Out Standing in My Field

Building in time to process

2013-05-07T16:45:00.003-05:00

At SOBCon, we work together to build our businesses. Photo by Elja Daae.

Just back from one of my favorite annual events (SOBCon), and I'm trying to make sure I don't just stuff my notes in a folder and forget about them. I'm planning some time today to think and process.

I held a phone call with a friend who happened to be attending a major conference of his own. We shared our takeaways and thoughts as he was driving home and I was waiting to head to the airport.
I did some processing and thinking on the plane. I copied notes into the paper handbook from the conference. I copied ideas and actions into my personal notebook. Why copy over by hand? Because that act of re-writing gave me a chance to re-think and refine.
Today I'll take those goals and action ideas and turn them into specific things to do and put them into my system. I'll add some things to items to do this week, and others on the waiting list.

One new attendee said she knew she had a three hour drive home, and she couldn't do much work there. Then once she's home, it's right back into all the regular things that need done.

One person who has attended several times said he usually takes five or six weeks before he digests the lessons from the event. He doesn't set aside special time for it.

My friend that I called said he had set aside special time on the morning after the conference and before his drive home to do his review. BUT the night before, he sat down and made goals and a plan for what he would be thinking about. If he hadn't, he said, he knew he'd waste that time on unfocused activity.

When I mentioned this need to Kyle Golding, he said if you built time to review and process into an event, people would just use the "extra" time to review and check their phones, social media, text, basically wasting it.

Meeting organizer Liz Strauss said people would skip review time and do their own thing. They would see it as "non-content time" and therefore less valuable.

SO.....
I'm thinking there is some way to make this work.

Build a 1.5 hour time slot into the very end of your event.
Label it as something people will value. (The most effective label would depend on the group.)
Have a facilitator lead a short (15 minute?) session to help people set their goals for the review.
Let people self-organize into small groups or work on their own.
Turn off the conference wifi. (That's just mean, but you know it reduces temptation. And if people really need online, most can use their phones. Or make a separate zone or room with wifi available.)

I'd love to hear about any events that plan for time to plan your "re-entry."

Row all the way in

2013-04-18T15:02:00.000-05:00

The Olympics were on the tv in a local restaurant. I caught a few of the rowing heats. The leaders in each heat pulled hard all the way to the finish. But those near the back, realizing they were beaten, would stop rowing and coast across the line.

Maybe that makes sense from a "conserve energy and do better next round" perspective.

But if I make it to the equivalent of the Olympics, I hope I put everything I've got into it each and every chance I get, or as close as I can make myself get to that ideal.

If you make it to the Olympics, row all the way in.

Facilitated video as learning

2013-04-12T12:47:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about completely changing the learning processes that I get involved in, especially speaking and conferences. It started with a tweet that farmers could learn best on farm study tours, rather than conferences. So "tours as conferences" has been running around in my head.

Now I have this other idea, inspired by the post "Where YouTube Meets the Farm" By David Bornstein in the New York Times blogs. The story profiles Rikin Gandhi, "a young American-born software engineer" and his efforts to change farm learning in rural India.

The best way to teach farmers to change their practices, it turns out, isn't to have the ag extension guy come around and tell them. It's to show short videos, featuring local farmers like them, demonstrating and discussing the practice, then show them with a facilitator who creates an active discussion. The controlled field trial in India showed this lead to much more adoption of the practices and it cost less money to accomplish. Jack Gibbons of Stanford was credited with the original teaching model, Tutored Video Instruction.

I think this holds some lessons we could apply in a much wider range of learning settings: conferences, workshops, churches, schools, tours, special events.

Keys:

Short videos (8 to 10 minutes)
Featuring "people like me"
From the field
Showing and explaining practices
Including mistakes
Shown in small local groups
Facilitating active discussion

1. Short videos
Who needs another hour long lecture? I don't. You don't. 8 to 10 minutes makes it possible to give enough detail, but not put everyone to sleep.

2. Featuring "people like me"
The project in India found that if they showed a farmer who looked too prosperous, the audience would quit listening. If they used only men, the women wouldn't listen. If the demonstration is given by someone with an accent that clearly isn't local, the audience discounted what they said. They listened and learned best with someone very much like them.
Imagine going to a local business, and shooting your video with the owner or manager, someone the business people in your audience can clearly relate to.
Rather than centrally-produced videos being shown all over, it's local videos shown across a small region. How local is local in this case? Well, I think it would depend on your subject. The goal is to get someone people in the audience can completely relate to. I'll listen more to another rural business owner than I will to a "big city" business owner any day. I'll listen to a small business person before a big corporate manager. The more local, the better seems to be the bottom line.

3. From the field
4. Showing and explaining practices

Not another talking head video. Just a farmer in the field showing and telling from the real world.

For your business video, let's get that owner or manager in the back room to talk about inventory management.
Throw away the PowerPoint slides. Just show me how it works!

5. Including mistakes
I don't mean mistakes in filming, I mean having the person demonstrating discuss mistakes or problems they encountered. This was included in the project in India, and it makes sense for all kinds of subjects. Tell people the pitfalls to avoid.

6. Shown in small local groups
7. Facilitating active discussion
Stop making people come together in one central location to get the latest knowledge from on high. In India, a local person is trained to act as facilitator. "Typically, the group watches once through, then a second time, with the facilitator stopping and starting, reiterating concepts, soliciting questions, asking people to share experiences, announcing follow-up discussions."

Random Notes
What if one of the farmers forgot a detail or wants to review the video before trying out the practice? In India, they are planning to try making audio from the videos available by phone. (Many locals who have no electricity still have a cell phone.) In the U.S., we have the luxury of simply making the videos themselves available.

The technology is here. Your cell phone shoots better video than the first video camera I owned. Video setups today can be simple and inexpensive. So there is no excuse for not making a local video.

In some cases, the farmer in the video was assisted by an expert.

And showing videos on site today is no tougher than bringing and iPad or a pico projector.

What if we combined the study tour and the facilitated video?

Your invitation

2013-04-07T18:00:00.000-05:00

I was just catching up with a friend today.

"Why weren't you at the big conference? It wasn't far for you to travel," I asked.

"Nobody invited me," he said.

We all feel like that, don't we? We want someone to invite us, to make us feel welcome, feel special. People like to be asked. I can think of a couple of ways I've let this feeling stop me from something good.

Lesson One. Invite them all, one by one.
If you run an event, any event, remember that you need to personally invite everyone you can think of. You have to ask them, one by one. Maybe they'll come anyway, but people like to be asked.

Lesson Two. Don't wait for your invitation.
If you haven't been personally invited, stop waiting. Invite yourself. Yes, it's normal to want to be invited, but that's a poor reason to miss anything.

Take this as your invitation.

Why do we spend for status?

2013-01-06T13:26:00.000-06:00

In a small town, we know your family, and we know what you've done for the community over the past 20 years or so. We can judge your status based on your contributions.

In a big city, you don't know all that. You have to make your judgment of people based on more shallow indicators of status. If you show the outer markers of wealth, then surely you have also made important contributions to the community.

I think that is where spending for status comes from: the lack of context about status based on your own worth, replacing it with status items.

Of course, it may have come from big cities, but spending for status is plenty prevalent in small towns, too. And I think that is because of our much better communication tools. Now rural people tend to judge themselves against not just locals but also urban friends.

What difference does this make? Probably none at all. Just thinking.

A suburban maze of twisty little passages

2012-12-17T14:52:00.001-06:00

As the plane came in to land at DFW, I looked down at twisty suburban roads. A phrase from a computer game from 30 years earlier popped into my head.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
--Colossal Cave Adventure (also said in Zork)

Photo (cc) by La Citta Vita, of Prince George's County, Maryland.

Trivia: Sometime around 1983, I played Adventure on the mainframe at JM Petroleum in Dallas.

Reinventing SmallTown

2012-12-11T12:37:00.000-06:00

I started this post the morning after SmallTown 2012 (State of NOW, fka 140conf). I was tired. But I was also thinking, thinking that we can make this event better, much better. Jeff Pulver and I have been talking about this even while we prepared for this year.

We need your help to do it. We're ready to rethink (almost) every aspect of this event.

1. I need help.

I did too much of this event myself. We need an entire team of people working on this, taking on promotion, recruiting, sponsorships, registrations, the website, onsite volunteers, meal arrangements, and more.

Are you in? Tell me what you want to do.

2. We need attendance.

Honestly, the 100 or so people we hosted this year is not that many. We've had over 200 previously. I think the right size for this event to be big enough to be powerful, but small enough to feel connected, is about 200-300.

Every year our buzz and attention grow. We draw people from more states every year, 20 states and 2 countries this year. We've drawn more amazing people, both big name and small name. This year, we trended on twitter. Twice. Over 200 more people (unique viewers) tuned in live online, from 6 countries and 31 U.S. states. Even more will watch the videos after the event.

I need you to help to find the people who should attend and connect with them.

3. Should we move?

I don't know. I love doing it in Hutchinson. We get to play in a salt mine 650 feet underground and in a space museum of world-class quality. We revel in the splendor of a 1920's theatre. We enjoy exceptional support from the Hutchinson CVB (Convention and Visitor Bureau). Local volunteers pitch in. And I get to drive instead of fly.

But.... it may be time for a change.

This is risky because I've had people tell me I need to bring this international event to their doorstep before they'll turn out. "Well, if you do it in Hutch, why not do it in my town?" You can do it in your town. You are invited to create your own local event in the State of Now in your town. Or region. Or state. Or industry. We (me, Jeff, Deb Brown, and many others who have hosted one) are willing to offer advice, feedback, and suggestions. We'll help spread the word.

But there is a place for one big SmallTown event. Part of the magic is that validation that you are not alone. Other people do care about small towns and rural areas. And rural people are far more different and interesting than even you imagined.

Down at the bottom of this post, I'm opening it up for you to tell us where to go. One of you knows just the right place for this event to go next.

4. Should we change the format?

A dangerous question, I know. Jeff came up with the theater-style event we've used for all three years. For some people, it's a huge honor to stand on the stage and share their story. Some are not experienced public speakers, but it matters that you get to share your piece of humanity with the audience. And you always amaze me.

The unconference this year gave me a glimpse of something else that can work. One person would ask an open question, one they didn't know the answer to, and people from the audience would jump in to help. People made connections and excitedly exchanged contact info as they realized they could benefit each other.

After reflecting on this for a month, I think I have a plan.
1. Unconference becomes Collaboration Time: we'll do at least a half day of collaboration like we did this year. Anyone can pose a topic, and we all offer the best of our experience to help each other. If you're kind of new to social, or you've doing it for a few years, you'll gain a lot here.
2. Learning Tour: we'll spend at least a couple of hours touring a business or organization, to talk through how they are integrating social tools into everything they do, or how they want to do it. Even if you've been doing social for 5 years or more, you'll gain from seeing how it integrates into everything a business does.
3. Take the Stage: this is the part you know, the part we've always done. People from small towns all over take the stage and share from the heart why being connected matters to them. We all gain from this section. It's personal more than practical.

What do you think?

Request for Proposals

We're opening ourselves to new locations for the next SmallTown State of Now. Here's what we are looking for, and how you might nominate your own small town to host.

1. Size: We don't want to go any bigger than Hutchinson, KS, so 40,000 population is about the max. In fact, we'd welcome much smaller towns or even neighboring small towns working together. (and yes, Hutchinson people, I'm open to hearing from you, too, if you want us to stay.)

2. Location: Your town needs to be reasonably close to an airport with commercial flights. Transportation from the airport matters, also. How will we get people to your town?

3. Venues: If you have a theater that can seat 200-300 or more, that can host the main event. For the collaborative session, we need an open classroom-type space for about 150 people. In the past, we've hosted receptions at cool local attractions in Hutchinson. If you have a cool place to show off, this is one way to do it. WIFI will be critical at all these locations. You may need to contract with a service provider to add extra wifi to handle the 100+ connections simultaneously.

4. Hotels: It's always a guess, but I think we'll need about 50-60 hotel rooms. You can get creative on this, if you have alternatives like B&Bs or can come up with a way to host us.

5. Locals: Can you bring in 150 attendees from your state or region? We will bring in another 150 small town people from 20+ states and other countries, so it is a terrific opportunity for your local businesses to learn, your startups to network, and your students to expand their connections.

6. Sponsors: We're looking for about $10,000 in sponsorship. Can you find local companies, utilities, banks or organizations that can cover this?

7. Team: People make all the difference here. You need local and regional publicity, 5 or so helpers at the events, people to record and stream video, someone to create name tags, someone to arrange lunch and receptions, and someone to acquire furniture for the stage.

8. Date: What time of year works well in your area? We can be flexible, though we do have to work around our existing commitments. Since the global State of Now event is in June in NYC, June is not an option.

Think your town is the right place? Tell me about it. I'm excited to hear from you.

Join the Mailing List

If this is the first you've heard of the conference, but you can't wait to see what we come up with, please join our mailing list. If you've attended any of the three SmallTown conferences in Hutchinson, you're already on the list.

Subscribe to our mailing list

Tours as conferences

2012-12-10T12:28:00.000-06:00

Joyce asked me this in August, and it's still percolating in my head:

.@beckymccray your thoughts? > The best use of #farmers' time is study tours of other farms, not conferences via @calestous
— Joyce Sullivan (@JoyceMSullivan) August 4, 2012

What if all conferences suddenly became more like farm tours?

I've been on tours of all different kinds of businesses: farms, agritourism, even a salt mine. I always learn a lot, and I'm always fascinated. What if we deliberately made that fascination the centerpiece of the learning, instead just a side show before or after the main event?

Indicators of quality

2012-11-19T11:03:00.000-06:00

We recognize superior quality by certain indicators. A photograph, for example. We have learned to associate things like random real life subjects, selective focus and creative color saturation with good photos because they were associated with the great photographers.

My faux-Instagram from Paris.
Shot through the lens of my sunglasses,
to give it that faux-vintage look.

When the quality indicators get applied to every item we encounter, it confuses the definition of superior quality. When Instagram and other apps apply those features to every photo, when every second photo we see looks like that, we can only think they're all good for so long.

We respond by developing new indicators of quality. The definition of a good photo is in flux. The use of random real life images, selective focus and creative saturation emerged as a response to the over-use of a previous set of quality indicators. Ansel Adams style taken to an extreme, and then rebelled against. The great photographers started using toy cameras, and we adopted our current set of indicators.

The new great photographers now emerging are using many different styles. Which will be the new standard for quality? We'll see as those new indicators emerge, are accepted, and ultimately copied by our comsumer photo tools. Then they'll be over-used, rebelled against, and discarded in favor of an even newer set.

Where's the business lesson?
The same process applies to a concept like "local." We all want local products, so corporations start stretching the definition and labeling everything as local. We can't think it's all superior, and we rebel. We will pick a new indicator of quality.

Bleeding for the land

2012-11-15T07:28:00.000-06:00

I watched another drop of blood run down my hand and fall on the red dirt. I thought about what it meant. Then Joe and I went back to fixing the fence. We finished the job, because that's what needed to be done.

Then we went home and washed both our injuries and got out the ice packs. But I keep thinking about bleeding for the land.

People talk about bleeding their team colors. We live and work in the red dirt.

This drought is bleeding our land of life. Two years now, and no one knows how much more. The springs have gone dry, and the pond is going to follow. I can't bleed enough or cry enough tears to stop it.

How do we walk through the herd of cows we've raised since the day they were born, and decide which ones go to the sale and slaughter? How do we know if selling half of them is enough to save the other half?

We swing from despair to planning for the future. And we keep doing what needs to be done.

Restored

2012-11-14T09:05:00.000-06:00

Brian Allen had an accident at 10 years old. It injured his brain and took away everything he knew how to do. He had to relearn everything. He wasn't fully restored, and he learned to live with paralysis on much of his right side and other issues.

Last year, Brian came to our SmallTown event as a student volunteer on the video crew. He heard my friend Laura Girty tell about her son's brain injury. Brian decided he could tell his own story.

This year, he took the stage as a speaker. He charmed us with his humor and personality. When he got to the part of telling the story of his accident, we could see it wasn't easy for him. He drew a deep breath, and he whispered mostly to himself, "I can do this." The audience responded with calls of, "you can do it!" and "yes, you can!" He did. And he did a great job.

At that moment, Brian and the audience restored me, restored my faith in people.

Brian tells his story as a speaker here:

Heartwarming experience at State of NOW #SmallTown2012 reflects as a speaker and attendee

2 a.m.

2012-10-21T07:58:00.001-05:00

As I wake, what I dreamed were the cries of children turn into the yelps of coyotes moving through the field.

On birthdays

2012-10-16T10:26:00.000-05:00

Not mine today, but a friend's. Looking at the flood of generic "happy birthday!" messages on his Facebook wall has me thinking.

I don't reveal my birthday on Facebook. If you want to know my birthday, I figure you'll ask me.
Not wait for Facebook to mention it to you.
Not send some automated "Someone wants to add your birthday to her calendar" request.
Not just happen to see it go by.
You'll ask me.

And most of you don't care about my birthday, even my friends. I'm perfectly OK with that. Don't worry about it.

But reflect for a moment on the artificiality of these birthday notices. Is that really what you want from friends and acquaintances?

Sunrise

2012-08-02T08:29:00.001-05:00

Alone with the sunrise. No tall buildings, no people. Just me and the sky.

Make time to visit friends

2012-07-29T15:55:00.000-05:00

Make time to visit friends. Sit in their kitchen and discuss the world.

With Nancy and Jon Swanson in their kitchen in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Two sunflowers

2012-07-22T19:54:00.000-05:00

Giggling, the sunflower modestly covered her lips with a petal.

Sunrise meeting on a sunflower.

Urban versus rural

2012-07-15T20:08:00.000-05:00

When I saw the bag with "urban luggage," I instantly thought of the rural counterpart: the name brand designer tote for rednecks.

Not all sunflowers face the sun

2012-07-06T20:11:00.000-05:00

The gourd vine

2012-07-04T20:13:00.000-05:00

The gourd vine doesn't worry about its low reputation and makes beautiful blooms anyway.

Where I get perspective

2012-06-25T20:15:00.000-05:00

Raising cattle gives me perspective on business: seasons and cycles, gains and losses, life and death.

Make the day interesting

2012-06-15T20:19:00.000-05:00

Drinking iced tea out of a whiskey tumbler. Makes the day seem more interesting.

Green grass on the red hills

2012-04-20T20:28:00.000-05:00

The years when it rains a lot in Western Oklahoma, the grass covers the red hills, except the wash outs and the steep slopes. They bleed through and glint with gyp.

By late summer, the grass is sparse and dry, and the hard red clay is even drier.

Ever walk out your back door and see a tornado?

2012-04-15T14:27:00.000-05:00

I did that yesterday. And it was the first time in all my life to ever see one.

Here's the first one. I handed the video camera to my husband to shoot the video.

I was looking east from Hopeton, Oklahoma. (That's 8 miles south of Alva, in Woods County.) The tornado was moving NNE 1.4 miles away, passing between Hopeton and Dacoma between 7:40 an 7:44pm.

See the rest of the tornado pics on Flickr.

The mysterious Dunbar Townsite sign

2012-04-04T11:06:00.003-05:00

On Highway 132 west of Hennessey, and south of Drummond, Oklahoma, is a road sign for Dunbar Townsite. I've driven past it hundreds of times. In March, I decided to go look. That lead me to a Mt. Zion Church and a building labeled Morrison Hall. It looks like the remnant of pioneer community, much like any other community in western Oklahoma.

The brick pioneer monument sits in front of Morrison Hall on the left, and the Mt.
Zion Church is on the right.

Soldier Abraham Lincoln, Co. E, 53 U.S.C.Inf.,
a member of the U.S. Colored Infantry

Down the road a bit is Morrison Cemetery. As I wandered through the cemetery, I noticed military markers for "U.S.C.Inf." or "USCC". Those were unfamiliar to me, so I searched online as I stood there. I was surprised to find those are the abbreviations for colored troops, U.S. Colored Infantry and U.S. Colored Cavalry. These are the troops commonly called "Buffalo soldiers" who played such an important role in Western Oklahoma's early history.

That's when I finally figured out that I was in a former "Black town" in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma. Oklahoma was home to a number of all-Black towns. While there are lists of Oklahoma's All-Black towns, Dunbar or Morrison are not listed. In fact, I had trouble finding out much about it online. Dunbar was part of a cluster of All-Black towns in Kingfisher County, further west than most of the well-known communities. Looking at the Tulsa Library's map of Oklahoma's All-Black Towns, it was nearest the marker for Columbia. Update: You'll find another map linked from the All Black Towns of Oklahoma page at the Tulsa Historical Society. Dunbar was north of the marker for Lincoln.

The most substantive record online about Dunbar is at the Geochaching site, which includes this description of the town:

Dunbar was a Negro community for many years. This [geocache] is not really where the townsite was located, but is where the school was. The school was known for its agricultural program, particularly livestock, and students took many prizes in the shows. After intergration, the school was closed and the students, went to Lacey, Drummond and Hennessey. The building was sold and torn down.

From reading the pioneer monument between the church and Morrison Hall, it seems that a religious order played a role in the community.

The cemetery is still in active use today, so I am sure that the families associated with it have more information about Dunbar and Morrison, but it's just not online.

From the grave stone of Robert Tutt:
"A man who, by his honesty and fair dealings,
earned the goodwill and respect of his
neighbors and has advanced the cause of
his race among all people."

More pictures at Flickr: Dunbar Townsite.

Tolerance for inefficiency

2012-04-04T04:53:00.000-05:00

Inefficient for traffic. Beautiful for people.
Luling, Texas.

Tolerance for inefficiency has been rolling around in my head for quite a while, but I don't ever flesh it out enough to blog about. So I'm taking time to at least list the bullet points today.

If growth is the only goal, efficiency is the paramount value. Economy of scale is worshiped.

Today, growth is no longer the only goal in our society. Inefficiency can now be tolerated more freely.

This frees us up to explore the meaningful, the small, the beautiful, the local, and the beneficial, not just the efficient.