shift and share

We explain our approach to facilitation as coming from the roots of the word: to make easy. This really runs back to the roots of the method, which is grounded in part by the writings of Christopher Alexander and his concept of patterns in architecture which either encourage or inhibit a natural flow.

It’s a wonderful concept; create a flexible work environment and patterned working process which removes all barriers and inhibitors which stand in the way of highly productive work. The concept has equal force whether it is applied to work or environment, or in the case of how we use it, when both are combined.

That is why I read this article in the New York Times (with an excellent audio slide show) with such interest. Artists and designers Arakawa and Gins have created spaces that run counter to the paradigm of designing for comfort…they have designed a house that challenges. The floors undulate and are bumpy (yes, bumpy!), the plugs and switches are helter skelter and there is barely an even surface in the place.

The idea? In their sworn effort to defy death, they have made it their mission to design spaces which force work and adaptation, creating stronger, healthier individuals.

This got me thinking. When is it better to “make easy”, and when is it better to make things difficult? There are definitely parts of our process which, I know, push people outside of their comfort zone, and it’s the hard work and cognitive dissonance of being out of the status quo that often encourages superior results.

In one of our internal sessions a few years ago, we removed all the furniture and fittings from the center in order to force the group to consider what was truly necessary in a space. It was uncomfortable, but some great dialogue came out of it.

I’m curious; who designs their sessions with comfort and discomfort in mind? When, in your mind, does facilitation mean making things harder for people?

This is the second part of my report on using Google Sites in a session last week; the first part was the “what”, the next part is the “why”, but for now, I’m going to confine myself to the almighty “how”.

The first thing to understand is that all of the flavors of Google Apps require a domain name, which you can purchase as part of the sign up process. This is not to be confused with “Google Docs”, which you may have encountered as an add-on to your GMail account. What they’ve done is take a number of their services and mash them together, so you get a single stop for mail, documents and now, sites.

Read more…

This week we wrapped up a session in Detroit working with New Paradigm, IBM and an automotive client to help put together Enterprise 2.0 enabled solutions for their enterprise and partners. Leading up to the session, there was a good deal of thought back and forth as to which tools we should use to put together the session deliverables.

About two weeks ago, Google announced the very timely release of Google Sites, the long-awaited retooling of JotSpot as a part of their Google Apps suite. The timing seemed perfect, and I could think of no better time to give the tool a test drive. The results? Well after two days of building the session journal real-time with 30 participants logging in as we built, all during a North America-wide disruption in the Capgemini network, I can say that there were some stressful times, but the results have been positive. I say that, however, with a considerable number of caveats. I thought it would be useful to capture some of the frustrations, highlights and tips here…

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Maybe it’s just me, but I derive a lot of inspiration from food, and do some of my best thinking in the kitchen. And so it was, on the weekend, when I found myself trying out a new mortar and pestle (much different from the other two I own!) that I started thinking through what it means to create something.

I generally take the shortcut when I make my curry paste. I take all the lemon grass, the chillies, the garlic, and throw it in the food processor. But to test drive the mortar and pestle, I decided to do it the hard way; chopping and pounding each and every ingredient until I had a uniform paste. From the moment I started, the lemon grass began releasing an incredible aroma, and as I incorporated the chillies, I could see their color spread into the paste as it was pounded into the basalt. At every stage, I could see the transformation unfold, the smells and sights flooding my senses.

The result? A profound sense of connection and excitement about what I had produced; anticipation of what it would be like to use it. I understood something more about the paste and the process, and thought more deeply about the end product, when at last, I sat down to eat. What would I change next time? What worked? What didn’t? And most of all; pride. The final dish was the result of my work and effort, and it tasted all the better for it.

I was halfway through pounding out the ingredients when I started to think about the parallels with what we do; our workshops are the grueling hard work of leaders sweating it out with their people to pound out a solution that everyone has had a hand in. Each decision, each input, is seen, sensed and understood by the people who take part, and the end product is something that people can’t help but feel a deep connection and commitment to.

Solutions handed down from the top are the fast food of decision making: they are mysterious, uniform, uninspiring and generally unappetizing. Who knows what’s in there?

Co-creation is, to be sure, a lot more work. But when it has to count, there’s no better way to ensure results. You can’t put a price tag on how invested people become, just like there’s nothing you’ll find in the supermarket that compares with what I pounded out for an hour on Sunday afternoon.

In whatever spare moments I can muster, I’ve been reading Christopher Alexander’s brilliant book, The Timeless Way of Building. I find it overwhelming. Brilliant. Most of all, it has raised my appreciation of environments and how they affect interactions.

Needless to say, then, I have had Alexander’s words ringing in the back of my head lately, and I have been considering things through the lens of his ‘patterns’. That relational elements of any environment form patterns which, taken together, can be taken as a language; that this language forms the basis of our interaction with the space around us, both in how we exist within it and work to create, modify and relate to that environment…I find this profound.

I understand now, more than ever, that the spaces created to support our methodology are not intended as cookie-cutter franchise facilities. They are meant to express the patterns which are core to the language of cooperation and collaboration. To enter a place where the physical space strongly expresses a way is a powerful idea.

But this week I had a conversation regarding a client which got the gears turning for me, especially as it is such a recurring theme; how necessary is the environment? How much can you compromise?

Read more…

If you’ve maintained a steady pulse over the past few years, you have - no doubt - heard a bunch about Web 2.0. It slices, it dices…it enables mass collaboration…etc. But what if you wanted to actually do something with this nebulous thing we call the read/write web?

That’s exactly the challenge we have for a client in an upcoming session; how to apply this stuff into some tangible gain for the company?

Specifically, how can web 2.0 tools be used to change the way employees interact with the company? With each other? How do suppliers and vendors interact and collaborate using these tools?

As part of our “scan” for this session, we want to put together a virtual tour of Web 2.0 tools, showing some of the things that have caught people’s interest; some of the tools people use in their personal lives and others that they have carried with them into their professional lives.

So what do you use? If you had a visitor from 1995, what would you show them on the web - on your web - to make them realize the staggering extent to which their internet was static, stagnant and irrelevant?

What are the tools that make the new internet indispensable for you?

Here’s a few of my recent favorites…

Housing 123

Sifting through endless pages of house listings on static pages is mind numbing. How do you figure out where it’s located? How can you tell a pricey neighborhood from a slum? This mashup pulls data from Canada’s MLS (real estate) listings and plots it on Google Maps, so you can see the listings by location, with the pins color coded by price. Now you can see if you’ve got the best house on a bad street, or the worst house on a good one! Chip, of course, one-upped me on this one with his fancy American site, zillow.com.

Google Reader

Okay, this isn’t new, but I love it. I could go to 20 different web sites to get my daily dose of reading, or I could use my handy-dandy RSS aggregator to pull together stories from all of my favorite sites…with a few of my friends’ blogs thrown into the mix for good measure.

Kayak

In my pre-kayak days, I used to search about 10 different sites to find the best fares. But you know, good data just wants to be free. Kayak digs up fares from all over, then lets you slice the list any way you like with tweaks to your original search. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

LinkedIn

Facebook seems so innocent, now. LinkedIn is social networking with an agenda, constantly telling you how many connections you’ve made, and how many opportunities there are within “x” degrees of separation. Whoa. Submitting your resume is sooo old-skool.

YouTube

Okay, I can not only upload video, but I can embed and share it? You mean, I can subject THE WHOLE WORLD to my baby videos? Wow.

So? If you were to give a tour of the new web, what would be on it? What are the best YouTube videos you’ve seen? How do you share your documents? What’s the most amazing site you’ve been to?

Steve Rubel wrote an interesting post today on the disappearance of deep blogging and the steady transformation of the ‘blogosphere’ into the ‘lazysphere’. He points to the current practice of many bloggers of simply jumping on the bandwagon of the story-du-jour without adding anything in the way of insight or added value to the discussion.

This is, indeed, an interesting trend, which I think highlights a number of features in a maturing blogosphere.

First, where blogs emerged originally as a new medium of self publishing and self expression, where individuals outside of traditional media could express their views, it has since evolved into a ’set-up-your-account-in-five-minutes-and-speak-to-the-world’ tool for any and all to use.

This change is important. With no real barrier to entry into “publishing”, the field has become crowded and the commitment to creating content need not be particularly high for someone to, nonetheless, go ahead and start blogging.

So what’s the motivation? I would like to believe that there is a desire to share, to expose your ideas to others and to gain validation and further insight from their responses. This is, ideally, the collaborative core of blogging. Let’s not call it content; let’s call it ideas. Ideas are fed to the world, where they can flow freely between connected writers and readers quickly, being built upon and improved as they go.

But there is also more immediate motivation. To be ‘well known’. Nowadays, getting a spike in hits and a jump on technorati is the same as getting published. And this leads to more readers, more exposure and - maybe, just maybe - the chance for some kind of tangible payoff, nay, fame.

So how does one achieve this? Well, the network effects are all about flocking and aggregation. You could somehow do something so astounding that the world will notice, or tag along behind a topic that everyone is already looking at, hoping to snag some long-tail readers and traffic. By chasing after every little blip in the consciousness of the network, a blogger not only increases their chance of getting collateral readers, they also fulfill the desire of the crowd to have a steady stream of new (let’s not call them ideas, let’s call it…) content.

And that’s why blogs like Steve’s are valuable; though there is a huge amount of chatter out there, engaged individuals within the network can help steer us towards those who, despite the pressures of the swarm - continue to produce…what shall I call them…

ideas.

I spoke with Andy Heppelle yesterday, who was fresh back from Holland. He passed on a quote - which I found rather inspiring -  from a top executive who had just been through an ASE:

“I find my team works best when I am silent”

I loved that. I love that it not only takes an incredible amount of courage and confidence for a leader to vocalize that, but it also shows the pride and confidence that that leader has in his team. I’m always impressed when people assemble amazing teams, then take that step further to actually recognize the collective capacity and strength of the team they have assembled. That’s when you know you have a great team that has not been hired for the sake of vanity, but to get things done.

The quote Andy passed on reminded me of a poem by Chuang-Tzu, which has always served as my ideal blueprint for leadership since I first read it in Thomas Merton’s The Way of Chuang-Tzu:

The wise man, then, when he must govern, knows how to do nothing. Letting things alone, he rests in his original nature. He who will govern will respect the governed no more than he respects himself. If he loves his own person enough to let it rest in its original truth, he will govern others without hurting them. Let him keep the deep drives in his own guts from going into action. Let him keep still, not looking, not hearing. Let him sit like a corpse, with the dragon power alive all around him. In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing, he will see all things grow ripe around him. Where will he find time to govern?

That last line still gives me a chill whenever I read it…”Where will he find time to govern?” The concept that to lead is to enable people, as opposed to direct them,  is truly inspiring to me. It asks, what can I do to allow my people to succeed?

Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear someone come out of an ASE with the answer to that question.

I read a wonderful book not too long ago entitled “The Culture Code”, which had, as its thesis, the concept that each culture has a “coded” set of primal affinities and aversions. Through group regressions, the author - Clotaire Rapaille - claimed to be able to distill the essence of a culture’s feelings for a particular object or concept at the most basic, reptilian level of consciousness. The book is a fascinating read.

What hit me most as I read it, however, was the gulf between people’s stated impressions based on rational explanations versus their “true feelings” which lay beneath, deeply imprinted upon them by their culture.

And that got me thinking about collaboration. My suspicion is that collaboration is not “on code” for North Americans. We love the concept on an intellectual level. It makes sense to collaborate, to work together, to leverage the experience and intelligence of the group; but my guess is that the concept makes people nervous on a visceral level.

Doesn’t it mean that you, personally, aren’t worth very much? Don’t we value champions? Shouldn’t we want to “Be a Tiger?”

While doing some research on Wikipedia not too long ago, I came across a great quote by someone arguing that it is not the end product of Wikipedia that people object to, it’s the process by which it was (and is) made.

Culturally, collaboration is seen - I think - as a bit of a rip-off. Where’s the hero? Who’s idea was it? Who gets credit? Who profits?

Test it; what does collaboration mean to you? If you’re gauging only by results, collaboration seems great. But don’t you really want to be able to say “That was my idea”?