“The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.

The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.”

This applies equally to being paid poorly as is does to being paid well. I remember the frustration I felt spending three years at the bottom end of the music business with little to show for it. This frustration prevented me from feeling fulfilled by work I enjoyed.

One of the comments references Steve Jobs’ exhortation:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Note that he didn’t say “do what you love”.

Gadgetphobia

I’m not big on gadgets. I spend most of my time fixing problems caused by technology and my disdain for the arms race the mobile phone marketplace has become means I have only ever owned two mobile phones: one in the ’90s and one in the ’00s (a Panasonic and a Samsung. I couldn’t tell you which models).

So perhaps it was the dawn of a new decade which led me to decide I could no longer live without instant all-day access to e-mail and social computing tools on the move. Having seen the Samsung go through the washing machine, survive and limp on for another 18 months, I’d kept an eye on smartphone developments. The convergence of photography, video and GPS navigation were the main attractions. Vodafone’s Text And Web Freebee meant I could get web access for less than £10 a month – a significant increase on my current use as I’m not a big talker, viewing a phone as a convenience rather than a necessity - and when I saw Phones4U offering the HTC Wildfire for around £120, I picked one up at their Strand shop.

I spent the following weeks getting to know it. With a 600MHz processor, it was slower than the HTC Desires and iPhones sported by friends. The only application, I bought was music player PowerAmp which plays lossless FLAC format music files. Coupled with Last.fm‘s scrobbler, this automatically updates my listening history.

Problems

In the beginning, performance was good. Early problems saw PowerAmp locking up when syncing my Yahoo Mail or if Seesmic attempted to update my Twitter stream, necessitating a reboot. Things worsened over the summer after I installed the huge Google+ client application.

Removing as many applications as I could resulted in some improvements and I found myself wondering why I couldn’t get rid of the unused apps in HTC Sense which I found useless: stock price updates, Quick Office… none of which I used.

The release of version 2.3 of the Android operating system, Gingerbread, in the summer also passed me by. It wasn’t until I was marvelling at the interface sported by a friend’s HTC Sensation that it occurred to me I was missing out. Checking the latest HTC phones, I found Gingerbread wasn’t an option for the Wildfire, now replaced by the Wildfire S, which did have Gingerbread. Likewise the original HTC Desire.

Would I be compelled to upgrade a mere six months on? While I didn’t fancy shelling out £400 for the Sensation, even a Wildfire S would leave me around £100 out of pocket, going by the Wildfire’s current resale value.

CyanogenMod 7

I soldiered on for a couple of months, but some questions kept bothering me. If Android is an open platform, why can’t I upgrade it? And why can’t I remove applications I don’t need?

Several years ago, I improved the user interface of my Archos FM Recorder by replacing the operating system with RockBox. Perhaps something similar is available for Android phones?

Upon investigation I found all these things were possible. There is a thriving community of dedicated modifiers dedicated to improving user experience. One of the most popular is CyanogenMod, the new stable release 7.1 based on Android 2.3.7 had been made available a few days earlier.

The upgrade process was involved, but the steps are well documented. You cannot omit any of them.

The improvement was instantaneous and way beyond my expectations. Navigation responds more quickly, PowerAmp no longer freezes, applications work better. And I’m not the only one surprised by CyanogenMod7‘s effectiveness.

Further improvements are possible. Repartition your SD cards so you can install applications onto them, which stops your phone filling up and slowing down.

There have been some hiccups – it took me over two weeks to get GPS working again by reflashing the radio component - but there is a vast amount of information on-line and a supportive community who answer questions (as long as they haven’t been asked too many times before).

I’m looking forward to future improvements. After all, the Wildfire has a lot to live up to if it’s going to make it to 2020′s.

Romec

Nigel Williams‘s presentation was cut short last time, so he returns to demonstrate Romec’s Interact-based intranet.

Romec was established in 1989 to provide facilities management services to Royal Mail. It has a distributed workforce which is highly unionised. The intranet serves 4,500 users, 25% of whom use laptops, though 45% have nothing.

Interact has been around for the last decade and is a modular tool – if you want something, there’s usually a module available. This makes Interact intranets fell nicely integrated, with the activity streams showing not just social updates, but notifications about which documents people have updated.

A feature Romec are experimenting with allows people to tag others with actions. While this could result in “another” inbox, the transparency it demands is useful and a useful step in the direction of online task management.

I hear advertising on the intranet being discussed from time to time. Romec have taken a different approach to simply adding banners to certain pages. The site directory shows advertisements for local taxis, hotels and restaurants, all of which offer preferential rates. The information is maintained by secretaries as part of their KPIs.

Contract Briefs are central to Romec’s business process and Romec have used the intranet to replace a system of ad hoc spreadsheets with a centralised tool. Crucially, the business likes it and have become advocates for the new system. Another success has seen the Romec Management System, which stores forms, policies and manuals, being signed off by auditors DNV.

Field Fisher Waterhouse

There was an extended networking break as James Mullan and The Crown Estate’s technical team wrestled with gremlins, but eventually we got underway.

James is bravely following in the footsteps of Maria Cesa and Rod McLean (twice), admitting that FFW’s intranet is due a revamp and presumably looking for ideas and feedback. Judging by the Twitter stream during the presentation, he got what he was looking for! As James explains, the intranet is three years old and he inherited it when the Knowledge Management team took it over. As well as purely technical challenges, like many law firms – and indeed organisations with any history – FFW faces the challenge of changing a culture of “private documents”.

FFW’s intranet allows some personalisation of feeds and information sources, but I wondered why these weren’t aggregated in one place or an RSS reader. Many pages feature communications in a kitchen sink approach to getting the message out there – wherever there’s space.

Navigation is organisation-based, so most people use the “A-Z of the intranet” to find what they’re looking for – a strong indicator that the navigation must be improved.

Intranet Innovation Awards 2011

We were happy that James Robertson of Step Two Designs was able to grace Intranetters with his presence once again, having stepped off a plane from Australia at about 6:00am.

This time, not only is he presenting a review of the very recently announced results of the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards, but three of the winners are with us to receive their trophies.

Sharon O’Dea collects an award for UK Parliament’s mobile intranet, demonstrated at the last Intranetters session at The Crown Estate, Alex Jackson for placing Framestore‘s core business of visual effects and computer animation at the heart of their intranet, Adam Pope for Arup‘s effort at engaging employees in fundraising for Sports Aid with the Amazing Race.

James’s summary of this year’s awards was peppered with common sense advice. On the need for intranets to evolve as systems: “Redesigns achieve little – the real value is in (continuous) incremental change.”

This was best exemplified by Framestore. Having already won an award last year, their latest innovation uses pictures of individual animation frames to help animators  visually understand their progress. Framestore are already planning a version which includes video, so we may well be applauding their third consecutive success in 2012.

I just liked the name of Framestore’s internal microblogging tool: “Fritter”.

James’s parting advice for all intranet teams was simple – make a list: “What are the six things you are going to improve in the next six months?”

(Update: James Mullan has written up this event on his blog.)

So I was surprised to notice on my way to bed last night that the front page of my blog had been replaced with this screen which reads “Hacked by Amin Safi”:

How could this have happened? Had my passwords been discovered through a brute force attack? Would the blog I’d recently migrated have to be recreated from scratch? Was my entire material wealth currently being sucked from my grasp by some enormous virtual vacuum cleaner?

When I’d calmed down, I set about finding out how to repair the damage and prevent it happening again. Naturally there is a lot of information available on-line.

First, it’s not an uncommon experience: this cyber crime site lists a number of similar violations. And there are no teams of pale, dark-eyed teenagers. It’s mostly done by code which exploits vulnerabilities in WordPress, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

The damage was relatively minor: I couldn’t log in to WordPress, so first I had to go in via CPanel and reset the user passwords. This allowed me to enter the dashboard and select the default WordPress theme, which restored my blog to functionality, if not to its former glory.

How did that happen?

The following day I returned to understand more fully how my blog had been compromised.

I deleted the hacked index.php file, then reinstalled the theme I had been using, Stripe, which I had found on the web.

I then installed Antivirus and scanned the theme. Antivirus pointed out the footer was encoded in Base64 and decoding the characters in the footer, I found some code which displays an advertisement for acne medication.

I also installed Exploit Scanner, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else to worry about, so having removed the dubious code and replaced the Base64 encoded section with regular, the theme is up and running again.

The following pages all helped me:

• How to backup and restore a MySQL database
• How to fix a hacked WordPress blog
• Backing up your database
• Pre-hacked WordPress themes
• How to completely clean your WordPress installation
• WordPress’s own advice on what to do when your site is hacked
• Improving your WordPress blog’s security

You finally sit down to talk and your heart sinks as they start to outline how scrolling marquees are going to revolutionise their business function.

What if you could point to an example which explains why perhaps their suggestion isn’t such a great idea?

Why Intranet Management is so difficult

I sympathised with Luke Oatham as I read his excellent blog post on “The horrors of devolved publishing”, but it was the throwaway comment at the end which caught my eye:

“I’ll never forget in the early days, the proud publisher who posted an animated gif of his revolving head…”

I’ve seen a lot of intranets. Most are good. Some are excellent. And they’re all managed by highly-skilled, professional people who understand the field to a depth which few others appreciate.

Responsible for a complex, constantly evolving set of tools which touch every area of an organisation, they’re expected to be a step ahead – identifying future technology to fulfil the organisation’s strategy, while tactically supporting its day-to-day work with the existing intranet tools.

And yet, they’re repeatedly forced to listen patiently as members of their organisation line up to explain why their site can’t follow the design standards, why it must work “like Google and the iPod”, have a four minute Flash intro which can’t be skipped and picture of the regional director on the homepage smiling with his thumbs in the air.

The perfect intranet site.

How we learn from experience

It’s just over four years since we started Intranetters – a community of practice for intranet managers – and I first spoke at a conference, the Melcrum Social Media Forum. More conferences followed – J. Boye, Ark Group, KMUK, Econique Business Masters to name just a few – and more Intranetters events and I’ve met many, many people who work with intranets.

I’ve enjoyed all these events, but they all have one thing in common. When the doors close, the stories start. The clients with their ridiculous requests, the misapprehensions, the misconceptions and above all the failure to understand the people, the tools and just what the purpose of an intranet is.

If I sat down one evening to redesign my car, then popped in to the local garage the following morning with my drawing on an envelope and asked them to make a few “tweaks”. Because everyone uses the internet, they believe they understand what makes a great user experience. Unfortunately, this often means Flash intros, mystery meat navigation and animated gifs. As James Robertson of Step Two Designs told Intranetters in 2010, if people aren’t listening to the advice of intranet managers, they’re undervaluing their expertise.

What more can we do?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dave Snowden and his KM principles, it’s that “tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.”
There are excellent resources on the web which highlight good intranet design and poor internet webpage design…

• The Nielsen Norman Group’s Design Annual recognises good design and Jakob Nielsen writes about web usability
• Step Two Designs’ Intranet Innovations Awards recognise innovative and emerging ideas for increasing productivity
• Vincent Flanders’ Webpages That Suck highlights poor design and usability on the internet

…but I’ve yet to see anything specifically directed at bad intranet design.

So why not create one?

What are the worst ideas you’ve heard and seen? The pointless animations guaranteed to increase “hits”, the awful styles, the unusable navigation…

Send me stories, pictures, wireframes, screenshots… tell me why these ideas were supposed to work. Did you implement them? Or were you able to dissuade the client from a career-limiting mistake.

You can submit anonymously, remove logos… email intranetdisasters@gmail.com and I’ll include the best ones at Intranet Disasters.

“There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channel.”

Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo.

Hosted by Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly who founded the LSE’s complexity Research programme, the afternoon featured presentations from Prof. Sue Richards and Lynne Sedgemore. I’d expected to see more familiar faces, though I recognised Ed Rosen from South Bank University from Gurteen Knowledge Cafés.

Prof. Richards spoke about her experiences of UK public administration, the changing relationships between central and local government. The UK ”tightened up the mechanism of the central state” since 1979, but is now experiencing diminishing returns and needs “leaders… to work more effectively in complex adaptive systems.” This, she said, could result from greater diversity in Whitehall, the “burning platform of public expenditure…” and supported by the experience of the Civil Service which helped set up the Coalition.

Prof. Richards’ final slide was a summary of the traits she felt were required of modern leaders:

• Acknowledge complexity – governance, policy and management approaches
• Government as one actor among many, but with a pivotal role in influencing
• Embrace the power of self-organization but set-out the parameters
• Harness the power of small changes that can produce large results, but  course correction will be required;
• Both competition and collaboration will be part of the dynamic of any complex endeavour;
• Connect with a wide array of other actors – gain knowledge and relationships
• Learn to reframe public issues in affirmative ways that build on strengths, dissolves tensions and leads to action;
• Embrace diversity as it provides new energy for innovation
• Build capacities for both “exploration” and “exploitation” and maintain an appropriate balance;
• Explore the potential of multi-level governance arrangements in (i) managing the cross-scale interactions that characterize complex public issues and (ii) to buffer the negative effects of surprises, tipping points and cascading crisis

Lynne Sedgemore of 157 group then took to the floor, every inch the modern leader. A self-confessed “personal development addict”, she talked about herself and shared her passion for leadership and learning. The scope of her passion is broad – even spiral dynamics was name-checked - and testament to the need for constant experimentation.

I spoke briefly to Prof. Richards about the challenges of helping leaders educated better understand complexity during the refreshment break, after which the group reconvened to discuss the same point. Vinay Gupta‘s comment stuck in my mind as he recommended Cynefin, then suggested the four (five, I think!) domains needed to be simplified or renamed (!!) to aid understanding.

I didn’t stay afterwards, so look forward to the next session on 29th June: “Inner Complexity – an introduction to the Landscape of the Mind”; I’ll be keeping mine open as Lynne Hopkinson shows excerpts from a film about the development tool she has created: ”Interviews with individuals talking about their experiences of using LoM are complemented by the results of an fMRI brain scanning study.”

(Slides and audio available here.)

Earlier this year, British American Tobacco hosted a meeting of the Intranetters community of practice for intranet managers. As well as demonstrations of Interact and EDF’s intranet, Australian intranet author and consultant James Robertson of Step Two spoke about the winners of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards.

James was so impressed by Interact that he included several screenshots in his recently published book “Designing Intranets – Creating Sites That Work“.

The latest article in his KM column uses Interact‘s My Employment page as an example of  Creating effective intranet “shop windows”, calling for content managers to ditch “blah blah blah” content and help intranet users to find what they are looking for.

“The design of these ‘shop window’ spaces,” says James, “is critical. If they are well-designed, staff can quickly and easily find what they need. If they are filled with ‘blah blah’ content, they clutter the intranet with irrelevant content that gets in the way of completing tasks.”

He goes on: “‘Shop windows’ should therefore focus on:

• Providing links to common and useful information needed by visitors to the section.
• Surfacing key tools needed by staff, whether as links or directly as applications.
• Grouping information into categories, escaping the usability problems of long lists of items.
• Using clear names and links, matching how staff think, not the internal structure and practices of the business unit.”

(Read the article and find out more about “Designing Intranets.”).

Tony showed some of the findings from the Mexico leg of Children Of World in an informal session full of practical insight. The advice to introduce a client gradually via high level summaries before delving into the detail of individual stories was particularly useful.

After lunch and a quick stroll around the Grand Place, the group started developing signifiers for sensemaking. Two anecdote circles gave us a set of meanings which the group clustered and then started to create triads, diads (duads?) and prompts. This experience was invaluable to me -working with experts enables so much more focus on the task. I even picked up a couple of valuable insights to help future CommunityBuilder sessions.

The next meeting is scheduled for Amsterdam in December.

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/media-player?open&g=Dilbert+Comic+Strips&mf=L004967

The Crown Estate

After a brief welcome, Rod McLean kicks off with The Crown Estate’s intranet which serves 400 mostly London-based people, a mixture of lawyers, foresters and gamekeepers, many without access to a computer.

In dispersed organisations the challenge for communication is that no single channel reaches everyone. The intranet is currently seen as an internal communications tool, but the organisation is asking whether it can be more, but with no intranet manager, there is a lack of vision when it comes to answering these questions.

The design is attractive. Rod points out a couple of quirks: the navigation appears above the banner, and the logo is positioned top-right. Most people currently use the intranet as a portal to access other systems through the links section and the most popular area is the menu for the cafe. A review is imminent and the next stage is evaluating the analytics in greater detail to find out which areas people find most valuable.

UK Parliament

Sharon O’Dea begins by explaining some of the mind-boggling challenges faced by the UK Parliament intranet. It’s a complex organisation, historically paper-based with strict rules about who can communication with whom. The two houses and support staff total around 5,000 users: a mixture of MPs, staff and interns.

Having already merged eight existing intranets built in Dreamweaver and migrated to EPiServer CMS, the announcement of the 2010 election signalled a different challenge. It was around this point where I stopped taking notes and pictures because I was so intent on the story. Anticipating lots of change, many new people and a more tech-savvy audience, they identified the information new members needed and chose to offered it through mobile phones.

The result is impressive: simple screens delivering the right information to the right people in the right place at the right time on different devices.

The next challenge Sharon and her team face is to move HR self service  to the intranet.

GE Healthcare

Christine Payne rounds off the afternoon with GE Healthcare’s intranet. Founded in 1878 by Thomas Edison, General Electric has 46,000 employees worldwide.

In common with many large corporates, the intranet is based on a common platform provided by the parent company.

A sophisticated system targets stories using mailing lists. ”My Links” are customisable, although Christine admits they ditched portlets “because no one used them”. News and links are tailored to individual users, though alternative settings are selectable. Staff are encouraged to leave comments and HR leaders take notice of feedback and have a policy of responding.

Having wrestled with different ways of presenting search options on the homepage, I also notice users have to select between the organisation and people directory when searching.

We rounded off with a discussion on the role of innovation and then retired to the bar for food and drink kindly sponsored by The Crown Estate.

Thanks to Rod for hosting and securing a budget for drinks!

Most organisations seem to have adopted intranets for communication and collaboration, but how should an organisation’s intranet support its knowledge management activities?

From communities of practice to blogging and ultimately internal social networking, it’s something I’ve grappled with over the past eight years – trying, failing and hopefully learning at each stage of development.

It’s a journey I reflected on in a recent article for Inside Knowledge Magazine.

I originally created the group in 2005 in response to some requests for help which weren’t reaching the correct audience. Apart from one response a year later saying what a great idea this was, there had been little activity – or so I thought.

During the interim period, the membership had been growing steadily. All it took was one request for  help in improving the operation of a factory machine. Quickly there was a response from another part of the world suggesting a modification they had used. This included a description, pictures and even blueprints!

This led to a flurry of other requests and responses and although the requests died down after a while, I believe it has helped the community see the tool as a way of connecting with expertise around the world.

Ironically, if we’d upgraded the tool in line with our IT team’s recommendations, this would never have happened as part of that would have meant removing “inactive” communities.

Ernst presents a comprehensive framework for web governance at different levels. I liked that while it was simple enough to read and understand easily, they took the time to make it relevant to users and to communicate it, the CIO sending a memo to all staff stating the purpose explicitly. It’s even displayed to users as they log in:

- primary tool for internal communication
- place to publish and find information
- place to collaborate
- entry to online workplace

There are similarly easy to read sections covering roles and responsibilities, content approval, intranet access and the intranet content structure.

Feeding The Monster by Mark Wyatt, Environment Agency

Mark gave a captivating presentation about the challenges facing the Environment Agency following an intranet content management tool update – and I forgot to take notes.

Starting with the statement that the perfect publisher is different for every organisation, Mark talked about the aftermath of the introduction of a new content management system. With over 700 content publishers and a central team of five content editors, there was an imbalance which left the publisher community feeling a lack of support from the organisation and too much content of low quality. With the situation tending towards the chaotic, they acted to reign in the content managers, reducing the number by 90%.

They took a top-down/bottom-up approach, building support with senior stakeholders to get the right governance in place and highlighting the potential costs of failing to comply.

At the same time, they formed a network of senior publishers – recognising those who produced quality content – and improved communication and collaboration, giving them forums to share good practice and discuss issues. A three-strikes rule for all publishers introduced the threat of withdrawing publishing privileges for anyone whose content failed to measure up.

Mark said the content publishers have welcomed these guidelines, which is understandable since they provide clarity, improve overall quality and ultimately recognise their role as important to the organisation’s success. Managers on the other hand struggled to accept the minimum standards, even while they supported the cost benefits.

Armed with these light constraints, the intranet has been brought under control and while Mark felt the system was optimised, he admitted it wasn’t perfect.

His best learnings warned against becoming seduced by the pursuit of perfection:
- you can’t build a theoretical community
- you can’t take a one-size fits all approach
- you can’t do it in isolation to the culture and workings and strategy of an organisation

A good perspective on working in the real world.

Web Idol
A tradition at the J. Boye conference sees a group of content management vendors line-up for some abuse at the hands of a panel of expert judges. Hence representatives on stage for seven minutes putting SharePoint, eSpirit, Kapow, Terminal4, 23 Video and SiteCore through their paces.

The biggest surprise I got was when Terminal4 showed their product which has exactly the same user interface for setting up navigation as BAT’s bespoke tool SiteBuilder. Coincidentally, their tool, Piero told us, was aimed at occasional users. And the whole experience was very SiteBuilder-like.

Oddly, SiteCore was the only entrant who tried to engage the audience with a story, featuring characters, something meaningful which encapsulated an end-to-end experience. All the other entrants merely tried to demonstrate features. Kapow showed a useful-looking tool for migration, 23 Video a white label tool for setting up video sharing sites which featured some impressive-looking analytics and SharePoint touted its similarity to existing Microsoft Office applications.

SiteCore naturally romped home with the audience’s vote, proving that if you want to communicate with people, tell them stories they’ll understand. The story supplies the context and there are no awkward “…so what I’m going to do here is…” moments.

My early morning Ryanair flight from Stansted must’ve caught a tailwind, because I arrive twenty minutes early, catch the bus into town and arrive to hear the end of Jane’s spot, the first public presentation of the results of her fourth annual Global Intranet Strategies survey. I’m already looking forward to reading the report when I get back, but I’m happy to hear very large organisations who are social media pioneers are benefitting from “more effective knowledge sharing”, “more engaged employees” and “increased cross pollination and innovation”.

Why We Need A Modern Intranet – Miquel Maldonado, Médécins Sans Frontières

First intranet case study of the day comes from Miquel. Médécins Sans Frontières launched a new intranet in August 2009 having decided that a new file sharing tool would not meet their requirements.

The design is clean – the sparing use of colour indicating this is a business tool. They’ve put a lot of thought into their taxonomy, extending the keywords they initially identified by adding popular tags from users, a nice feedback loop making good use of crowdsourcing.

A couple of questions from the floor:

Q: (Regarding user profiles) “How do you indicate ‘complete’ profiles to users?”
Miquel says there isn’t a measure of completeness for a user profile, but it prompts me to wonder whether a Linked In-style percentage measure would encourage greater completion of profiles? Something to try out in the future.

Q: “How integrated is the people directory?”
One of the great strengths of an intranet is its degree of integration. In MSF’s case, Miquel says, it’s not just blog and community posts which link to people directory records, but document authors too. Most intranets I’ve seen aren’t integrated to this level which impressed me.

Using tag clouds

A key feature of the new design is a tag cloud displayed prominently on the homepage. The terms are all countries, the larger ones representing countries with the most documents associated over the last three months.

This interested me because I’d had a conversation with my colleague Simon only 24 hours earlier about the appropriate use of tag clouds. We had a situation where we wanted to give users of a site the quickest access to policy documents. The problem is the tag cloud signifies popularity by measuring volume, not relevance – the most appropriate for my needs – or usage – the most often accessed. With user-generated content, this is great because it shows us trends. In MSF’s case, they’re using a time-frame of three months, so the cloud represents currency, the organisation’s focus areas during that period.

I was lucky enough to find myself sitting next to Miquel at dinner that evening, so I asked him about it. He said he’d had exactly the same conversation. Bravely, they’d gone ahead with an experiment to try it out and see what happened.

It will be interesting to see the results and get feedback from users. I’d be interested to hear other people’s experiences with tag clouds on intranets and whether or not they’ve helped people access user- and non-user-generated content more easily.

Having confused destination and starting point, I have just been driven at high speed to Billund airport to catch my flight home. Hearing the above words spoken by a taxi driver normally wouldn’t instill confidence, but as his satnav indicates we’re only five minutes away, I’m feeling a deal more relaxed than 45 minutes earlier. Then I was standing outside the Radisson Hotel wondering where my bus was. Closer inspection of the timetable revealed I had planned my journey around the incoming schedule instead of the outgoing. The bus I needed had departed an hour earlier.

(The loathed cliché “the devil is in the details” reminds me of an appropriate Danish swearword, one of a few words of the language I picked up in the ’90s in several visits for parties and the ’95 MidtFyn rock festival, the others being “jordbaer”, “kartofler” and “nej ikke er der”. Now when I travel to the country, I am confident I will not starve and I can direct people to urinate elsewhere – which is especially useful when camping at MidtFyn.)

None of this can detract from what has been a wonderful couple of days. I’ve attended slick conferences and professional conferences, but this is by far the friendliest conference I’ve been to. Janus Boye walks quietly around the sports hall venue, nodding and smiling at everyone, seemingly greeting everyone by their first name and generally creating the sense that he’s throwing nothing more than a party to which he just happens to have invited several hundred leading web thought leaders and practitioners. Oh, and me.

I’ll post reviews and reflections from the conference over the next few days.

Arriving early after an energising stroll up from the Thames, I was greeted warmly at the door and asked to complete a profile which I taped up on the wall. After saying hello to some familiar faces, I filled my plate and glass (several times each) ready for the show. There seemed to be a lot of new faces and it wasn’t just because I’d missed the social events over the summer and the most recent meetup. Moving the group to LinkedIn seems to have increased its visibility.

Presented by London Area Communicators’ Group, the evening was a collaboration between The Big Wheel Theatre Company who performed songs and sketches and Jason Buck who ran a social media/enterprise/web 2.0 workshop.

After several introductory sketches and songs with a social media theme, we moved upstairs, passing through offices where employees were engaged in amusing scenarios, for the workshop section.

Jason gave a brief introduction then we were asked to consider the different attitudes to social media tools which might be displayed by four archetypal employees of a fictional company, as exemplified by the characters associated with Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor and Sid James.

Following the “Carry On…” theme, we were encouraged to cram as many innuendoes as possible into our conversation, something for which I am proud to report our group – “Big End – we give it to you straight up” – won special recognition.

After the workshop, we returned to the ground floor where we were greeted with champagne served by a lady on stilts, which I can confidently state is a first in my experience. There were more songs and a chance to quickly discuss how much we’d enjoyed the evening before departing into the night in the direction of Kings Cross station.

Thanks to Jason Buck, The Big Wheel Theatre Company and Matt O’Neill for organising a great evening.

Arriving five minutes into Rod’s introduction I noticed a lot of new faces. I considered blaming the tube but guessed someone might already have done that gag – and as Rod pointed out, it would be easy to find out whether I was telling the truth from LU’s real time update system.

London Underground

First up Rod McLean talked about the work he’d done on London Underground’s intranet since joining in January.

The intranet had grown through the use of Frontpage with little organisation or governance. Rod’s initial audit resulted in the deletion of over 50% of the existing content (with surprisingly little protest), amounting to some 6GB in volume (check Rod’s presentation in the attachments section for a full breakdown). Rod spoke of using Webtrends, Google Search Appliance and PowerMapper to get a sense of “what’s out there”, but said they had to write their own tool to find out what was on the servers.

As an example of the remaining work, Rod points out a 496 page PDF titled “Jargon Buster” which he notes is a prime candidate for a wiki.

The biggest problem, says Rod moving on to the demonstration, is navigation which he demonstrates by pointing to the tabs across the top of the screen which open different applications, all in new windows. The breadcrumb bar provides isn’t as effective at orientating users as it should be and sites are intensely cross-linked, which compounds the problem.

None of this seems to have dulled Rod’s enthusiasm for the job ahead. Instead you get a sense of pragmatism at work, dealing with the problems you can in a logical order without becoming overwhelmed by the size of the task.

Transport For London

Brian Dobson has been working on TFL’s intranet, Source, since 2005.

Source‘s navigation is more mature, dispensing with the organisational hierarchy navigation still favoured by LU for more user-orientated titles relating to people’s work and needs as employees.

Source‘s choice of imagery is based on people, London and travel rather than specific transport systems, so there are no pictures of trains or buses, which gives Source a slightly more human face.

Brian says every employee visits Source, though he experiments to engage people interactively with forums have disappointed, most lapsing into “whingeing”.

An interesting warning for expertise location tools: “Don’t ask people to put in their own expertise: you’ll end up with 500 web developers..!”

Brian notes the challenges he still faces, including replacing lots of PDF forms which are printed out and filled in.

Thanks to Rod for organising the visit and to both Brian and Rod for enjoyable demonstrations. Check the Intranetters community for news of forthcoming visits.

Weinberger’s point is that multiple viewpoints result in multiple categorisation systems, all of which are equally valid from their own point of view. He talks about the shortcomings of attempts to categorise using Linnaean classification and the Dewey Decimal system as examples, and about the three orders of organisation: of physical objects, ideas and metadata, and the relationships between them.

I’m not blowing the final conclusion, but there are three paragraphs on the final page which seem to me to sum up the power of social computing perfectly:

“It’s not who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing their gravity.

It’s not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else’s experience. It’s how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links.

It’s not what you know, and it’s not even who you know. It’s how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.”

Dan quotes research by Dr. Bernd Irlenbusch of the London School of Economics: “We find that financial incentives… can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”

Engagement “…derives from self direction”, autonomy, mastery and purpose:

1. autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives
2. mastery – the desire to get better and better at something
3. purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

As Dan points out “…too many organisations are making decisions about talent and people assumptions which are outdated, unexamined and rooted more in folklore than in science.”

Now if Dan would just close his talk by telling us the incentives which applied to his law degree…

Imagine employees being treated as people instead of resources. You’d never hear the phrase “Can I borrow you?” (to which I am always tempted to respond “Of course, if you bring me back…”)

There’s so much interest in engagement within the internal communications fraternity, but perhaps the answer isn’t procedural.

Yesterday’s Ark Group social software masterclass was a great opportunity to hear about other organisations intranets then sit down to discuss the challenges faced by some of the attendees. For me it was also a chance to catch up with David Ferrabee and Neville Hobson who presented at Melcrum’s social media conference two years ago. Neville’s presentation that day marked my first sight of Twitter and convinced me that I needed to be active in external social media as well as internal, so I was looking forward to seeing what’s on his radar at the moment.

Neville sets the scene with a presentation about the progress of social media in 2009, before we’re briefly interrupted by a fire alarm and have to file out into the blazing sunshine in Holborn. While we’re standing outside it dawns on me that I’ve seen Denise Maskew before. In fact I missed her presentation when I had to leave KCUK 2008 early, so I finally get the opportunity I’d been hoping for to catch up with her work.

United Utilities

Denise talks about the challenges involved in introducing social media tools at United Utilities and the drivers behind the strategy. They’re experimenting with a wider range of tools than we are, so it’s interesting to hear about podcasts and wikis along with more familiar applications like commented news and blogs. I note they’re using Red Dot for content management,

Pfizer

Pfizers’ Ben Gardner is next, talking about their Project Collaborate aimed at increasing team interactivity. They’re also using technology I’d like to be experimenting with internally, including wikis and RSS. I suggested at a brainstorming meeting earlier this year that we might consider replacing the intranet with a wiki in the long term. I still think this is an excellent way forward and the views I heard expressed at July’s Corporate Social Networking Forum have reinforced this.

The technology I’m not familiar with today is Microsoft OneNote, a tool for unstructured note taking which Pfizer are using as a front end to Sharepoint. (Indeed, I’m so unfamiliar with it, I later refer to it as iNote.) Ben also shows us some of the cultural and communication efforts used to engage users, including Meet Jessica, Pfizer’s own variation of Meet Charlie – what is enterprise 2.0?.

(I had to make a note during Ben’s presentation as I didn’t know Google Chrome can be installed on locked desktops. It installs without updating the registry, which is great… as long as I don’t want to use any sites with Flash. It also highlights some problems with the CSS on the intranet.)

British American Tobacco

My presentation on the cultural impact of social computing tools (slides available here) looked less at the technology, more at the internal landscape, design and cultural impact of the tools.

We’ve focused on communities, blogs and social networking, all of which are still gaining acceptance. Our efforts to encourage knowledge sharing in online communities foundered for seven years with five different technologies, until we started looking at more creative ways to build social networks between the participants.

The blogging experiment has run for five years now and we’ve just had two directors begin blogging in the past twelve months. (Neville laughs at one point, saying out that ours is the twelfth instance of “BlogCentral” he’s heard of!)

Looking at other organisations’ work always gives me ideas for where we can go next. I’ve felt for some time that we need to move social computing further on and seeing what other companies are achieving always reignites that passion. I’m looking forward to the meeting of the Intranetters group next Wednesday, 26th August.

Coming from the knowledge management angle, I couldn’t help slipping in the odd KM-related question, such as “what mistakes have you made and what did you learn?” Only one person dared to answer directly, admitting that you never stop making mistakes and you have to learn how to deal with them. Most instead preferred to brush the question off with an answer along the lines of “well I wouldn’t want to talk about specific instances…”

One director was brave enough to admit that luck had played a part in his own career choices – being in the right place at the right time – so we hope that including these stories will help to open people’s minds about the potential opportunities available rather than being seen as a “recipe for managing your career”.

In the memo, Christopher Vogler interpreted Joseph Cambpell‘s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“, the book in which “Campbell explores the theory that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth.”

Vogler simplifies Campbell’s more scholarly work into a practical handbook for writers. In a new preface to the second edition he answers critics who called The Hero’s Journey formularic by saying it is a form, not a forumula. He goes on to make some interesting contextual points about its reception in “herophobic” cultures such as Australia and Germany. “Australians,” he says, “distrust appeals to heroic virtue because such concepts have been used to lure generations of young Australian males into fighting Britain’s battles…” while “…the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis has tainted the concept… distorted the powerful symbols to enslave, dehumanize and destroy.”

A new section looking at several modern films in heroic context includes “Titanic”, “The Full Monty” and oddly “Pulp Fiction”. The latter doesn’t naturally fit the form, so instead it’s used to view the individual journeys of the three characters Jules, Vincent and Butch.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6wGi4qHTm9Y/SZyVOgaiIvI/AAAAAAAAAIg/4QlnF8RjkrA/s1600-h/Sources+of+Power+-+How+People+Make+Decisions.jpg

I hadn’t encountered Niall Cook of Hill and Knowlton before, but I agreed with much of what he had to say. He began with some great points about emerging tools, saying that the return on investment doesn’t need to be high when the investment is low. He dismissed internal systems which “don’t work any more… – even e-mail” – while the traditional model of an intranet is “publishing, not collaboration”.
Work, business and employees are all changing, he says. People want to work differently. Leaders should be guides, not gods – and employees will demand inclusivity rather than command and control (at which point we got a nice Child With A Laptop slide).

“It’s not just about connecting”, said Niall, outlining a model with the headings “Connect, Communicate, Cooperate, Collaborate”. Cooperation he differentiates from collaboration using the following attributes:

• no end goal
• no command and control
• structure emerges
• requires internal versions of Flickr, YouTube, etc.

The old IT model of user needs is dead, he contests – employees need wikis supported by social networks, or – and this is the risk – they will go outside the firewall and do it. Implementation needs be demand-driven, based on what employees are using already in their non-working lives, to create value. But, he warns, don’t ignore culture. There is no point using collaboration software in a non-collaborative organisation.

Lee Bryant of Headshift talks a lot of commonsense on-line, so his presentation was what originally drew me in. Beginning with the statement that existing business processes are too inefficient and businesses can’t afford them, he went on to talk about a future based on simpler, lower cost systems.

“Trust is cheaper than control”, he states, explaining how social tools or a social layer can “rejuvenate old, unloved systems.” He touches on the evolutionary nature of innovation, based on rapid feedback – something he feels intranets lack. Social networks and weak ties, he says, create an organisational immune system, which increases network productivity, not just personal.

Lee recommends that we make hidden data shared and use it to drive collective intelligence, an example: from usage statistics you can see which are the most valuable areas of an intranet. Unfortunately, they are rarely shared.
He talks about the “ambient awareness” which small-scale status updates create and the benefits for team working, he states that “90% of project management is communication”.

He finishes with a vision of the intranet based on wikis which “locate publishing into the context of doing something” supported by social networks. You don’t even need to create new tools – “use your existing directories”, he recommends, by which time I was sitting with a very smug grin on my face.

Conclusions
I was pleased to see more forward-looking opinions siding against static intranets with old publishing models. I remember suggesting over a year ago to our team that Interact could easily be wiki-enabled to encourage more participation, without compromising the validity of the information.

So enabling collaboration (and cooperation!) with wikis, supported by a social networks seems to be a good emerging direction for organisations who want to lead by taking the next step.

I’m going to RIBA to see another terrible Celt, the rather more sedentary Dave Snowden, who is equally proudly but rather less bombastically unveiling version 3.0 of Cognitive Edge‘s Sensemaker software suite.

Dave kicks off by showing recent projects which demonstrate the latest additions to the software. There are more triangles in the signification part of the input process in these examples. Dave explains using triangles places a greater cognitive load on the brain during signification, resulting in a more meaningful result. Formulating appropriate triangles in an exercise during the accreditation programme certainly taxed my meagre intelligence, though I’m sure it’s something one develops with practice. At least I have first hand experience of their superiorityover the slider mechanism.

I was initially disappointed to hear the triangular interface element had been patented, which seems to preclude the possiblity of data collection through another tool. Much of my previous work has involved skunkworks-style prototyping of new tools, usually in Lotus Notes/Domino.

As it slowly dawned on me that attempting to demonstrate software designed to make sense of the results of complex mass-consultation exercises is unlikely to impress a handful of early adopters by merely reflecting their own responses back to them without demonstrating the formation of observable patterns, I realised a different approach is needed this time. Stories must be identified and narrative employed.

The best stories I’ve heard about SenseMaker centre on weak signal detection. During SenseMarker training, we were given test data which included a study of news stories in Iranian media. Signifying the stories against pre-determinted criteria and plotting against three axes creates a three-dimensional plane like that in the diagram.

Signifying new stories over time (yellow dots) and comparing them to the existing landscape can indicate the emergence of new beliefs. The cluster to the lower left of this diagram could provide early indications of new types of extremism.

In other examples, a drinks manufacturer and a Liverpool museum both use SenseMaker to obtain instant feedback on consumer experiences. This enables them to respond more quickly if action is required.

Lastly, Dave introduced an open project about gardens which anyone ca participate in here.

I’m going spend some time sitting in mine, thinking about projects where I can see SenseMaker contributing to better understanding – I’ve come up with about five already.

Conrad Taylor opened the event, framing technological change as “the co-evolution of tools, artefacts and environment” and suggested “science fiction, the future of personal computer and magic versions of current processes” as predictive approaches. After a video message from BCS President Alan Pollard, Chris Yapp spoke about the need for technology to augment and add to individual capabilities, “a neuro-physiological effect which increases attention-capacity” and the need for better algorithms. He made the surprising point that the technical capability outlined by Doug Englebart in his famous demonstration “A Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect” still does not exist.

Dominated by knowledge management professionals, the first group I sat with were uncomfortable purely discussing technology and the conversation quickly turned to shifts in society. Fears over security, data retention, defensiveness about intellectual property rights and reputation management appear to prevent progress.

One person commented that individual identity might be lost or changed due to mass participation and more sharing, but that younger people seemed to fear this less than older people. Since our opinions and the meanings we ascribe to things are founded on our life experience, what we learn will always reflect our previous experience and the sense we make of it.

Similar themes emerged after I moved tables. We talked about what Intellectual Property means now and considered how organisations will generate value in the future. We felt the cultural shift in ownership needed to be understood and “something like” the GPL or Creative Commons embraced more widely. The model which has served the music business for the past 100 years is no longer viable and there is a lot to be learnt from the open-source-software-and-consultancy model.

I sadly didn’t share a table with Ray Shaw where the most off-the-wall conversation was always likely (and so it proved). The conversation continued over excellent food and drink which had me questioning the fact that it’s around twenty years since I was a member of the British Computer Society. Perhaps it’s time I renewed.

This amounted to Dave’s Introduction to Complexity lecture, which I’ve now seen three times in the last six months, so perhaps it’s time to delve a bit deeper into the material.

Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable afternoon and I found it interesting to hear the reactions of people who haven’t seen it before.

Despite having worked in Knowledge Management for around six years, I’ve never yet seen Euan Semple speak. An odd omission which was happily rectified last night at the National Audit Office which hosted April’s Melcrum Communicators’ Network London Meetup

Euan talks a lot of what to me seems commonsense and I find myself nodding in agreement at what he’s saying… then thinking back and realising how far ahead of the curve his work at the BBC was and that for the most part we’re still catching up.

His observations on organisational politics ring true, particularly where he talks about the fear which seems to pervade any discussion about social tools, when all we’re doing is conducting “…self-correcting conversations in the open.”

What could there possibly be to fear in that?

The explanation of the dangers of pseudoscientific approaches to studying performance is recommended to anyone working in organisational design. I also feel all business management courses should start with the story about cargo cults and coconut headsets. Learn more from this excerpt from the first chapter.

Harry Golombek’s name wasn’t familiar to me. He was either slightly before my time or perhaps I read the wrong newspaper. The public face of chess to me in the 80s was Bill Hartson of Mastergame, though the show sadly went the way of Pot Black and One Man And His Dog.

Happily there are plenty of commented games available on YouTube.

The group on my table began with incentives, feedback and recognition, through leadership, authenticity, shared values and consistency, then onto necessity, relevance, line-of-sight, communication, before leaping into crisis and the question of how to help people accept and learn to cope with constant change.

As usual, the range of views represented increased the scope far wider than my own context and I quickly realised how narrowly I had initially viewed the conversation. When I observe how limiting my own viewpoint can be, I feel the value of coming along to events like these to talk to people in similar roles in different organisations and I wish I could convince more people to come along.

Kate spoke about The Landscape of the Mind, a model she has developed to help people understand each other’s preferred working styles. I began to feel uncomfortable here, the voice of Dave Snowden echoing around in my head, telling me that people change their preferences as they change context. Conrad must’ve felt the same way, commenting wryly as he did that “I don’t believe in astrology, but people with my starsign never do.” My own preferences seemed scattered throughout the model, perhaps leaving me somewhere in the middle, though I identified my current colleagues on either side of my category, not unlike real life.

I’d love to better understand the working styles of the people around me, but I fear many tools we’re presented in our working lives – such as Myers Briggs – aren’t up to the job and there is a real need to get smarter.

I’ll try to keep a more open mind.

Not many people get to travel to the top of the BT tower, which might partly explain why Tuesday afternoon’s Gurteen Knowledge Café was so heavily oversubscribed. Add Dave Snowden speaking about complexity and you have easily the hottest KM ticket in town. I hadn’t made the original cut, but my colleague Kevin was fading fast by Monday afternoon and arranged for me to go in his stead.

“How can we best keep employees engaged in their work, in the current economic climate?” – Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with Dave Snowden, Alex Wilson, Sharon Darwent – BT Tower

The afternoon began with a buffet in the revolving restaurant, which clicked into gear as we queued for dim sum, inducing a sensation faintly resembling seasickness. The restaurant completed a revolution as we sat and talked, picking out London landmarks through the gloomy haze.

David Gurteen welcomed everybody to the event and explained how the afternoon was going to work. As usual there was a great mix of first timers and regulars, which always helps get conversations started. The whole group of 80 or so were then ferried to the ground floor auditorium where we were welcomed by host Sharon Darwent and introduced to BT’s HR director Alex Wilson. Alex spoke about the need for engagement during the current economic climate, stressing that BT faced its own challenges and didn’t pretend to know all the answers.

Dave Snowden followed with his presentation introducing complexity, updated with some of the output from a recent Cognitive Edge engagement. His examples from the Liverpool museum project demonstrated the importance of collecting granular anecdotal fragments from children who had visited the museum and how SenseMaker helps signify, interpret and display them visually. Graphs showed how weak signal detection through the real time monitoring of anecdotes can lead to quick corrective action without the need for major interventions.

Moving back up the tower to discuss the implications highlighted some of the difficulties involved in helping people understand complexity and what it means for managers. Most people were happy to discuss their situations and propose solutions for each other’s problems but were less sure about a revolutionary approach.

Many organizations carry out an employee survey every two years. It’s a huge undertaking and an important input into strategy making. BT seems to be finding it needs to test the water more frequently and is taking quarterly surveys of samples of the organisation. It will be interesting to see how these more frequent inputs help the company become more agile.

As usual we decamped to a pub to make and renew acquaintances. I could’ve stayed longer, but I had another engagement.

“Newsletters are dead; Long live Engagement” – Jason Bates, David Paul

A smart walk back across Bloomsbury took me to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where Suzanne Clift of the Land Registry was hosting the Melcrum Communicators’ Network’s London Communicators’ Group February meetup.

Jason opened the proceedings by focusing everyone in the room on the challenges facing organisations in the current climate before dividing the group into teams for a workshop. David then took over in the guise of Rupert Fotherington-Smythe (or someone similar), CEO of Gravelodge, a nationally-respected chain of motels which has grown in size, but lost something of its identity along the way. We had thirty minutes to put together a proposal aimed at reconnecting Gravelodge with its employees and reinvigorating its reputation.

Everyone in our team was keen. Jess and Beata were firing off ideas, which I managed to record and Cari structured into a proposal convincing enough for David to award us the contract! Key to his decision, he said, was our focus on getting the organisation to understand its original values.

We celebrated with a beer in the Pitcher and Piano on Kingsway and went our separate ways, all looking forward to next month’s meetup.

Cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink“, this is a deeper and more satisfying examination of the subject. It’s full of stories about people who make rapid decisions in stressful situations, including chess players, surgeons and firefighters – one of whom had previously believed himself to be psychic.

Anyway, I thought I should share some of the others I’ve made, so here’s my mindmap of Barbara Minto’s “The Pyramid Principle”, which I wrote about previously.

Failure conjures up similar images of humiliation in my own mind. Growing up, both within my family and among my friends, failure was not something to be tolerated but an opportunity to indulge in the humiliation of the offending party.

Now I’m older, if not wiser, and failure seems greatly underrated. Ideo’s David Kelly talks of prototyping as a means of “failing faster to succeed sooner”, while Dave Snowden sees tolerated failure as an important learning tool.

I was disappointed that the group I worked with didn’t ace the Butterfly Stamping exercise at Cognitive Edge accreditation, but I’ve thought about it a lot since, gaining far more insight into the exercise than if we’d merely succeeded at the task we were set and moved on. Understanding the relationships between things helps us better make sense of them than merely categorising them.

As David Weinberger notes in Everything is Miscellaneous: “That was Aristotle’s startling discovery: A thing standing on its own, is what it is because of the connection to other things like it and other things not like it.”

Catmull talks about a studio head who thinks his problem is not in finding people, but ideas. Catmull disagrees, calling this “…a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product.”

His conclusion has a lot of resonance for business:

“…we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.”

Success comes from taking risks – avoiding them leads to mediocrity.

My friend has recently taken over the chair in Operations Research at the London School of Economics and since it’s over 20 years since Operational Research featured in my computing degree, I referred to the internet for a slight refresher.

Operational Research emerged during the Second World War, which some would call a golden period for innovation. British scientist Patrick Blackett was one of several developing methods to improve decision making. The Wikipedia entry includes this anecdotal fragment which demonstrates Blackett’s genuine ability to “think outside the box”:

“…Blackett’s team analysed a report of a survey carried out by RAF Bomber Command. For the survey, Bomber Command inspected all bombers returning from bombing raids over Germany over a particular period. All damage inflicted by German air defenses was noted and the recommendation was given that armour be added in the most heavily damaged areas. Their suggestion to remove some of the crew so that an aircraft loss would result in fewer personnel loss was rejected by RAF command.

Blackett’s team instead made the surprising and counter-intuitive recommendation that the armour be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage in the bombers which returned. They reasoned that the survey was biased, since it only included aircraft that returned to Britain. The untouched areas of returning aircraft were probably vital areas, which, if hit, would result in the loss of the aircraft.”

The answer isn’t always staring you in the face.

There are similar problems with the setting of conflicting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Some managers who are rewarded for reusing existing ideas which save effort, a typical organisational approach aimed at improving the flow of ideas – but it doesn’t work.

The same managers are also rewarded for showing innovation and entrepreneurial flair. But instead of proving they have adopted these principles as a general way of working, the savvy career manager needs only to show an example of each to tick the box and get their annual bonus. The fact they might have taken a costly, innovative approach when there was a reusable idea staring them in the face, begging to be reused is ignored.

It’s one further indictment of the bonus culture and a good reason to consider scrapping it.

Connect – joining up the business and keeping up with the times

Six months on from its revamp, Connect, our employee directory and social networking tool is basking in the glow of statistics that demonstrate its incredible success throughout the Group.

The speed at which the online networking revolution is taking place has been an enormous challenge for many corporations, but HR’s Knowledge Management team and CORA have provided a leading-edge tool that has other companies and think-tanks approaching us for further information.

Connect was introduced several years ago, but it truly transformed into a social networking tool last July when two existing directories were combined and updated and the ability for people to make ‘connections’ and post updates was introduced.

The true value of Connect is something that reveals itself on an ongoing basis – and the benefits are manifold. It supports the Group working as a single enterprise by helping people to find their peers, build relationships, communicate and share information.

“There are also many indirect benefits to Connect,” says Simon Hill, Consultant in Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0, Human Resources. “It helps with working virtually across cultures and geographical barriers. You can forget that you’re 5,000 miles from the person you are connected to when you see what they are up to on a daily basis.”

A positive effect on the bottom-line

A recent report from well-known think-tank Demos has endorsed the use of networking technologies to build relationships and closer links with colleagues, as they play a role in helping with productivity, innovation and democratic working.

Olivia Cook of London-based corporate social networking consultancy, SelectMinds, reinforces this. “The camaraderie that is built among colleagues through corporate social networks fuels positive views of the employer brand, and more employers are realising the real value that a more connected workforce can add to the bottom-line.”

A difficult birth

The idea of transforming Connect began in 2003 when a friend of Richard Hare, Consultant in Knowledge, Communication and Collaboration, Human Resources, invited him to join a social networking site, Friendster. “That was before MySpace and social networking had really taken off, so when I first suggested the idea I encountered hostility – people didn’t understand it and I wondered how I could convince them.”

Richard chipped away and with the arrival of Facebook came the realisation that he was on to something big. “Simon and I began to meet up on an informal basis with a group of cross-functional, entrepreneurial and like-minded people, including Melanie Steele (CORA), Svetlana Omeltchenko (Marketing) and Julian Gibbs (Legal). Between us, the GSD development team and some CORA funding, we made this happen.”

Suited to our culture

Richard Hare suggests that Connect is particularly suited to the way that the Group operates: “People in British American Tobacco move around a lot, so Connect can help them stay in touch with people they know, as well as finding people who can help them in their new learning curve. By answering the question ‘What are you doing right now?’ you increase the ambient awareness of what your network is doing.”

“It’s also in line with the emphasis on cost-consciousness and working smarter,” says Simon. “Our employees represent a goldmine of information, so to exploit that great bank of internal knowledge rather than go out and pay for it, or, to do it yourself and get it wrong, makes great sense.”

The future is Connect

Now, Connect is spreading on a worldwide basis. Even markets who use their own local intranet can access Connect if they are e-mailed an invite to connect.

“There’s a strong viral element to Connect,” says Simon, “We’ve released things quietly using a more exponential, contemporary approach. We’ve produced something that is easy and enjoyable to use. Now, Connect is built into many of the features of Interact and it spreads through its own mechanisms in a way that has exceeded our expectations.”

For the future, Simon Hill would like to see every single British American Tobacco employee connected, “because we want the collective knowledge of the Group available to each and every employee”, and Richard Hare would like to see Connect enabling more global conversations. “We already have plans for new features following suggestions by Connect users”, says Richard.

“We’re starting to achieve the kind of behaviours and excitement within the organisation that are becoming prevalent with social networking sites on the internet,” observes Simon, and both he and Richard are more than happy to continue their work in this fast-moving and emergent area, to evolve new ideas that help the Group connect, collaborate and innovate.

I’ve just read this story about firms switching from Microsoft Outlook to Lotus Notes (thanks to David Gurteen).

What struck me was the quote from IBM general manager Bob Picciano: “The shift from pre-Web, proprietary technology to open software that helps people connect, collaborate and innovate at a reasonable cost is undeniable…”

A surprising coincidence, since we built the intranet and social media tools using Lotus Notes/Domino.

Walking towards the London Development Agency’s office across Blackfriars Bridge, I notice both The Coat and Badge and The Founders Arms seem to be going strong. But The Paper Moon has closed, its miserable facade reverting to a similar condition to that which once led a student colleague of mine to nickname it The Paper Bag. Of the brass lettering added during a previous facelift, only the P now remains.

Quality Conversation
Of the many characters who populate the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe, Ray is one of the most memorable. He’ll happily take a provocative position to see what happens or speak his mind even though his thoughts aren’t yet complete. This is the second such event he’s led and both times the lead up seems to have been jokingly characterised by an undercurrent of revenge!

Ray takes a while to set up the discussion, having split the subject into four areas to make the conversations more manageable. I specifically avoid the “social media” conversation and find myself drawn to the group discussing whether conversation is a business process and if so, whether it can be managed.

Our group listens as a former police officer tells us about the best conversations he’s observed: those concerned with shift handovers in hospital wards. Coincidentally, another of our group had worked to improve these conversations by educating those involved in the importance of using conversation to transfer information.

As we reflect on this serendipity, the fire alarm rings and we spill out into the street for ten minutes, during which our former policeman disappears. And yet, when we reconvene such a strong conversational direction has been set, no one is inclined to change it.

The long introduction and interruption mean there is plenty to discuss in The Young Vic bar in The Cut after. As I leave, Ray collars me with a challenge: “What is your knowledge cafe going to be about?” I suspect he’s done this knowing full well it sit in the back of my mind eating away at me over the coming weeks…

The impermanence of memory
Afterwards I take a stroll through the backstreets of Southwark, heading back down Blackfriars Road, then turning off towards Borough Station. Twenty years ago I spent the industrial year of my sandwich degree working at the Economic Adviser’s Office at the D.H.S.S., providing PC support and C programming expertise to the economists who provide statistics to answer parliamentary questions.

Friars House passed from Government hands long ago when much of the Department moved to Leeds. The Screenwriters Store is one of the new tenants, though I’ve no idea who occupies my old office on the top floor.

Turning left at the building, I glimpse some familiar sights – the row of flats, the pub with separate lounge and public bars (still intact, I think). At the end of the road I made a wrong turn and have to resort to heading in the general direction of Borough station.

Emerging north of the fire station, I cross the road and walk south to the entrance of Mint Street playground. This area of green was an oasis 20 years ago and I’m happy to see the local council has continued to maintain the area.

I can’t see David Prowse’s car or any sign of his gym. And I’m even more saddened to note the old “Mint Street playground” sign is gone. This was notable for a confusing graffito which I passed every morning.

“Loins”, it read, simply.

I puzzled over it for a number of weeks, before realising it was merely a misspelling of the nickname of local football team Millwall: The Lions.

It’s always been a disappointment to me that I didn’t acquire a deeper understanding of chess. I assumed a talent for the game depended on the ability to think some number of moves ahead which approached infinity. My reading – Know The Game: Chess, available from all good sports shops – on opening and endgame theory stopped almost as soon as it started – and I never took the time to learn the notation.

Recently I read Gary Klein’s book “Sources Of Power – How People Make Decisions”. (Perhaps you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” which quotes a couple of the cases, but draws some erroneous conclusions.)

Klein explains how we make decisions not based on a rational analysis of the available data, but by looking for a recognisable pattern with which we are already familiar. This trait – pattern recognition – is especially well developed in chess players and correlates with an ability to speak languages.

This would all be pretty much by-the-by were it not for something else I learned at the recent Cognitive Edge Accreditation Course. Up to the age of 25 our developing brains are open to new pattern formation. (No coincidence that Einstein did his most important work before this age.) But after the age of 25, the established brain works with the patterns it has already formed. Until… around the age of 45, when the brain becomes more open again.

That means I’ve got about five years to practice and learn in preparation. And thanks to the wonders of modern global communication, I’ve already got a coach. In Albania.

I realise it takes talent – I’m not expecting to become Grandmaster.

Not in the first five years.

It’s good to have something to aim for though.

I am contemplating relaxing for longer while waiting for my alarm when a sickening feeling hits me. I reach for my phone, which I’ve left plugged in and charging all night and find it’s just gone 6:30am. The alarm didn’t ring and I’m one and a half hours behind schedule.

I leap out of bed, dress and within ten minutes I am walking to the station. No time for a coffee, but I’m oddly not hungry, so I settle down with an episode of Cold Case on the Vaio which today doubles as my training PC for the SenseMaker session. I hope a seven year old Crusoe-powered 600MHz machine is up to the job…

Amazingly, I arrive in time for the start of the session. I had wondered whether the third day concentrating on the use of SenseMaker software tools would be of use to me, but Ron was convincing, saying this session would draw everything together.

The demonstration data sets show off the range of SenseMaker’s capabilities. The possible insights are as intriguing as the task of choosing signifiers seems daunting. While I’ve been warned that it can sometimes be difficult to apply the ideas, I can see huge potential for mass consultation in IT strategy and marketing.

My Vaio stands up to the task well enough to follow, but not enough to allow me to sprint ahead. Since SenseMaker is written in Java though, it is easy to move to different systems. And while I can’t yet import data collected in Lotus Notes, it will be possible in the next version, which would make the collection phase simpler in my current role.

An exciting conclusion to three days full of ideas, which I’m going to need to reflect on for some time to really begin to appreciate.

Social Network Stimulation

The morning session begins with some commentary on natural numbers – 5 (7 +/- 2) the number of items you can keep in memory, 15 the number of people you can trust and 150 the number of acquaintances you can maintain and have knowledge of. This leads nicely into applying the Cognitive Edge technique Social Network Stimulation communities. Dave applies the natural numbers to communities as follows:

I can think of examples in most of the domains, but I need to give this more thought. Could make an interesting sidenote to some of the community research I’m involved in.

Distributed Cognition

The advantages of using Distributed Cognition to deal with complexity should be self evident. Running an internal blogging site, we choose not to police the posts – and I’ve argued against it at meetings of our Intranetters community, to general incomprehension and bafflement – instead telling employees what is considered acceptable and giving them the power to report anything they feel falls foul of the guidelines. No one ever has.

In this session we are introduced to different aspects of narrative and anecdotes. Some I am familiar with, others I’ll need to work through again. These are powerful tools and which we could benefit from using more of.

I’m happy to note the positive light Dave shines on the cynic when he says “cycnics care” while those who parrot back the party line generally don’t and that “negative storytelling in healthy” while sticking to the script isn’t. I can only agree.

We also consider complexity using fine granularity objects like narrative fragments – anecdotes, videos, photos – and disintermediation – allowing access to the fragments rather than providing summary reports. Dave tells how US Army staff preferred to read each other’s blogs during the Iraq conflict, an interesting update to the Centre for Army Lessons Learned Knowledge Management case study which I’ve seen so many times.

These ideas sound like a possible way forward and I feel excited thinking about potential applications.

Morning session: origins and complexity
I arrive on time. It’s overcast at the London Wetlands Centre which is quiet, although there is plenty of activity on the water. There’ll be no coffee until the first break, so I’ll be sustaining myself on interest alone.

Dave kicks off the first session with some background about Cognitive Edge, an introduction to naturalising sense-making, complexity science and the Cynefin framework. The goal of sense-making, he says, is a better understanding of where we are today so we can decide what to do next. This sounds very like why I’m here.

I’ve followed Dave’s blog since early on and the language isn’t as scary as it once was. I barely blench the first time the word “ontology” appears and I am more than comfortable for “epistemology” to make an appearance.

We’re repeatedly told day one is intense, though it doesn’t appear so from the material. The exercises are a little rushed though, something we are told will be remedied on future courses by reorgnising the material into beginners and advanced courses.

Butterfly Stamping

Our first exercise involves a sheet of items to make sense of. Our table blows it by attempting to categorise the items onto the Cynefin framework, earning a rebuke from Dave for being of an “I.T.” mentality. We should have concentrated on the relationships between the items instead and built the framework using those. I think. I’m not certain, but there’s little time for a post mortem as we must move on quickly.

The Future Backwards

Steve Bealing takes over for the morning’s second session as Dave departs to an appointment alongside Tony who’s been looking on from the back of the room during the first session.

The next exercise sees us examining a current issue, tracing the issue back through a series of milestones over time, then working from a turning point to create visions of heaven and hell based on a series of turning points with some random factors thrown in.

Tracing backwards is supposed to help us avoid “retrospective coherence” and “premature convergence”, the simplicity which hindsight can introduce to a complex situation. It seems to make it harder – for a group with an I.T. mentality – to understand history without examining case and effect.

This time we take the result and attempt to understand the relationships between the events – but we blow it again. We were supposed to classify it onto the Cynefin model. Weren’t we? Again I’m not sure and there’s no time to linger and learn from our failure.

Social Network Stimulation

The most instantly useful technique I learn on day one is Ritual Dissent. We’ve struggled to get people to listen to feedback, a crucial phase in the Deep Dive innovation workshops we run. No matter how we organise the session, as soon as a team presents its design, the presenter naturally attempts to engage with dialogue with his critic. This is less of a problem at Ideo where the method is inculcated into the designers, but where people aren’t naturally familiar with it, we need something else.

Ritual Dissent solves this problem by turning the presenter 180 degrees to face away from their audience and listen to the feedback. The contact and desire to engage in debate rather than just listen is instantly broken.

End of day one

We repair back to Hammersmith to a pub on the river for a few pints and something to eat. I don’t linger too long as I have to be up early again tomorrow. Perhaps a hotel might’ve been a more sensible option..!

1. Hammersmith Palais (Echo and the Bunnymen ’84, The Alarm ’84, ’85)
2. Hammersmith Odeon (The Alarm ’85, Iron Maiden ’88, Then Jerico [twice!] ’89, Omar ’90, The New Jersey Gospel Choir ’91)
3. Fulham Greyhound (The Acolytes ’89, ’90, This Picture ’89, Bomb Disneyland ’89, Mega City Four ’89, Paddy Goes To Holyhead ’89, Senseless Things ’89 and several other events which may well have escaped recollection)

Under the flyover, Hammersmith was a grim-looking place. We visited infrequently, so took a while to learn which exit to use from the Underground, which invariably meant walking half way round the island looking for the flyover to give us a bearing. The walk back up Fulham Palace Road from the Greyhound was never undertaken either alone or sober. If we did it quick enough, there’d be time for a kebab from the shop at the other end, before jumping on an early enough train to connect with the last Central Line train back to Essex. Sometimes the Central Line train was held so the last trains would all connect up.

Apart from a recent Straight8 event I haven’t been back often, so the transformation of Hammersmith into bustling metropolitan shopping area still surprises me. Even the Underground station has been completed, with the addition of a bright new shopping centre and bus station.

I’ll be catching the bus from Hammersmith to Barnes where The London Wetland Centre is the venue for the last London-based Cognitive Edge accreditation session of the year. After kicking myself for missing the previous session, I was more than happy for Ron Donaldson to twist my arm a little to attend this course. No surprise he recommended the venue. It beats staring at the side of a building while you’re “composing your thoughts…”

• Commonsense should tell you that unless your company has at least 50% of the market, your results will be affected more by what other companies do in the marketplace than what your company does.
• We need to abandon the “Analyse – Think – Talk (Do)” paradigm and replace it with “Believe – Do – Think – Talk – Do again”.

And on how advertising works:

1. “…advertising doesn’t tend to work by changing our opinions… What we think about a product tends to follow our usage behaviour, not the other way around”
2. “…the most important contribution to effective advertising is the creative contribution (John Philip Jones)… it’s novelty and not the message itself.”
3. “the most likely advertising research measure to move in the real world… is… ‘advertising salience’ – the sense I get that this company is doing quite a bit of advertising these days, all of which knock the traditional awareness and persuasion measure into the sea (and rightly so).”

A fascinating book for anyone interested in where marketing might be heading.

1. a ‘wall’ for messages (like Facebook)
2. some way of getting around the replication delay when invites are sent
3. an optional message when you invite a connection to join with you
4. send an instant message directly from Connect and see individuals’ online status
5. send an e-mail from Connect
6. forward/email profiles to other users
7. send a text (SMS message) to someone’s phone
8. add information about business trips so people can see if anyone in their network is travelling and plan to meet them, perhaps by changing their own travel plans (like Plazes)
9. more detail on what people are currently doing (for example, their current project)
   ranking individuals on how helpful they are

As ever, it’s a matter of balancing budget against the effort, so we may not be able to implement all of them this time around.

Yes, photo-sharing was a massively-popular suggestion – it’s currently sitting on the “too difficult” pile while we attempt to get our heads around that particular challenge.

“How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer“

Thanks to Anecdote.com.au for the tip.

We are here – a stone’s throw from Charlton Park where Antonioni shot some exteriors for 60s fashion flick “Blow Up” – to see the visual realisation of the Global Employer Brand project. Models Ufuoma, Tim, Mairi, David and Sergio were selected from Globe House HR employees to pose in ways representing the theme of “Bring Your Difference”.

Friday morning saw the model makers put the finishing touches to a huge Death Star-like construction formed of small interconnecting shapes which will later be coloured by computer. The afternoon is spent with the models posing variously in front of a section of larger shapes which will also be subject to computerised jiggery-pokery at a later date. On Monday, the fun really begins with our models suiting up and throwing paint over another part of the construction.

The Global Employer Brand debuts on 7th November.

This month Russell-Oliver Brooklands – ROB to his friends – spoke about the need to improve the internal comms process, for which he has come up with the Internal Communication Model for Business. Rob has a fascinating personal story and did an excellent job of identifying the pitfalls of Internal Comms – I found myself ticking all 12 of his list of problems which you may have encountered at some point.

My interest – along with most of those in the room – was piqued when he spoke about seven “triggers” which cause people react to communications by taking one of three roles in the process: communicator, audience or detached observer.

Despite probing, Rob was loathe to elucidate, saying that he’d once tried to sum up in a short period what he usually takes a day to teach and the client had lost a substantial sum of money as a result (“citation needed”).

A great example of “Lost” director J.J. Abrams’s principle of “don’t open the box“..!

Mark Earls has just published “Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature“. Herd is Mark’s second book, following “Welcome To The Creative Age“, a book which marketing cartoonist Hugh MacLeod says changed his life.

In Ten Questions for Mark Earls, Hugh gets an overview of Mark’s philosophy, which sounds like work being a social activity and not simply a list of processes to follow. Here’s a taster:

“Let’s start with the good stuff about “Brand”: it’s clearly a popular idea, it’s spread far and wide into politics and self-help books. It’s useful, in that it allows us to talk about the cluster of stuff that floats around reputation and perception and so on. It looks like we can measure it because it’s something that seems like folk out there in Consumerland can talk about.

Fifth, “Brand” perpetuates the myths we like to hold tight to, about the power of marketing and communication – sometimes when you hear brand folk talk, they seem to imagine they are sorcerers and magicians, weaving binding spells and illusions. More often than not, they like to use military metaphors. The truth of course is that mostly were neither of these things and have a marginal effect at best.”

I like the point about the brand being a result of doing something well, “the scoreboard, not the game”. It reminds me of “when you make a measure a target, it ceases to be a measure.”

I recover after some rest and by 2pm on Saturday afternoon, I’m cycling along the Danube in the direction of the Freier TuS Regensburg ground. The TuS play in the Landesliga, the seventh tier of German football (though in Bavaria the Landesliga Bayern-Mitte is actually the sixth tier). The game against Schalding-Heining features two of the four clubs who were that week joint top of the table, and the two highest scorers in the division.

The match began frantically with Schalding in control, holding the ball up, passing well. Peppering the TuS goal with shots, they inevitably had the ball in the net only for it to be ruled out for offside. TuS held firm. It wasn’t enough for Coach Brandl who wasn’t happy with the Charlie Daniels-lookalike left back and let him know it. Organised and strong, TuS absorbed the pressure then scored themselves in the 20th minute. It made little difference to the flow of the game. Schalding continued to dominate but were unable to find a way through and went in a goal down at half time.

The second half started in similar fashion. Schalding continued to dominate and put the ball in the net again within five minutes. Unfortunately for them, this time it was ruled out for a push. And the second half continued in the same vein, TuS keeper keeping the team in the game with several classy saves.

Sadly, the player I came to see, Markus Smarzoch – top scorer with seven in eleven games – is on the bench and only gets a twenty minute run out at the end, not really enough time to make an impact. Still, the team hand on for the win and go equal top of the table with ASV Neumarkt.

The rest of the weekend is equally wonderful. I catch Hannah Montana for the first time and discover Phineas and Ferb and the excellent Perry The Platypus – all in German, naturally. But having wondered at one point why an episode of Sandman was all in English when it wasn’t, I may have found my level. At least I’ll be able to keep up with Anna for a couple of years.

I was particularly interested in this session because I wanted to hear Luis Suarez talk about his nine-month battle against corporate e-mail as chronicled on his blog “Thinking Outside The Inbox“. As you might expect from a someone who has chosen to forge a new path, Luis is quite zealous in his anti-e-mail stance. And it seems to be working. From receiving 30-40 e-mails a day, he is now down to around 20-30 per week, with an all-time record low of just 13 in one week.

Luis began by telling everyone through his internal blog that he would no longer reply to e-mail. As Suw Charman-Anderson’s summary of Luis’s presentation at the Unicom conference that afternoon tells, this provoked comments ranging in tone from “you’ll be fired in two weeks” to “finally, someone has stood up to the corporate e-mail monster!” Suw’s post also includes some useful insights into the way IBM uses technology internally. There are quotas on people’s e-mail file sizes, so people share files through a file-sharing repository. Luis uses blogs and wikis to document questions which recur, thus building up a personal knowledge sharing tool, which means people from his network can answer questions when he is away.

Luis’s stance raised the hackles of some of the audience. During all three conversations I was involved in, people were quite adamant about not giving up e-mail. They insisted e-mail was a good tool if you used it properly, while conceding that few people are actually trained to do so. They felt e-mail was good for point-to-point communication, but not one-to-many or many-to-many and that we should use the right tool for the job, not just throw out e-mail altogether. We discussed serendipity, which Joe said “…got you to where you wouldn’t go if you were being efficient.” (Ray liked this a lot.) The standout comment for me was probably: “E-mail is a tool to hide away from your responsibilities as a professional.”

While there was no overall consensus and the conversation meandered somewhat, it was interesting to note how few technologies people advanced as an alternative to e-mail. Luis talked about instant messaging, blogs, communities and social networking tools, but the only technology I recall being mentioned in our discussions was Skype.

I left feeling it would take more imagingation than this to break an addiction to corporate e-mail.

A comment on my internal blog yesterday reminded me of a famous story about a group of Xerox photocopier service engineers who maintained their own service manual.

A researcher investigating how the engineers shared knowledge was surprised to find the official company manual being ignored in favour of an unofficial manual compiled by the engineers themselves which was full of “things the manual doesn’t tell you; glitches the manufacturers did not care to own up to; solutions for problems which had no official existence”.

Another famous KM story tells of “a group of gas fitters that had an informal process for recording and passing on scraps of knowledge gained on the job. The centre of this ‘knowledge share’ was a particular cafe where they met up between jobs. It was discovered that they kept a book under the counter, in which they recorded problems encountered with specific boilers and other pieces of equipment, and how they had solved these problems. Gas fitters who spent much of their time out on the road would often consult the book under the counter, or add new entries of their own. Over time this book became a valuable hoard of localised, task-specific knowledge. And the company didn’t even know about it.”

Whether you see these stories as examples of unofficial knowledge management or collaborative learning, both rely on the will of people to share knowledge and help each other using tools created and owned by the people themselves. We need to provide social media tools which support this.

[Story sources: http://www.epic.co.uk/content/resources/epic_think_tanks/km_think_tank4.htm]

“My general response to people who ask the question How do we get people to share what they know, is If you have to ask the question then you have probably taken the wrong approach. In my experience people generally do want to share, but they may not want to share in the manner prescribed by the corporate KM department. If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. As someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered; it cannot be conscripted.
2. We can always know more than we can tell, and we will always tell more than we can write down.
3. We only know what we know when we need to know it; that is human knowledge is deeply contextual – it is triggered by circumstance.

You can learn more about Dave’s approach to knowledge management here.

More than three times as many people used Connect in July as used it in the previous month. And they looked at ten times as many user profiles. But the current user base is still only just over 5,000 – around a quarter of the potential users.

People’s profile views
In the month preceding the new version of Connect we averaged just over 230 Connect profile views per week.

This increased tenfold over the three weeks of the soft launch, peaked at just over 13,000 with the Interact news story and is now settling back around the tenfold level.

User numbers
1564 people used Connect during June, compared with 5404 in July. The second figure represents around a quarter of registered Interact users, so there is still plenty of scope to improve.

We hope to see usage plateau, then slowly start to increase as more people discover it, though whether we will have to promote it further or we can simply rely on the network effect remains to be seen.

People are already asking for photo sharing and a Facebook style “wall” which we’re thinking about, but we don’t want to go down the route or merely offering worthless applications merely to increase the hitrate. Anything we do add must be a genuine enhancement which increases the quality of the connection between people.

Problems and opportunities
The project flushed out some data quality issues. We discovered accounts belonging to people who left the company, so we’re updating processes to ensure accounts are removed when people leave.

Some confusion was created by Connect’s organisation chart function which creates charts on the fly from the data people have entered and there was a concern that people might think this data came from the SAP HR system.

Happily for us, this has meant we’ve been able to link Connect to SAP HR, which has brought it closer to being the single source for people information in the British American Tobacco group – something I hadn’t expected to see for another 6-18 months.

If you’ve ever found yourself on the other side of the table to the “resource”, you might find this uncomfortable viewing…

“I had a conversation recently when I was in Indonesia – I don’t recall whom it was with but the subject turned to motivation and the person I was talking to started to talk about the need for rewards and charismatic leaders and the like but I did not agree and when I got back to my hotel room – I listed some of the things that I think motivate people – they certainly motivate me!

1. listen to them
2. show them respect
3. help them find their voice
4. have conversations with them
5. show genuine interest
6. give them help and support
7. engage with them
8. trust them
9. give them responsibility
10. give them recognition
11. give them opportunities for self fulfilment and personal development
12. don’t try to tell them what to do

Now the crunch: you don’t deliberately do these things to motivate people – that’s not motivation – that’s manipulation. You do them because you genuinely care in their development. Its more akin to the love you might show for a son or daughter than anything else.”

Recently presented at an Enterprise 2.0 conference, these points were taken from a recently declassified US Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) publication entitled “Simple Sabotage Field Manual“:

1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
2. Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
7. Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Remember, this is how you sabotage a workplace.

Good luck Jim.

Last week the internal communications team sent out several messages to promote Connect and encourage people to keep their profile up to date. There was a story and a feature on Interact, the global intranet and several e-mails to corporate communications professionals around the group. The publicity doubled the daily visits to Connect from the previous week to over 1000 per day and tripled the amount of data traffic and page views.

By the end of the week, over 4,500 of the 24,000 user profiles have been viewed. Many are viewed multiple times, with 26,850 profile page views in total. By the end of July 8,330 different profiles have been viewed and there have been 16,811 visits to Connect by 5,401 different people.

Comparing the top ten most viewed profiles, different names appear every week, implying that usage is spreading. And it’s spreading widely, with people in over 170 different locations browsing information, updating their profiles and connecting with colleagues.

We expect to see activity reduce in the short term, while remaining widespread. We’ll be watching to see who’s updating their status and what they’re doing that’s interesting…

We managed to get most kinks sorted out before Internal Communication’s main communications went out last Monday, which was great because the intranet news feature and story caused a stampede of users keen to see what all the fuss was about.

A few issues came back to us, with people in several markets finding they were unable to accept requests. This turned out to be a technical issue which we’ve quickly sorted out. There has also been a steady stream of requests to update the list of British American Tobacco offices around the world. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to get back to us which is helping us get the information updated.

Most exciting of all, to sort out the organisation charts, we’re going to be linking to HR’s personnel information – several months earlier than we’d hoped..!

There are nearly 400 connections between people and best of all, nearly 1,800 people have updated their Connect record.

This week internal communications are publicising Connect, making the release official. There will be stories on Interact and e-mails to specific departments asking them to update their details and become part of Connect.

We’re getting some feedback on the manageability of the homepage (no, you can’t turn off the feed once you’ve activated it – the genie is out of the bottle, there is no going back!), so we’ve reduced the number of updates visible on the page. This may need some more thought going forwards (I’m still lobbying for no more than five links to updates – and likewise for each bulletin board section!), so we will be reviewing the homepage design in the medium term. There are calls for moving the update panel to the front page of Interact, sensible since the use and meaning of the homepage will change over time.

Week two saw a 40% increase in visits and 31% more pageviews. We also had 34,449 page views in the first two weeks of July, compared with 17,015 in June (the previous high was January with 34,274).

Internal comms are preparing a series of communications to announce Connect officially.

Stay tuned…

My first thought was “how can I help?”, so I made a few suggestions around my areas of expertise and found there were some things I could do immediately.

The net widens, connections deepen.

To test the application is available globally I’ve connected to people around the world, leading one colleague to dub me the Lily Allen of Interact. While a few of my contacts have amended their status to show what they’re doing, most of the updates on my homepage feed show my connections connecting with others. Happily, almost everywhere I’ve invited people to connect with me, the system is working.

NetTracker statistics show a four-fold increase in people using the system and a five-fold increase in page views, while over 450 people have taken the time to update their profile. Is this how we get them to take responsibility for maintaining personal information? We may have an even bigger mountain to climb than I’d imagined. While talking to someone today, they told me how we’d have to link the database to HR information so it could be kept up to date.

Yes, even in the age of Facebook, there are people who think it’s someone else’s job to tell the rest of the world who they are…

The other idea I picked up at KCUK 2008 last week was Enterprise bookmark sharing – just upload from the browser and choose which ones to share.

Two new ideas I will be starting to push in the coming months… I’ll let you know how I get on.

Don’t forget to tune in to Bannatyne takes on Big Tobacco tonight. Expect a balanced film about one of Britain’s best-loved companies.

Well, maybe…

The feed on the central pane of the homepage is tracking updates – connections and changes to profiles. Predictably, many connections result in a profile update as people check their details and notice they’re out of date.

Slightly fewer people are updating their current status. Perhaps we need to encourage them to use it by demonstrating how we can keep them up to date with what we’re up to. If people begin to adopt this, it has the potential to give a far richer impression of what people’s daily working lives are filled with.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on how it goes…

Day Two starts with a panel discussion on “efficient directories” which sounds technical, so I need little convincing to switch to Manzur Maula’s session on designing a communication strategy. Manzur and I spent much of the previous lunchtime trying to decide if we already knew each other and where from, but our working histories don’t seem to coincide which is curiously unsatisfying.

There are more people here for this session and like many communicators I’ve met, they’re quite vocal. After three attempts to add an item to the agenda – when we communicate, do we listen for the response? – I had to concede defeat. Luckily, Mazur had included this in the subjects he was covering, but it left me wondering that communications professionals are so focused on pushing messages. Will this ever change?

After coffee, a panel discussion on whether social software makes knowledge sharing easier was prefaced by chairperson Claire Andrews of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP admitting to being a social media skeptic, a point I made a particular note of for the afternoon!

After a quick lunch I nip outside for ten minutes to warm up my voice. I’ve the first line in both Oedipus Rex and The Winter’s Tale and the importance of being ready has been impressed on me numerous times. A walk around the block (what did we used to call a block when I was young and less exposed to US English?) also helps me to calm any nerves, rather than sitting inside waiting as tension builds. (Sadly, I can’t think of a suitable analogue for an environmental theatre group, so we’ll probably have to stick with the now-traditional trip to the nearest toilet).

Chair Claire says as she’s about to introduce me that she’s still a skeptic on social computing and I say I hope I can perhaps convince her otherwise. As she starts to explain how she’s against the focus on technology, I agree and point out the sentence “There is no technical solution to knowledge management” in my notes which seems to engage her.

The presentation went well with some good questions at the end. Unfortunately, despite the presence of micorphones, I can barely hear the questioner due to the absence of any foldback onstage. I suppose you have to keep things as simple as possible, but “no simpler”. Some of the questions afterward focus on the technology, which makes me wonder whether my message is getting across. Perhaps I should review my stories.

As I sit down to make way for Ron, Claire looks very illuminated and tells me it was really good, which restores my faith somewhat. I realised when I sat down how many details I’d left out… then I remembered the story from “Sources Of Power” about how outraged the presenters whose stories were collected into a book were when they found out all their five-point slides were left out and realised the details aren’t always important.

Ron’s presentation is great, opening with an introduction based around one of the best slides I’ve seen, drawing a parallel between English Iron Age communities and Natural England’s organisational design. He tells stories about using Cognitive Edge techniques like anecdote circles.

Again I have to leave early and miss a slot on knowledge capture methods, though I would’ve been more interested in the session with Denise O’Connor on managing user generated content. Maybe next time.

I grabbed a coffee at the break, but didn’t quite feel up to meeting people yet, so went back to Gary Klein’s “Sources Of Power” which I’d been looking at on the way down (thanks to Tony Quinlan for the recommendation).

It was announced that Steve Denning‘s session was open upstairs to anyone interested. I must have misread my schedule – or assumed it was following a similar track to one I attended a few years ago – because I’d assumed this was taking place on Friday. (If I’d realised, I would’ve made more effort to be in time for Victor Newman’s session first thing.) I made a quick decision which unfortunately meant missing the panel discussion on Generation Y, but this was too good an opportunity to miss if by some miracle I could squeeze in.

I needn’t have worried, since there were six other people in the room with Steve, including the aforementioned Tony Quinlan. They’d just decided to abandon the proposed workshop and instead discuss Steve’s new project, hot spots and high performing teams, the subject which he’d presented on at The Smithsonian back in May (read Steve’s paper).

We spent the next hour or so telling stories about our own experience of high performing teams, while Steve outlined some of the behaviours he’d noted which tend to exemplify such teams. He came up with purpose, ability to bond, autonomy to innovate, the presence of boundary spanners (people who bring in knowledge from outside) and rhythm. The group must’ve enjoyed the session because after lunching with Tony, the rest of us reconvened over a table for dessert. Some interesting conversations were started, so I hope we’ll run into each other again soon.

The afternoon was less interesting for me. Very few stories in either the bullet point-led presentation on search and the “shouting over confusing diagrams” one on e-learning meant little memorable to take away before I had to depart to be home in time for the evening’s performance.

Obviously I need to work on the voice a bit because I “spoke quietly” – the in situ: director won’t be impressed..! I will have to do a proper vocal warm-up in future.

I was a bit confused by the comment that I didn’t answer the question because “it was only about blogs rather than online collaboration”. Fifty percent of the presentation covered our work with on-line communities at British American Tobacco and the need to focus on the people rather than the technology. Perhaps someone arrived midway through..!

No matter – all useful in preparation for Knowledge and Content UK 2008 in a couple of weeks…

If I were, I would have asked for an alternative venue to be found for last night’s Melcrum Communicators’ Network meeting as soon as I was out of hospital. Having no experience of recovering from surgery I overestimated my return to fitness, foolishly basing it on my rather hasty discharge (from hospital). If you end up in surgery, do yourself a favour and postpone your commitments for the next month. I hate to let people down, so I’ve often failed to make these decisions quickly enough, preferring to “see how it goes” rather than give myself the benefit of the doubt. After all, I’m sure nothing will go wrong.

Something went wrong when I returned to the office a few days beforehand to find my potential food and drink sponsor on leave until the day of the meetup. Organiser Matt O’Neill kindly volunteered to provide food and drink, which is a no-no as it is against The Rules as I pondered to myself at 3am the night before, visualising my position potentially disappearing down the plughole. Matt was as good as his word and with a little jiggery-pokery we managed to sidestep nearly every potential enforcer of The Rules.

On the day, name badges are ready (most are even spelled correctly) and it should be simple enough to escort everyone in. With people due to arrive, I go to check on the room I’d booked and find the previous occupants still in session, having overrun by 30 minutes. Ten minutes later they are still there. 25 minutes after we should have been in, I hear the immortal words “We have a big problem”. Apparently, 17:30 doesn’t always mean 5:30pm and they were planning to continue indefinitely. We hastily change our plans, relocate to the boardroom and set up with relatively few hassles.

And then I split my trousers.

It was around this point I decided to display some of the positive unflappability Matt had shown all the way through. Either that, or I began to see the funny side and stopped caring quite so much about relatively minor problems.

In contrast to the behind the scenes shenannigans, the presentation “Recruiting Communicators” by Cassandra Barker of recruitment consultants Robert Walters was extremely professional and stimulated much discussion. Having canvassed the opinions of recruiters, candidates and clients about all stages of the process, the presentation summarised the findings, some advice for candidates and illustrated the points with some key quotes from the participants.

The point which jumped out at me was the slightly ironic request from candidates for more communication during the process. Some felt they needed to understand more about why they were being recalled for a second interview and that more feedback would help them prepare better.

My own limited experience of recruitment has been about finding a programmer with sufficient skills and personality to join an existing team. I came away from this meetup feeling I understood more about the executive recruitment process from a much broader set of perspectives.

The MCN meetups will continue through the summer on a social basis, beginning with a barbecue in Southwark on 20th June.

Family stories record the tears I shed whenever Andy Pandy or Robinson Crusoe ended on television. But I wasn’t frightened by things that traditionally scared children my age either. I knew Dr. Who was fantasy and my childish nightmares – I later discovered – had more in common with early David Lynch films than the traditional “monsters in the cupboard” which send most children racing downstairs thirty minutes after being tucked up in bed.

No, there was only one programme that saw me in the tiny space between the wall and the sofa, refusing to watch. That was the episode of Mary, Mungo and Midge where Mary broke her arm and had to go to hospital.

Fear
Now I’m not scared of hospitals. Or doctors. Or injections. But I’ve never had to stay overnight in a hospital. Or undergo surgery. Or, since breaking my collarbone at the age of 18 months, have a bone reset. Obviously there are advantages to not using your bed as a trampoline and I learned that lesson early on.

Suddenly, thirty eight and a half years later, I am in an ambulance being raced to Addenbrokes Hospital with suspected appendicitis and I am feeling more than a little anxious.

Pain
There was a definite point where I realised my May Day Bank Holiday Weekend might be subject to some variability. It wasn’t when the stomach cramps started – I thought that was merely some food poisoning (my sincere apologies to my 6th floor colleagues who I mentally slandered for poor hygiene because of the Chocoloate Hobnob which I mistakenly ascribed my discomfort to).

It wasn’t when I was asked to move upstairs because I was keeping my partner awake through my inability to sleep.

It was probably when I collapsed on the floor of the bathroom early the following morning, awoke amid various broken household items, a doctor was called and an ambulance sent for.

In Addenbrookes Hospital there is no sofa and nowhere to hide. I have no choice but to go with the flow. Everywhere I go I answer the same questions to different people. I try to maintain my wits in an effort to avoid being subjected to a different procedure and prolonged agony. After being poked and prodded ever more intimately, I arrive in anaesthesia in late afternoon to say the same things one more time. No, I don’t smoke. Yes I drink about 5-10 units a week on average. No, I don’t have any alleriges. The anaesthesiologist tells me I’ll be asleep within 10 seconds… and suddenly I’m waking up as I’m wheeled into Recovery, though how anyone is supposed to recover in this place which has the air of a sweatshop I have no idea. I haven’t seen the inside of the theatre or even encountered the machine that goes “ping” which is slightly disappointing.

Visitors
I’m barely in the mood for visitors, but my family turn up anyway. My father attempts to give me a friendly clap on the shoulder and upends my beaker of water over the bed. Thank goodness I haven’t begun filling the line of bottles next to it, I think to myself as my mother observes: “it’s like being visited my M. Hulot!”

My family mistake my resignation – and the effects of anaesthetic and morphine – for bravery. My father tells me Orient beat Bristol Rovers 3-1 and furthers my incredulity with the news that Nottingham Forest have achieved automatic promotion. I should’ve done that away trip last season.

Parole
Two days pass in a blur. A nurse offers me a packaged sandwich which I manage to eat half of, washing it down with water. Either not eating for 24 hours has made me forget to swallow or I’ve been on some drug to stop me salivating. I later read that Addenbrokes food was voted 97th out of 160 similar establishments. That seems… high. I ask for all the morphine I can get. It has a strong, sweet taste and I can imagine becoming addictied to it easily.

By morning I’m ravenous but dizzy and a nurse says I have to get up. Lacking confidence, I ask for a wheelchair to visit the toilet. I improve steadily and late in the d ay I manage to shuffle slowly to the toilet under my own steam. Within 24 hours I’ll be out, not because I’m recovered but because they need the bed. It’ll be two weeks before I’m approaching something like normality. This leaves me with the vague feeling that I’m not so much a customer of the service as the product.

I’m still not a fan of surgery.

Members of teams and communities need to begin to trust each other quickly. A great way to start is by learning everyone’s name. Psychologists say to learn a person’s name, you should use it three times in conversation as soon as you meet them. This is difficult with a roomful of people, so you need a way of making people repeat their names.

Here are some warm-up exercises I learned from the in situ: theatre group’s Learn To Act course.

Introduce Yourself
Invite the members of the group to walk around the space and introduce themselves to each other. Ask them to greet each other as they meet – “Hello, my name is Richard” – even when they meet someone for the second or third time.

No one would introduce themselves three times to the same person, but by giving the group permission to act in this way, you increase the chance of them remembering names. Lead by example and no one will question this or call it unrealistic.

Allow this exercise to run for 2-3 minutes or until everyone has met everyone else 3-4 times.

Introduction Circle
Form a circle and ask everyone to introduce themselves to the rest of the group, saying, for example, “My name is Richard.”

Tell everyone to find a new place in the circle and go around the circle with everyone introducing the person to the left of them: “This is Andrew.” (Tell them to check the person’s name beforehand if they’ve forgotten!)

Tell everyone to find a new place in the circle and go around the circle with everyone introducing the person to the right of them: “This is Suzanne.”

Ball Circle
Introduce a ball into the circle. Choose a person, call their name and throw them the ball. They repeat this. Continue for 2-3 minutes.

Break the circle and ask everyone to walk around the space, throwing the ball between them and calling the name of the recipient as they do. Continue for 2-3 minutes.

Simple exercises like this help to breakdown barriers from the start and encourage people to get to know each other.

Facilitators should always participate – it saves resorting to sticky labels..!

Anecdote have just published a white paper on collaboration, written by Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenke and Nancy White. After spelling out the dangers of assuming collaboration to be technology problem, they look at different types of collaboration and ways to strengthen collaboration culture.

Clear and insightful, it covers a lot of the areas I’ve been working in over the past five years, like communities of practice and storytelling in a realistic common sense manner.

I’m looking forward to the reactions of the people I’ve shared it with.

After posting a reply, I returned to my e-mail inbox to find a message from a colleague in Kuala Lumpur. I hadn’t heard from her in several months, but her first comment was to wish my daughter a happy first birthday. This isn’t something you’d know about from my office Who’s Who entry, or from a professional networking site like Linked In – the only way she could know was through Facebook.

When I say I work in “culture” and my aim is “a great place to work” by improving the connections between people, this is what I mean.

The mood of the room was light-heartedly against his insistence on blocking Facebook and reasoning that “we go to work to work”. I wonder if the employees feel it’s a great place to work, or that they’re being policed unnecessarily? I always say it’s the same as blocking the telephone 100 years ago. Is it just a case of learning to use the tool appropriately?

Despite being a Facebook refusenik, Damien did mention the Workbook Facebook overlay which provides a secure Facebook for the enterprise.

The Media
Kevin Anderson, Guardian Blogs editor, gave us an insight into how news media has changed over the past ten years, why The Guardian has pursued social media and how their principle of “connection, not crowd-sourcing” enables them to “involve the audience in meaningful ways”.

(He even managed to slip in the “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?” gag I’d been thinking about using in its “consultant” variation.)

The Big Smoke
Proving a talented chairperson can make anyone feel at home, Pfizer’s Chris Shilling introduced me as working in “the only industry more hated than pharmaceuticals”. Spread the love.

I told two stories. One about how we’d applied design thinking to community facilitation to create our CommunityBuilder framework. The other told how we’d introduced blogging into British American Tobacco with BlogCentral.

I may not have been clear enough when I made my point about the assumptions many people have about the “media savvy generation”, because one member of the audience attempted to disagree with me by agreeing with what I’d said! As I recounted, an external research agency came in last year to conduct some research on this demographic, expecting to find younger people more connected, always texting, using social media sites and so on. What they found – both inside British American Tobacco and other companies – was they don’t exist! People from all generations use these tools. (I will have to find the report and start showing it to people..!)

More Law
Although we were quick to get into blogging, we’re not the only people to have done so. Ruth Ward talked about how Allen and Overy had adopted blogging as a team communication tool.

I was impressed by how well she seemed to know the users – easier in a smaller company, but it must help your confidence when gaining support – but surprised to learn they had no blogging guidelines… until she pointed out it was all covered by the company’s communication policy.

On reflection, lawyers probably do tend to think these things through rather well.

Government 2.0
Jillian Cameron then presented an overview of how the Government is looking at new media trends and attempting to embrace them with varying degrees of success. The sheer scope of this endeavour meant some of it was a little abstract and while old media tends to knock the slightest stumble, I was impressed by the range of experimentation. Enabling this in the near future will be a fascinating pursuit, particularly with a 500,000 strong Civil Service.

Government 2.0 2
Alexis Castillo-Soto then showed off the newly-launched MOSS 2007-based intranet of the Learning and Skills Council. Not being familiar with Sharepoint, I was impressed to with the potential of the tools which are included. I could almost imagine using it myself, though the migration from Lotus Domino could be a challenge.

Let’s hope Alexis can invite the Intranetters for a visit very soon.

Puff
Thierry Menard then presented a puff piece for the sponsor’s search engine in which he spent half the allotted time introducing his company Bureau Veritas. Commerce doubtless dictates one shall not bite the hand that feeds by cutting off your sponsor’s advocate, but it was a pity we didn’t really get the meat of what BV have achieved in Knowledge Management.

Bad Web 2.0
This left Ian Lloyd slightly curtailed in his fascinating look at the downside of web 2.0 and how users of assistive technologies such as screen readers suffer at the hands of AJAX and sloppy code in applications like Facebook. This was a real eye-opener and given the legal implications, we might want to get hold of a screen reader and review the new versions of our social media tools before they’re released.

Governance
After lunch, former Home Office Head of Information Peter Griffiths gave a detailed breakdown of the areas to consider for governance of social media content. A comprehensive list of questions and worth running past our team later to check we’ve thought of everything.

Communication
That left Richard Dennison to close the day with an excellent overview of BT’s intranet with a special reference to social media.

He told how BT is now unrecognisable from the company he joined ten years ago and that without its intranet it wouldn’t exist. Very different from a manufacturing company whose IT function is in thrall to its ERP systems.

I was amused to note they’re about to roll out a blogging tool they’ve also named Blog Central. There must be something in that name… They are ahead of us in many other areas though. While we’re about to roll out an upgraded user directory with networking added, they’re already including networking in their tool, which even features a Facebook-style wall. (I wonder if we can still get that added at this point?)

Richard’s a communicator by profession, which made for an entertaining 90 minutes, as well as setting the bar high for tomorrow. I should review my speaker’s notes…

Aberdeen University’s Professor Rhona Flin provides a commentary explaining the dynamics of teamwork, highlighting how important an understanding of roles and responsibilities is to the team. Working and making decisions at high speed is crucial to the team’s success, so she also pointed out how important it was for team members to know how each other would react in specific situations.

Go the the BBC site to read more about the programme and listen to the show on Listen Again.

Future programmes promise to examine a team of Morris dancers, an Antarctic research team, a girl’s football team and a backstage team.

After the big event at British American Tobacco before Christmas, this was more of a return to the format of the first meeting at Eon. With fewer participants, we were able to relax and have more open conversations.

We also experimented with Webex for the first time, sharing the presentations online with a couple of attendees listening in down the phone line.

Watson Wyatt
Jane Moore and Abi Leeves from Watson Wyatt’s Knowledge Management team showed their intranet first. Insight is in it’s third version and will soon be moving to SharePoint. The company’s intranets are regionally split and Jane and Abi are responsible for the European version which consists of over 100,000 pages.

Jane told us the most popular feature is a link on the front page “Send To Babloo”, which allows readers to send a question directly to the Head Of Europe. While the questions are screened, very few aren’t published and topics range from business matters to the state of the sofas in the entrance hall. This is regularly updated, giving users a sense of what’s happening right now. This enables real dialogue between different levels of the business.

Despite this openness, the company do block Facebook and YouTube (due to bandwidth problems, Jane said). They have also encountered problems implementing RSS feeds due to lack of control over which news stories would be displayed.

I liked the way the search results included the company’s external website, something we could learn from. The search technology is Autonomy, the company having ditched Google because it ranked the pages too similarly.

I was particularly impressed to learn how Insight has a global look-and-feel, something Jane ascribed to a culture happy to listen to the advice of experts and to be told what to do when it makes sense.

G4S
Paula Martin showed us the G4S intranet which has grown from several different companies merging. As she explained, they need to help former employees of those companies understand how big their organisation now is.

G4S has thousands of employees distributed around the world, linked by the intranet. Unsurprisingly, the highest traffic is measured on the People- and Office-Finder applications (great user feedback on an AJAX widget which provided read ahead capability on the latter!).

G4S use their intranet to share best practice documents, policies and training, making document management and content management an important concern.

In future, the intranet will reflect the further evolution of the company by adopting a single homepage for all its sites and users.

Summary
Superficially the two intranets we saw looked quite different, but looking beyond the page design, they showed a similar level of maturity. Both offer their audiences problem solving and time saving applications, while the presence of HR documentation confirmed they had taken a similar approach to us in identifying priorities.

Reports from our remote attendees indicated Webex worked well for sharing the screen shots, though if we were to use this again, we would probably need a more formal process for conversation.

Another useful visit – thanks to Jane, Abi and Paula – and I look forward to seeing Watson Wyatt’s intranet again and hearing all about how their migration goes.

Back in the 90s, fuelled by the desire to learn about the web (and not a little ego), I created a website to document my collection of records by U2. It wasn’t the best designed U2 site, it didn’t have the most up-to-the-minute new, but attracted a fair amount of traffic and lots of people linked to it.

In the early part of this decade, I was trying to sort out some recordings I’d made of Ricky Gervais’s XFM radio show. This was immediately after the first series of “The Office”, before the Golden Globes win, the second series and the record-breaking podcast. The show had been running for several months and producer Karl Pilkington was becoming a bigger and bigger part of it as he shared his strange worldview, so I began taping the banter between the songs.

Several months later, I sat down with a pile of tapes and tried to work out which segments were broadcast on which date. Helped by other fans who swapped recordings with me, I eventually identified them all and posted the information on my webpage.

Neither of these efforts are particularly impressive – and both are certainly indicative of a certain mindset on my part – but what is interesting is what happened next.

Aaron Sams read my U2 site (and, no doubt, other similar ones) and finding it lacking – it didn’t include any release I didn’t own – decided to create U2Wanderer, a definitive U2 discography.

Nigel Webb read my Ricky Gervais Show pages and decided to improve on them by creating the Pilkipedia, where fans discuss everything related to Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington on the forum, download the show and document their work collaboratively on a wiki.

Obviously I am not an academic and the knowledge I shared had little application beyond its own niche. But it was enough for me to appreciate an important principle: “someone else will have a better idea of what to do with your data than you will”.

The Benefits of Open Knowledge
Last night I went along to the Cambridge Open Knowledge meetup to learn about some of the social, legal and technological challenges we will increasingly face over the next decade as we struggle to unlock value by convincing others of this idea.

While the open source movement has focused mainly on code, data has been left behind. Most data is either unavailable, or badly structured, meaning work has to be done to make it usable. Most people don’t do this because they can’t imagine anyone else using their data, but as one of the speakers put it, “someone else will have a better idea of what to do with your data than you will”.

Rufus Pollock gave a good overview of the problems, speaking about the need for standards when sharing data and highlighting the pioneering work of CKAN, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.

Francis Irving then spoke about the challenges he’d faced using Government data in his work for PublicWhip.org, mySociety.org and TheyWorkForYou.com. His TimeTravel maps give a hint of what would be possible if this data were openly available in a usable format.

Finally, Jim Downing of the Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Informatics spoke about Open Source and Open Access in Chemistry. Chemistry is traditionally more closed than other sciences, but people are working to open it up like the Blue Obelisk group (“open source, open standards, open data”) promoting interoperability using standards such as Chemical Markup Language (CML).

Despite their diverse fields, the speakers agreed while it’s still early, their successes provide fascinating vindication of the approach.

Learn more about Open Knowledge through Open Knowledge Foundation and their forthcoming conference at the London School of Economics.

Following some requests from the Melcrum Communicators’ Network, here are my notes from the first London Group meeting back in September.

Great events 1: identify your stakeholders

Who stands to benefit from the event you are holding?

The first part of designing a great event is to consider who the stakeholders are. Our discussion about the event we were attending looked at the following groups:

• Attendees – the members of the network who’d joined the London group
• Organiser – Matt O’Neill, communications professional
• Sponsor – Cordova
• Host – National Audit Office
• Presenter – Tony Carey, events management professional
• Caterer – Afriyad, a newly-launched delicatessen catering business
• Non-attendees – the people who weren’t there and will hear about what happened

Great events 2: aims and objectives

What do the stakeholders want from your event?

After deciding who the stakeholders are, determine their aims and objectives. Aims are simple statements like “stakeholder X wants to…” completed with a few words. Objectives follow the SMART rule – they are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable/Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-bounded

For each stakeholder you identified in the previous phase, decide what their aims and objectives in attending your event will be. This will tell you what to include when you begin designing your event.

Example aims:

• The organiser wants the event to be successful, to run smoothly and for everyone to leave aving derived some value from attending.
• The speaker wants to enhance their reputation and to network with the attendees.
• Attendees want to enjoy themselves, network and make contact with other people and to learn something.
• Non-attendees want to hear about the event, perhaps basing their decision on whether to attend in future on what they hear about it.

Example objectives:

• Speaker: gain at least three further speaking engagements via the attendees within the following six months
• Attendees: meet at least five people they didn’t know previously during the evening;
  contact at least three people they didn’t know previously in the following week

The more details you consider in this phase, the more insight you will have when it comes to designing the event. If you simply design a series of talks and fail to leave enough time for people discuss what they hear or to meet each other, people will get less from attending.

This phase will also give you a guide to measuring the success of your event. By writing SMART objectives, you can easily create measures which show how successful the event is.

Great events 3: design a relevant programme

How do you create a successful event programme?

Having considered the aims and objectives of your stakeholders in the previous phase, you are in a great position to design your event. Knowing exactly what everyone wants, you can create a relevant, useful programme balanced between the needs of all your stakeholders.

If you have identified the attendees’ desire to network as an aim, you will need to allow plenty of time in the programme for them to get to know each other, not simply over a few coffee breaks between a schedule of talks. You might even decide to include a speed-networking session to encourage people to meet others who they haven’t met before.

Once you have created the programme, the next stage it to decide on some measures to indicate its success.

Great events 4: install measuring tools

How do you measure the success of an event?

Having designed your event programme, you should decide the measures you will use to show its success.

As well as surveys which you can hand out at the event, e-mail afterwards or place on-line, consider talking to people to gather feedback, e-mailing them personally and even checking their blogs for comments. Audio interviews are one way to capture quotes about the event. You might even choose to use these subsequently in a podcast.

The objectives you identified in phase two are an excellent source of specific measures. Look at the aims and objectives of each stakeholder in turn and write a series of questions to measure how successfully they were addressed:

• Did the attendees, organiser and speaker feel the event was a success?
• Did the attendees meet enough people?
• Did they learn enough?
• What did non-attendees hear about the event?

Consider some secondary measures to look at the effect of the event on subsequent behaviour:

• Did more people attend a subsequent event?
• Did the speaker get more engagements as a resulting from the event?
• Did any communities related to the event see more activity as a result?

Other measures might be specific to the event’s topic. If the event related to a particular activity, did that activity increase afterwards?

Once you have gathered your measures, you need to create a report which summarises them.

Great events 5: report back

How do you report the success of an event?

Having held your event and collected feedback from all your stakeholders, you need to report on the success of your event. Your stakeholders will want to hear how the event was received by their peers and by other stakeholders.

Numbers provide a good baseline for you to compare the success of future events (as long as you ask the same questions next time), but on their own they are pretty meaningless.

Instead, provide context using narrative. Tell stories about the event: who met who, who learned what. Use quotes from people you’ve spoken to or whose comments you’ve read. Photographs tell great stories. Include plenty of shots of people interacting.

Make sure you summarise the feedback to all your stakeholders. If you have formal reporting needs, you may decide to write a comprehensive round-up of the project from start to finish, complete with documented learnings for future reference. If your needs are less rigid, you may simply post an informal report on a blog, perhaps including a podcast or vodcast incorporating interviews and feedback.

Once you close the loop at the end of the project, you’re really to start all over again on the next one..!

A recent post about fostering relationships to support early community development highlighted several important factors we’ve included in CommunityBuilder, our framework for launching communities.

The latest piece by Krista Schmeling recounts a story about the organic development of an on-line community and their need to meet regularly to reaffirm relationships – like the European members of our Management Trainees community who met recently in Berlin.

Unlike many of the communities we facilitate, there was no one pushing them to do it, no one organising the trip for them and no one paying for the food and accomodation. The community members simply decided it would be fun to meet up and get to know each other a bit better.

A History of A Successful Community
Established last autumn, this community has developed rapidly. Not, I hasten to add, because of any intervention from the KM team. It has been driven purely by the enthusiasm of the members themselves.

There has been a community for Management Trainees since around 2000. The original community centred on a Lotus Notes discussion database set up by a Management Trainee named Helen from Southampton in the UK . It was quite rough and ready as there was little budget available, but it was very vibrant and quickly becamse one of the most successful discussion databases in the group.

As Interact, the group’s intranet, began to catch on during the early part of the decade, Management Trainees asked whether we would be able to create a whizzy new bespoke web-based community for them. The Notes team was able to furnish this request with a standalone tool for which the MTs chose the name “Padare” (meaning “meeting place”).

It was well-designed and built and crucially, closed. By which I mean it had a password and to be granted access you had to ask a custodian. Unfortunately, the custodians – all MTs themselves – regularly moved on, custodianship wasn’t always passed on and people rarely received an answer to their requests… which brought them, inevitably, to me.

Removing Technological Barriers
We’ve been planning an update our free, open community system for months (perhaps even years) and regularly put off sorting out the problem until “after the update” (which still hasn’t happened!) at which time we would “engage with the stakeholders” and “begin the process of migration”.

By last autumn, I was tired of telling people I couldn’t help them, so I created a new community in about five minutes and let them know where it was. My involvement has been pretty minimal since – answering questions as they crop up and helping out with the occasional technical issue. The community meanwhile goes from strength to strength through the commitment of its members.

I suspect if I asked them why this was important, they’d look at me as if I was mad. The opportunities for learning from people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds are immense while belonging to a group of peers provides a huge amount of support for a group of people who are going through similar experiences. If that’s true, why is it only Management Trainees who demonstrate this level of enthusiasm?

If these people are the future of the group, the group would do well to hang on to them.

He had kindly agreed to an interview because he felt it was important to share what had been learned from the function’s change management programme. So how do we spread learning? He didn’t have all the answers, but he did tell us a story.

A factory was struggling to dispose of the polypropylene strapping tape that bound every package that entered the factory. It’s long, strong and springy and it builds up very quickly. Every four hours they filled a cardboard box, which had to be disposed of. This costs money and time.

The factory came up with an innovative solution. They bought an ordinary chipper, which chopped up the tape into small pieces of plastic. This meant they only had to remove the box every week.

And the best part? They could SELL these chips of plastic! For money!!

Sometimes a simple story can have a big impact.

Here in Globe House, a story wall featuring pictures from a recent team event used to greet visitors to the HR department. HR employees had added speech balloons made from post-it notes to some of the more amusing pictures.

A few months ago the story wall was replaced by dayglo text reading “Winning Organisation – Outstanding People – Great Place To Work”. We’ve moved from the employees saying who they are, to the company telling employees who it wants them to be.

Is this a forward or a backward step?