Driving Change?

Tom Guariello chatted to me about the notion of "driving change" in organisations and has just uploaded part 1 as a podcast. Neither of us really like the assumptions about organisations that often seem tied up with that phrase.

Surprise

I used to call my workshop for facilitators, "Facilitation for Surprise". I was thinking of reverting to that title, and more so when I got this picture. It was taken of me at the Post Danmark conference I keynoted in September. Here I am hosting the drawing exercise I'm fond of using when talking about co-creation.

Why the optimism?

Chris Corrigan asks a really interesting question.

What is interesting is that despite the fact that we are small players working in a big system, and we KNOW that our effect in the world is usually small and local, there is something almost inherent in human nature that convinces us that we can have more impact than it appears. To be sure, this sentiment sometimes becomes arrogance, especially here in North America, but everywhere I have been in this world, among many different people living in wildly different circumstances, I find this pattern of optimism. Whether or not that optimism is productive, or stands a chance at worldchanging is an interesting question, but even more interesting for me is this question: if we are truly products of the global earth system, and we know that we are simply small pieces of a huge and complex living system, where does this impulse, calling or optimism come from?

My hunch, and that's all it is, is that we feel optimism when we feel connected in some way or other to the potential for collective intelligence, or maybe just our connection to, rather than separation from, the world around us.

In his post, Chris explains he's using a "CoHo" tag to identify ideas and information that relate to his enquiry, which is

how hosting, facilitating and convening conversations can help shift people, organizations and communities to new levels of awareness, work and changemaking in their worlds

Kindred spirits

Last week I met Matt Moore, visiting from Australia. I didn't know Matt at all but he introduced himself as a reader of my blog (obviously an endangered species) and we took it from there. He's a Director of Knowledge Management at Oracle.

We had an excellent time putting the world to rights. A big theme was challenging the mechanistic metaphor of organisations which sets us up to think change is driven/led by hero leaders. How organisations are talked about as nouns as if they are solid, fixed things, instead of as verbs, as processes of change. That the notion of "making them change" is possibly misleading. I banged on about the net allowing people to organise around their real passions instead of trying to make them passionate about organsiations. Matt says he doesn't keep a blog any more. I wish he did; he has lots of interesting thoughts I'd like to link to!

And yesterday Rob Paterson came over to Islington for tea, then beer, then dinner... it was that kind of meeting. We spent a lot of time talking about Borat, and how you could see that film as being highlighting the shadow side of politeness - which the character so ruthlessly exploits. Rob's been blogging lovely stuff about his trip to England and all the chords it strikes from his upbringing.

Engagement and complexity

I think it was Denis Healey, a onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer who quipped about something, I think it was a change in interest rates or something of the sort. He wanted to convey his mixed feelings, and did so by saying it was like watching his mother--in-law driving over a cliff... in his new car.

This came to mind as I read Anthony Mayfield's post about this article at Wiredset: Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer Like Anthony, I like their simple listing of levels of engagement in social media, ranging from adoption to collaborative filtering, to content creation to social.

I just wish they didn't explain their elegant taxonomy in this ugly diagram:

Ok I'm probably nitpicking, but the diagram seems bonkers to me. Instead of elucidating their ideas, it raises a series of rather unnecessary questions. For instance, why does Content Creation overlap with Collaborative Filtering but NOT with Adoption? Why does the Social circle overlap with Adoption but not with Collaborative Filtering? What does the bit of the yellow circle in the middle that doesn't cover any of the others represent? And what do the bits of the circles not covered by the Yellow circle mean? These are rhetorical questions. I DON'T want the answers: that's my point. I'm suggesting that this diagram confuses me by bringing in extraneous meanings that I don't think the authors intend.

It's a sort of bastard child of simplicity and complexity, having the crudeness of the first, without its clarity; and the confusion of the second, without its richness.

Having got that off my chest, I do like the simplicity of the four levels of engagement. I think it highlights how many different ways in which social media can engage us and encourages us to think carefully of the many ways we can choose to measure it.

(By the way, Antony's blog is near the top of my faves at the moment.)

Southwest Wisdom

I like the Southwest Airlines blog. Here's one of their people shedding light on the Southwest Culture.

Cultural problems are almost never “out there;” they are almost always “in here.” If we all focus on the part of the Culture over which we have control – our own behaviors – the rest will tend to take care of itself.

Tolstoy on managment...

Andrew Sullivan quotes Tolstoy:

It seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labour and efforts. Whle the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat-hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat-hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the adminstrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, feeble man.

Unsocial objects

I talk a lot about the importance of social objects - stuff for people to talk about - in marketing, and the idea that successful brands naturally create a lot of them.

Neil Boorman's latest post presents a slightly depressing alternative reality of brands as unsocial objects. He describes his fellow laptop users at the British Library, and their apparent lack of engagement with each other. I was a bit depressed by this story:

Months ago, I noted on this blog a conversation I had with a brand manager at Adidas; he believed in treating people according to the stereotypes of their brands, that this system of values saves us time in selecting friends and partners. According to this law, there would be no point in making friends with the attractive Asian women who sits beside me each day, because she has a clunky old Hewlett Packard. Nor the friendly looking middle-aged guy who sits opposite me with his Toshiba

Posted by Johnnie Moore at 12:27 in Branding
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