptly to requests and comments, don't procrastinate, say 'thank you' a lot) -- but I just don't do it.

Lately I've been spending more time with people who are sensitive, partly in the hopes that they'll be a positive influence on me. I was really surprised, then, when one of those people, Nancy White, confided that she was really distressed because she'd unintentionally hurt someone -- a participant at her presentation at Northern Voice. I would normally not blog about such a personal and painful occurrence, but since it's all been put in the public record by the participants, I figure it's OK to talk further about it. It's actually causing me as much distress as it's causing Nancy.

Here's what happened:

Nancy encouraged everyone at her session to "be fearless" and draw on craft paper and post on the walls of the meeting room something about a subject (the subject happened to be Ice Cream) that meant something to them, and to post on their blog their drawing, instead of just writing about it. The purpose of the exercise was to understand how visualizations add meaning and value to information, and to open ourselves to the additional personal understanding that comes from expressing oneself in pictures instead of just words.
One of the participants, the actress Meg Tilly, found the exercise personally devastating, and wrote about it on her blog. Here is a photo of her drawing, just to give you a bit of context.
Nancy was really distraught to have caused Meg such pain, and she wrote an apology on her blog.

Just to add a bit more to the story (since I was in the room at the time), when Nancy left Meg's drawing to move on to one of the many others up on the wall, Meg (I didn't know who she was at the time) cried out in protest (something like "but wait...") in a voice that sent shivers up my spine. After that I forgot about it -- there just wasn't enough time to dwell on a single drawing, and the time for Nancy's presentation was quickly running out.

No one was to blame. No one was really blaming anyone. But there was pain anyway, and it's clear (from the blog posts and communications since, and from the comments to the blog posts) that the pain was deep, and isn't going away easily.

There is a line in the movie Peaceful Warrior in which a young athlete, trying to impress his mentor with what he's learned from quiet contemplation, from "gathering information from the inside", says "The ones who are hardest to love are usually those who need it the most." Nancy pointed me to a post by Chris Lott, another participant at Northern Voice, in which he says something similar:

Iâ€™ve been reflecting for the past few days on something Nancy White was talking about at lunch a few days ago. without going into too much detail, her point was that I would better understand someone who she knows that I admire and am constantly vexed with if I understood that person had a hard time accepting love.

For the past 18 months or so it has felt like everything I examined with any intensity came down to issues relating to scale. I suspect my next 18 months (at least) will be consumed with the problematic (sorry, I was brought up a postmodernist, where â€œproblematicâ€ is an acceptable noun) of love and all the things that cluster around it.

In a conversation earlier today about all this, I said to Nancy: "I suspect this kind of unintentional hurt occurs all the time without us ever being aware of it -- it's hideous to think about, but even those of us full of love and sensitivity probably inflict pain and hurt on others by what we do (and what we fail to do) every day. And the more social we are, the more we probably do it...I'm just thinking about how much I've hurt people I know and care about by what I've done and not done in the past few weeks...ouch...Responsibility is scary...no wonder so many refuse to take any."

Nancy replied, and I agree, that (a) we can't help unintentionally hurting other people, though we can probably learn to spot, and help others show us, cues that we've done so, and (b) the more people we know and spend time with, and the more open we are with them, the more pain we are likely to cause. I also think the actor in Peaceful Warrior and Chris are right that (c) as much as most of us want attention and appreciation, most of us don't really want to be loved.

All of these truths are about Responsibility and its burden. When we stand up in front of a group as an 'authority', or talk to an individual one-to-one, or just communicate wordlessly with someone, we are being asked to take some responsibility for their feelings, their understanding, and even their love. When a member of the audience asks us a question and we answer in a way that is unsatisfactory to them (for whatever reason) they are hurt. When we say something to someone that makes them flinch or frown or leads to a 'pregnant pause', they are hurt. When someone looks at us, perhaps in invitation to some further communication and we turn away, they are hurt. It is not intentional. No one is to blame. But there has been a Failure of Responsibility. The word 'responsibility' comes from the Latin words meaning to promise back. All of this pain is the result of unintended broken promises.

Perhaps this is why so many people wall themselves away physically and emotionally, physically so they never have to accept this dreadful and unintentional responsibility, and emotionally so they won't be hurt by others' unintended failures of responsibility. In this sense, to be a social being, a teacher, a lover, a conversant, a member of community, is an act of great courage. It is the acceptance of enormous responsibility not to hurt or let down those with whom we dance in love, conversation and community. To do our best, not to "do no harm" (for that is impossible if we are social creatures at all), but rather to be responsible, to live up to the promise back to all with whom we engage. To respond.

There is another, safer form of social discourse -- performance (from the Latin meaning supply what is needed). It is substantially one way, from performer to audience, and although there is a social contract in performance, and the performer has a 'responsibility' to inform or entertain, s/he is not required to 'respond'. That is the role of the audience. If the audience fails to respond, it is the performer who suffers the pain. The performer need only 'supply what is needed'; s/he is not 'responsible' for the audience's reaction, response. That is up to them.

At one time, most education was performance. The instructor spoke and left the podium. The learning, the response, was the student's job. At one time, most business was performance. The supplier produced and delivered, and the contract was done. The buyer (caveat emptor) was responsible for the actual use of the product. For some people, sex, and perhaps even 'giving' love, is and can only be a performance, an act, a supplying of what is needed. No responsibility. Take it or leave it. It is the recipient who must 'respond', take the responsibility. She the respondent (for it is mostly men who are the performers) is expected to appreciate, pay attention, and respond appropriately (with devotion, obedience, and perhaps multiple orgasms). No wonder we all want to love (and be adored by those we love) but we don't really want to be loved (with the responsibility that places on us).

Today art, education, commerce, and love are, for the most part, no longer one-way performance activities. They are participatory, two-way, conversational, collaborative. We all have equal responsibility for their success, and the roles are blurring and disappearing. We all have to respond to each other, live up to the promise back to others we engage with. We all have the responsibility to be sensitive to others, and to know how our response (and even our lack of response) can cause anguish to them.

No one is to blame. We just have to learn the newest and most important social skill -- improvisation. In my recent post on improvisation I defined its essential elements as follows:

The competencies include: active listening, paying full attention, inventing, self-expression, reacting quickly, remembering, teaching/helping quickly, learning quickly, letting go and letting come. There is a zen-like state that you can get into if you have, and practice using, these competencies: It's a combination of extreme alertness and extreme relaxation. That's only a paradox to the incompetent. Arguably, it is our natural state.

The tactics include building and drawing on others' actions ("yes, and..." rather than "yes, but..."), exploring, reflecting, complementing, mimicking, and what someone has called "moving with and moving against".

The attributes include intimacy, engagement, true 'whole is more than the sum of the parts' collaboration, and reciprocation.

If we were all good at improvisation, the way wild animals play with each other, energetically but somehow harmlessly, perhaps no one would be hurt. What do you think?

No one was intentionally hurt in the making of this article.

Category: Social Networking

Lessons from Northern Voice 2008

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:37:54 GMT

This past weekend I attended Northern Voice, the annual Canadian social networking forum in Vancouver. As with most conferences, the most valuable conversations and learnings emerged in the corridors, or more specifically in the Atrium of the UBC campus, a wonderful open space (picture above) in the middle of the (still theatre style, alas) presentation rooms. Or they emerged in the pubs, on the hiking paths, in the airline terminals, in the virtual spaces, or on the stopovers and places of reflection where you digest, consciously and unconsciously, what you've heard and seen.

In no particular order, here are the 10 most important things I learned this weekend:

Moving from collection to connection: Many young content providers and content architects are still trying to fight an uphill battle against security-obsessed IT departments and possessive content owners, and trying to make content sharing more effective in organizations. The real opportunity is to improve connectivity in these organizations: providing simple, ubiquitous, real-time tools (like IM, virtual presence/desktop video, and virtual learning tools) that help people find the people (not the stuff) they need to learn from and work with, and connect and collaborate with those people more effectively.
The end of e-mail: Generation Millennium is catching on to what our grandparents understood: most asynchronous messaging systems (notably voice-mail and e-mail) create more work and reduce productivity, and allow and encourage people to message instead of doing real work. If it's important, the caller (if properly 'trained' not to expect replies to v/e-mail messages) will keep trying until they can arrange a real-time conversation. If we could develop an effective system for scheduling such conversations, one that callers could use to book recipients' time in time periods alloted for that purpose by the recipients in advance, we could (a) engender more such conversations, (b) convey knowledge more effectively, and (c) possibly eliminate v-mail and e-mail messages (and rid ourselves of dreaded 'in-boxes') entirely.
Don't try any of this alone: Too many people are still trying to develop too many social networking solutions independently. The best ideas and solutions come from collaborations of teams of diverse, passionate people with a shared purpose, experimenting together to hone in on qualified, innovative approaches to coping with real problems, and drawing on the Wisdom of Crowds.
We need more laboratories, exploratoriums. Places with the people, resources and collaboration tools to do experiments and share what works and what doesn't. With no requirement for a tightly-focused short-term ROI. Play spaces where people who care about something can sketch, make stuff up, try it out.
Know yourself: We need to know our Gift, our Passion, our Purpose, and what we know and don't know and need, in order to be effective collaborators, innovators and problem solvers. World Cafes & Open Space only work well if the groups know what they need, what they can offer, and bring some diversity of perspective but focus of passion -- on a few shared problems.
Imagine that: We need more imagination of what's possible. Too much of what passes for innovation in social networking (and everywhere else) is incremental change (usually adding more features and complexity) to existing tools which are themselves copies of poor designs. Before you have great design you need to have great inspiration, which stems from great imagination, something no one ever thought about, in a way no one ever thought about it before, applied to a real need.
Gravitational communities: My brother Alan coined this term as something less than an intentional community but more than an accidental one. It's the perfect explanation of how people find and make community in complex environments. You can't plan it -- there are no reliable ways to systematically search for and find just the right people to build community with. But it's not accidental either -- finding the right people is not a random activity. It's evolutionary. You send out signals, explicitly and tacitly, and so do others, and you pick up on them, sometimes consciously but often sub-consciously or unconsciously. You end up in community, not with random strangers or the 'people you were meant to be with', but something in between, a collective self-selection, in constant flux.
Support groups as intentional communities: Three times this weekend I got into discussions about support groups -- people who are helping each other out, not with a shared passion or shared purpose, exactly, but more a shared personal problem. Something with a sense of urgency. The problem with most intentional communities is it's too easy to walk away from them when something more urgent comes up, or minor obstacles arise. When you're all suffering or dying from something in common, you'll stick with a possible source of resolution, even it's not easy or fun. Pollard's Law again.
Hope for disaster: I'm not a neo-survivalist hoping for the end of the world, or the Rhapsody, but I am learning that personal crisis seems to be very helpful in getting individuals to realize their need to Let-Themselves-Change, to discover what they were meant to do with their lives, and with whom, and to shake them out of their complacency in useful ways that can change their worldview, their understanding of the world and of themselves, and what they need to do. If you're restless and unhappy but not sure what to do, maybe the problem is that you're not unhappy enough. Thanks to my friend Wendy Farmer-O'Neill for this insight.
Can somebody please translate this into language I can understand?: Last Thursday I was on a panel at a Social Networking workshop in Toronto for business executives. Once again I learned that most executives do not understand what social networking is or how it could be useful in business. On the weekend in Vancouver, I was surrounded by a much younger crowd who knew exactly what social networking is, and is becoming. But they had almost no experience or understanding of business (that was true even of the consultants there, who claimed to know something about business), so they had no idea how social networking could be useful in business either. Until (or perhaps unless) someone (other than Nancy White and I) can explain what's possible (and useful) to those who can write cheques for it, social networking will remain a marginal discipline, a geek crusade.

Most interesting observations at the event? The full parity of women among the young cohort of attendees -- this was the most gender-equal event of any kind I have ever attended. And I also noticed there were more cameras at the event than laptops -- and some of the cameras were bigger than some of the laptops.

Thanks to the event organizers and all those who said such kind things about my 'reading' at the opening party.

Category: Social Networking

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