Entreprenurses

How to use failure to drive innovation

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:24:00 -0700

Everybody recognizes that failure plays is an important role in innovation but there is a lack of structured advice about how to encourage and use failure in a practical way. Below are some thoughts about how failure can be used in a practical way:

1) Remove the stigma from the word failure Failure is a word that has a lot of negative connotations and is a word that many people are uncomfortable using. In a recent interview I asked applicants “what was their greatest failure” and many replied that they did not like the word and did not associate anything they did with failure. If conversely I had asked “when have you ever tried anything new”, none of them would reply “I have never tried anything new in my life”. And yet this is precisely what they are saying by saying they never failed. Nothing is ever achieved successfully on it’s first attempt so any attempt to try or learn anything new will involve some failures along the way. We need to reclaim the word and recognize it’s importance as a developmental step.

2) Encourage the sharing of failure If you are trying to encourage innovation, there will inevitably be failures along the way. By encouraging people to talk about it and to share their stories of failure, the group or organization as a whole can learn much faster. If the same mistakes are being repeated over and over again in isolation, it makes the learning process much harder and much slower. The sharing of failure needs to be seen as an important contribution to the success of the group and the success of the organisation.

3) Fail often and fail small Where failures become catastrophic, they are often very large failures and can result in the destruction of an organization (e.g. Barings Bank, NHS University, etc). Even when the organization survives, a catastrophic failure can seriously damage an organization’s reputation (e.g. BP, Nasa, etc). The trick is to iterate quickly so that any failures happen quickly and at a small level. By encouraging experimentation and innovation at a small scale, the lessons can be learned before significant resources are invested.

4) Make failure survivable for the person and the organisation Linked to the previous point, the board and management team of an organization need to make sure that failures do not destroy the organization and so this needs to be managed in a way that encourages failure but at a small enough scale so that learning can happen. Equally individuals who fail must be protected and possibly praised for their innovation. If a culture emerges that failure is met with punishment, then people will quickly learn to avoid doing anything new or innovative and this can be far more damaging to the organization as a whole.

If we can learn to reduce the stigma around failure, openly share our failure stories and learn how to fail fast and often, then we will be well on the road to creating truly innovative organizations and teams.

What to do when your manager is an idiot

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Tue, 6 Dec 2011 07:34:00 -0800

“So what do you do when your manager is an idiot?”

If I had a pint for every nurse I met who felt their boss was an incompetent idiot, I would spend nearly all my waking hours staggering around in a drunken haze. I would go even further and say that most of the nurse entrepreneurs I meet would not be looking to leave their current organisation if they had a creative, supportive and empowering manager.

So what do you do when your manager is an idiot?

Well a couple of suggestions and approaches might help make your job and your life more bearable. If you find yourself thinking about your manager a lot when you are away from work and talking about them a lot with friends and family, then this is a sign that they are having a very unhealthy impact on your life and you need to do something about this. Either that or you have a crush on them and that is an entirely different blog ☺

Firstly a word of caution. Acting like you know they are an idiot (no matter how tempting) will only make things worse. If you antagonise, embarrass or annoy your manager they can easily transform from being an idiot to a bully and the bane of your life.

So where do you start?

The easiest route is if you can turn them from being an idiot into an ally. Do you understand why they act the way they do? What are their priorities? What are their problems? What would make THEIR life easier? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then find out. Nurses are highly skilled in verbal and non-verbal communication and in making complex assessments – use these skills on your boss. Find out what drives them, what their priorities are, what their hopes and aspirations are and what they really care about. Very few people ever spend much time analysing situations from the world-view of others and it can be a very rewarding and transforming experience.

So let’s assume that you’ve worked this out. How do you use this information to improve your life (which is the purpose of the exercise)? What you need to do is to reframe what you want in terms of what they want. Do they want shorter waiting times, reduced sickness and absence, cost savings, more recognition from their manager or peers, better clinical outcomes, service redesign, etc? Once you know what THEY want, then you can present your ideas and your changes in terms that meet THEIR needs. So (for example) if you want an additional nursing post, you have to come up with a way of selling that as a way of meeting what they want and solving their problems (e.g. will this new post improve documentation, reduce complaints, help implement a new care pathway, reduce spend on agency staff, etc). It is like a move in the martial art of judo, where you use their energy and their momentum to move them where you want them to go.

So what if that doesn’t work?

There are a few things that you can do which will definitely make the situation worse. The worst culprit of all is complaining about your manager to anyone who will listen. Not only does this make you look very unprofessional but your manager will have friends and allies all around you, particularly people who see their future career success as something your manager can help them with. Very quickly your manager will find out what you are saying and then the relationship is likely to deteriorate very badly very quickly.

What if your manager just enjoys dominating others?

There are people out there who just enjoying dominating others, whether this is about their own insecurities, their personal ambition or this is the approach they learned from their early role models. If you have a dominating manager there are no easy solutions. One solution is to give in on some things and consider them as insignificant as it will become personally draining to fight them on every front. If they insist on small issues are done in a
certain way then sometimes it is easier to just go along with it and do what they want. If they want all the pillowcases facing away from the door (these Ward Sisters really do exist!) sometimes it is just easier to turn the pillowcases. However, whilst it is good to give in on small things, there are certain issues where we cannot allow ourselves to be pushed around. If your manager is encouraging you to be unpleasant to others, to treat other people badly, to ignore the needs of others and even to lie for them, then you should not feel compelled to follow. If you feel inwardly awkward about
something then avoid doing it. If you simply follow all the whims and dictats of your manager, they will exploit this and the situation will only get worse, but choose the issues to argue over and if you can trade “your way” on a few important issues for “their way” on minor issues, then this may be enough for you.

What if your manager is constantly criticising?

Some people seem to have real knack for spotting every mistake and error around them, no matter how small. Some of them even seem to get a perverse pleasure in pointing out other people’s errors and mistakes and this is annoying enough in a colleague but awful if they are your manager. They even seem to get a certain sense of satisfaction from pointing it out. There are ways of coping with this though. The most important approach is not to take this as a personal criticism. If you have made a mistake at work, it doesn’t mean you are a bad nurse or a bad person, simply that you did something wrong. This could be a great learning opportunity to improve your skills and performance but only as long as you don’t react to this as a criticism of you as a person. Remember that one of the roles of your manager is to manage your performance and pointing out mistakes is a legitimate part of that activity. Some nurses react to any performance management as if it is bullying without recognising that it is a legitimate and important management function.

If your manager is pointing out all your mistakes all of the time, remember all the things you do well even if this is not mentioned or recognised by your manager. The worst thing you can do is criticise them back as you will be locked in a cycle of criticism in which you will inevitably suffer. If your manager does infrequent performance reviews (or does them in a very mechanistic way), use the opportunity to present some of the excellent work that you have done and your achievements. Even the act of thinking about your success and achievements and writing the down will make you feel more positive, irrespective of your manager’s reaction or level of interest. Whatever their motivation for constant criticism, if you can put this in the context of all the good things you are doing, depersonalise it (even if only in your own head) and learn from it, then this will reduce the impact of this criticism on your self-belief and your happiness.

So when do you openly challenge them?

Many people think that openly challenging and confronting your manager is the way forward. Sometimes, particularly when the welfare of patients or other staff are concerned, openly challenging your manager’s behaviour and decisions is the way to go. However, even if you win, this is not a slight that they will easily forgive and neither will their allies. It is rare to find a nurse who has openly challenged their manager, has won and has still stayed very long afterwards in that area. Some complain of ongoing bullying from the manager, some complain of bullying from their manager’s manager, some complain of being ostracised by many of their colleagues and some feel that they have won a battle only to lose a war. If you are going to openly challenge then you need to make sure you get plenty of good professional support (e.g. trade unions, professional bodies, legal advice, etc) and plenty of personal support (e.g. friends and family). It is also worth assuming that after you have won, you need to move to another area or organisation afterwards and you should plan your exit strategy as early as you can. It is much easier to go through this difficult process knowing that you are leaving to a better environment and you will also find job-hunting difficult in the middle of a complaint, grievance or even legal process.

Finally, it is very unlikely that you will be able to change your manager’s behaviour or their personality. If you can turn them into an ally then that will make your life easier and will help you push through the changes you want. If you can’t then you will either have to live with it (which can be a pretty miserable existence) or leave. If other people’s welfare is at stake then you may choose to openly confront and challenge your manager but you need to plan your support and our exit strategy in advance.

Whatever happens, remember that a good job is a job doing what you love, surrounded by colleagues you like and respect with a manager you respect and who supports you – having only one or two of those in place means that it isn’t a good job and there are better jobs out there for you. As Confucious one said “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”.

My favourite blogger

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 03:59:00 -0700

This is going to be an odd blog post for a two reasons:

a) I am going to write about my favourite blogger, I am not going to tell you her name or where you can find her blog
b) I know more about this woman than I know about most of my friends but I have never met her and don’t even know her real name

So where to start with all this?

Well I suppose it started via twitter and I came across a number of posters who also wrote really good blogs and tended to link and comment on each other. What connected them was that they all had mental health issues and for some (but not all of them) writing about their mental health was the main focus of their blog. Reading what these bloggers were writing was an experience that I had never had in any other context. I worked in mental health during my training as all nurses do and had worked in hospital and community settings and though I knew a reasonable bit about mental health. It was all seen through the lens of a professional though and so I knew about medications, diagnoses, referrals, etc but not really much about what it is actually like to live with this. Some of my friends received treatment and a few ended up as inpatients during their training but we never really talked honestly about what those experiences were like. So initially I was really taken aback by these incredibly vivid honest accounts from these bloggers.

At first I felt like this was somewhere I shouldn’t be and reading blogs I shouldn’t be reading. After all I have never had treatment for mental health problems and had a pretty big online label identifying myself as a health professional. I was also actively connecting with them through twitter and blog comments rather than just passively reading their blogs. But people were OK with this and I never tried to pretend to be something I wasn’t or (god forbid) ever try and give clinical advice or information. Mind you that is probably because my mental health clinical skills are almost non-existent these days but also they knew far more about the ins and outs of the healthcare system, medications, diagnoses, etc than I did. And also, to be honest, these weren’t blogs about being ill, they were blogs about being human and being alive. Although health issues were what drew them together in an online community, they were all just providing very raw honest accounts of their lives. Some days were all about symptoms and the failings of healthcare and socialcare professionals and other days were about wine and love and poetry and family and jobs and dreams and fears.

It was the writing more than the content that really drew me and the quality of the writing took my breath away. I am a bit of a crap writer and although I try not to let that stop me flexing my writing muscles, I am under no illusions that my writing is not my best way of communicating. On a good day with a good crowd, I can do presentations and talks that make people laugh, cry and touch people’s innermost dreams and emotions. My writing has never come close to that, but these writers did. They shared a view on their inner and outer world that they openly said they did not share with family, friends, professionals or therapists. I would follow accounts of therapy sessions where they would talk about what they did and didn’t share and discuss whether or not to let professionals know about some of the dark scary things. And yet they were sharing this with complete strangers. Although for me some of them didn’t feel like strangers because they had shared huge parts of themselves that even good friends don’t really share, albeit through a veil of pseudonyms and anonymity. One person made a suicide attempt and we all knew because of her last blog post, her abrupt ending of a twitter stream and then her post when she was finally discharged from A&E having convinced them not to section her again. What became obvious was that for many of them, this anonymised electronic network was actually their primary source of support and there was real depth to the care, emotion and support that they shared with each other. If you have never been part of an electronic community it can be hard to imagine how much support and how much affection you can have for someone you have never actually met.

And of these writers, my absolute favourite is L. Well actually I know L is a pseudonym because she has since told me her name is actually J although that could be another psuedonym. L is an outstanding writer and we would generally communicate through blog comments and twitter. A few months ago, her family discovered her blog and so she has now moved it to a password-protected hidden place and I promised never to reveal where this is or provide any clues where her family could find it again (which is what makes writing about this tricky and why I seem to referring to her in a George-Smiley-kind-of-way). For people who have never really used twitter or blogs, it may seem strange to think that you can follow someone’s live, moods, ups and downs in real-time if they are very open and transparent. I know when L is having a great day, when she is curled up under the duvet on her laptop, when she is scared, when she has had crap treatment from professionals, when she is wondering whether to eat again, when she is drinking wine, the ins and outs of her love life and when she is thinking of ending it all. There are lots of days she makes me laugh out loud, there are days she makes me worry about her and there are days she makes me desperately painfully sad. But if she was sat next to me where I am writing, I wouldn’t know how she was. L has probably helped me understand aspects of mental health I never could have understood, not as a label or diagnosis or treatment pathway, but as one aspect of a bright multi-faceted life that sometimes takes centre stage and at other times is part of who she is with no more impact than hair colour or taste in music.

I will probably never meet L or share a glass of wine with her but she has touched my life in a way that probably seems bizarre to those who treat social media as a scary impersonal technology. She has also shown me the joy of beautiful honest writing and how electronic communication can sometimes be far more human, deep and powerful than what most of us experience in face-to-face “real life” conversation.

Is volunteering the new exploitation?

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sun, 16 May 2010 14:22:00 -0700

Another great conversation that emerged at the Shine 2010 unconference was about the nature of volunteering. I think we just assume that volunteering is a force for good and is about people being generous with their time and skills for the benefit of others. I mean what could possibly be wrong with that?

Doug Richards from the School for Start-ups suggested a very different way of looking at volunteering. He argued that asking people to provide labour for free is simply exploitation. That if a social business is genuinely trading then it should pay people for their labour and incorporate their costs in the price of the goods or service. His final parting shot on the subject is that "working for free is a hobby not a job".

I think there is something to this point of view. If the driver for a charity or particularly a social enterprise for using volunteers is that they can't afford to pay people then it means they are admitting that they cannot compete with other organisations. If a competitor's product or service is so much better than yours and the only way you can compete is by using free labour, then you do not have a sustainable position in the market. If we criticise firms that use sweat-shop labour as being unethical, shouldn't we apply the same standards of criticism to those who pay their workers nothing.

This isn't criticising the motivation or altruism of people who want to give their time for free but the lack of aspiration of the organisations that accept it. If you are a charity and using free labour is the only way of plugging a deficit in your funding, then I have some sympathies but I think this should be challenged in anyone who aspires to be a social enterprise.

Profit isn't evil - get over it

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sun, 16 May 2010 14:17:00 -0700

The interesting thing about social enterprise is that everyone asumes that we are talking about the same thing until a question arises that sharply divides them into various camps. There was such a question at the Shine unconference this morning and that question was "Is profit evil"?

Because within the social enterprise community are charities, voluntary groups and social businesses; some totally dependent on grants, some that genuinely trade and some that make considerable profits. For my money grants are simply donations from rich people or rich organisations and whilst they sometimes generate social good they are not sustainable. Grant income is simply a 21st-century version of medieval patronage and is entirely dependent on the whims of the rich. Whilst free money is always nice, it clearly isn't sustainable; which brings us to the idea of profit.

At a purist level, profit is simply the surplus of income over expenditure but for some charitable organisations, the word and the idea carry connotations of the most evil blood-drenched capitalist machines. For those of us at the social business end of the spectrum, profit gives you sustainability, independence and the potential to grow (and therefore massively increase your social and environmental impact). Whilst there may be an emotional (and arguably irrational) reaction to the word "profit", it is really just surplus and if you aren't making a surplus then you are just going out of business slowly.

A much more interesting debate is whether the MAXIMISATION of profit is inherently evil. There is a world-wide track record of organisations who maximise profit by laying off vast quantities of workers, reducing pay and benefits, sourcing from lowest-cost providers, dumping industrial by-products and taking resources from countries that can ill-afford to lose them. If the overriding factor in a company's decision-making is the maximising of profit, it is almost certainly reducing its social and environment impact, if not actively causing social and environmental harm. Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives may be a public-facing sticking plaster over this activity but the scale of it is dwarfed by whatever the core business processes are.

So the really interesting ethical division for businesses is not between those that break-even and those that make profit; but between those that make profit AND social and environmental benefits and those that maximise profit (at the expense of any social and environmental considerations). Depending on which side of that divide you are is a better indicator of whether you are really a social enterprise or a profit-maxising private sector business.

Testing my new iPhone app

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 3 May 2010 07:27:00 -0700

In a vain attempt to blog slightly more regularly, I have installed BlogPress on my iPhone. This is my first attempt from it and so far it seems to be working quite well. Of course, when I get my iPad, I suspect that it will be even better :)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Nursing, politics and social enterprise

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 11:18:00 -0700

One of the areas I find really interesting is the way that both Labour and Conservative have come out in favour of social enterprises. Not sure where the Liberal Democrats and the other parties are on this subject but whenever parties seem to agree on an issue, they then immediately try and establish battle lines between each other. At the moment, within the overall consensus on social enterprise is a division about a very specific type of social enterprise, namely the “worker co-operative”. This is where staff get together and collectively own an organisation and democratically determine how that organisation will be run and who sits on the board. The Conservatives are advocating more of these in the NHS whilst Labour are arguing against it, even though they have been promoting examples of this as the way forward for community provider services.

So what does all this mean and what’s it got to do with nursing?

To understand that, I think you need to understand two things: where worker co-operatives came from and what nurses hate about the NHS.

So where did worker co-operatives come from? Well although they are now an international movement, they were born in Rochdale, Lancashire about 300 years ago as a way of workers making sure that they had good working conditions, were paid a decent wage and as a direct response to the traditional company owners simply exploiting them to make as much profit as possible. From these roots were born the trade union movement and latterly the Labour Party and there are still Labour Party MPs who are technically members of the Co-operative Party (which joined with labour a few decades ago). So worker co-operatives are a response to workers feeling underpaid, undervalued, disempowered and exploited. The way they work is that every person who works for them has a single vote and these votes are used to democratically elected the governing board and make key decisions about how the organisation is run.

OK, but what do nurses hate about the NHS? The NHS is like family members who quarrel and fight but will defend each other from any attacks from outside. We often spend so long defending the NHS that there is very little attention given to what’s wrong with it and particularly what many nurses experiences are like in the NHS. Staff survey after staff survey shows that nurses are very often treated very poorly by their organisations whether by overt bullying, poor working conditions, lack of support, no training and education opportunities, etc. Having spent much of the last 9 years working with nurses from across the whole NHS, it is common complaint that nurses don’t feel valued or listened to by heir managers and that they feel that their organisations board puts money ahead of clinical care.

I have seen many nurses interested in the idea of worker co-operatives as a direct response to this lack of control, lack of empowerment and poor management practice. At its simplest, it is a way of saying “we think we could run this organisation better than the people who currently do”.

The focus on using social enterprises as a vehicle has drawn up battle lines between the unions and between some of the political parties; and has focussed on the mechanics such as pensions, TUPE (transfer of undertakings legislation), legal structures and whether these new entities represent “the privatisation of the NHS”. What all of these fail to realise is that this is not a response to large-scale economic shifts or changes in political policies but a very local response to how valued and empowered nurses feel. What is striking about talking to nurses who have left the NHS to establish nurse-led social enterprises is not only how much happier and empowered they are but how they are able to improve clinical services the way they also wanted to. Until the NHS gets better at treating its nurses properly then this is a movement which is likely continue whatever party takes control after the election.

Nursing Haikus

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:25:00 -0800

I have been working on nursing haikus and here are some of the ones I posted on Twitter:

Bend over, touch toes!
Your first prostate exam may
give you quite a shock

Nursing school Day 1
"Don't accept a grape or sweet
from a patient's hand"

You are on traction
keep hands above the duvet
at all times or else!

Some patients you will
always remember. Like Dot
that poo'd on my head

You've had picolax
don't walk from the commode
or you'll be sorry

Doctors' writing is
like the last series of Lost,
sometimes it makes sense

Renal cholic helps
men understand what childbirth
feels like (probably)

Shaving your own pubes
is always better pre-op
if you are able

Pee in this pot here
to show your current lover
that you care for them

Colonoscopy
is too many syllables
to use in haiku

A warm smile is like
KY Jelly. It makes nursing
tasks go more smoothly

Why the Skoll World Forum is elitist and anti-social-entrepreneurial

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 05:11:00 -0800

For those who have never come across this, the Skoll World Forum is an annual event that brings together social entrepreneurs around the world to look at supporting international learning and collaboration (or so I thought).

Ever since I set up my first social enterprise 7 years ago (the European Nursing Leadership Foundation), I have been interested in supporting and developing other social entrepreneurs. Initially this was very much driven by how poor my experience was of support organisations but then increasingly by trying to help people avoid the kind of mistakes that I (and many other social entrepreneurs) made in our early days. Since then I have founded other social enterprises and helped dozens of social entrepreneurs along their own journey towards creating their own social enterprises. This has also involved me getting involved regionally (on the boards of SELNET and SEEM) and latterly nationally (as a Council member of the Social Enterprise Coalition). I point this out by way of background and also to explain why I am passionate about social entrepreneurs learning from each other and supporting each other. In fact one of the amazing aspects of the social enterprise world is how open, generous and helpful most social entrepreneurs are towards each other and I think this is a visible expression of the fact that most of us are driven by values which are much more about benefiting others than they are about benefiting ourselves.

And this brings me onto the Skoll World Forum (http://www.skollworldforum.com/).

For the last few years a number of friends had been eulogizing about this as the major international event for social entrepreneurs. Whilst conferences like Voice, the Shine Unconference, etc are always must-attend-events in my diary for the opportunity to meet and share ideas with some of the most amazing social entrepreneurs around, it does tend to be mainly UK-based. So I thought it would be good to share some ideas, inspiration, debates, etc with some international social entrepreneurs, so I applied to attend Skoll. It seemed a bit odd having an application form rather than just buying tickets but I put this down to the quirkiness of academia.

Today I got an email from a nameless sender saying that "Unfortunately, we are not able to offer you a delegate space at this time". Now they are still open for applications on the site so this really says "we don't want you".

Now there are two things that made me really angry about this:

1) They seem to be rejecting the genuine social entrepreneurs

A few minutes on Twitter and I found a number of other people who had also been turned down by Skoll. What tended to characterise them is that they are all running social enterprises. The impression given is that Skoll is for people who aren't social entrepreneurs but like talking about the idea of social entrepreneurship rather than any real engagement with practicing social entrepreneurs. Whilst I understand that social enterprise is sexy, it is irritating how many people are attracted to the idea of social enterprise without actually getting involved in setting up or running social enterprises.

2) This is an example of the kind of elitism that social entrepreneurs are fundamentally opposed to

Openness, transparency, fairness and equality of opportunity are core values to most social entrepreneurs. We wouldn't dream of running services that were only available to people we like or even worse "people like us". What you would expect if you applied for an event is either a very clear transparent criteria for admission or a fair transparent non-discriminatory way of allocating limited places (e.g. first-come first-served).

What seems to be happening at Skoll is that some nameless person or people sift through the applications deciding who they want and who they don't. It is harder to imagine a process that is a worse antithesis of everything that social enterprise is supposed to stand for. It is the kind of mentality that kept women and ethnic minorities from clubs, societies and government for decades and has no real place in any organisation, let alone one that aspires to be empowering individuals, improving society and bringing about positive change in the world.

In case there are those who feel this is simply a rant about not being able to get a ticket to an event, I wouldn't feel this angry if it was a concert, commercial conference, etc because those organisations don't hold themselves up as ethical social organisations. You expect this kind of behaviour from traditional capitalist organisations because often these are run for the comfort of those in charge. I would expect a traditional organisation to want to surround itself with like-minded people from similar backgrounds and organisations because its comfortable and doesn't expose it to real challenge or diversity. Social entrepreneurs often are passionate about justice and fairness and when we see unjust unfair practices like this it makes us angry. That anger and passion is at the heart of most social enterprises and is the fuel that drives the change we want to see in the world.

Genuine social entrepreneurs are often challenging, disruptive and vocal and we are used to more conservative organisations finding us uncomfortable or strange. What is such an enormous waste is that there are plenty of opportunities for policy-makers, government officials and academics to gather but there are very few opportunities for genuine social entrepreneurs to do this. When someone claims to be interested in supporting us but then denies us access to each other then this is just fundamentally wrong. Can you imagine the Social Enterprise Coalition deciding who it does and doesn't want to attend the Voice conference? Of course private clubs can decide who is cool enough to attend and who isn't (although this is more often associated with the schoolyard or fashionable nightclubs than with international conferences) but we shouldn't let this be done in the name of social entrepreneurship.

The light at the end of this particular tunnel is that since I posted this on Twitter, a number of other “Skoll rejects” (e.g. genuine social entrepreneurs) have emerged and we are trying to organise an UnConference to achieve ourselves what we thought Skoll was supposed to be doing. All credit to Ben Metz for starting this at http://www.pledgebank.com/OxJam10 and this will hopefully be a human-scale event for social entrepreneurs to network, share ideas, inspire each other and really change the world.

We only need 50 more people so please sign up and I look forward to seeing you there.

Nursing Times Awards 2009

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:29:00 -0800

Last Tuesday was the 2009 Nursing Times Awards and it was (as ever) a spectacular affair.

The evening started off well when I realised that I could still fit into my dinner jacket and black tie and thanks must go to my Wii Fit for helping with that. Before the dinner was a drinks reception at the Park Lane Hilton, sponsored by the Royal Air Force where the great and the good in nursing (and a few of us ordinary bods) circulated, drank some lovely wine and were occasionally grabbed by Nursing Times video journalists (namely Gabe and Victoria). I particularly enjoyed this as there were a number of old friends who I had not seen in years at the dinner and this was a great opportunity to catch up with them on several years' worth of career moves, relationship changes and gossip. It was at this point where I was asked to look after tweeting for the Nursing Times for the evening which I did for the rest of the night (trying to tone down my humour and language to something more appropriate for one of the UK's leading nursing journals). I have no idea how the tweets went down or how many of the Nursing Times' followers noticed the difference but I definitely stopped before I got tipsy.

We were then shepherded through to the main ballroom for a fantastic three-course dinner. I am amazed at how people can produce good quality food for hundreds of people that is piping hot, when a dinner party for more than 10 causes my kitchen skills to collapse. I was sat with a few old friends for dinner as well as some other charming guests and the conversation ranged from nursing leadership to the state of the NHS, from social enterprises to women's health and from nursing overseas to the best places to drink at RCN Congress.

After the dinner came the awards ceremony proper, started off by a good speech from Alastair McLellan (the Editor of Nursing Times) which set the tone for the evening and then came the awards. There were 15 categories and the winners came from all parts of the UK and demonstrated some really brilliant examples of nursing practice, teamwork and clinical leadership. There were testimonials and examples which showed nursing and nurses at their best and it is this kind of night that reminds us how amazing nursing can be and often is in many parts of the country.

After the awards, everyone decanted upstairs for a disco and casino (not real money honestly!) and plenty of celebrations, commiserations and networking. This was again a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, plenty of RCN colleagues and make new friends. The party continued into the wee small hours although those of us that had work in the morning started to slip away at around 1.

All in all it was a wonderful evening to celebrate nurses and nursing, particularly for the award winners who were genuinely touched and honoured to be recognised in this way by colleagues and their managers. If you have never been to an event like this I would strongly urge you to go and if there are nurses around you who really represent the best of what the profession has to offer, then the nominations will be open soon for the 2010 awards.

Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:42:00 -0700

As todays task on the ProBlogger "31 Days to Build a Better Blog" challenge (#31DBBB) at ProBlogger, I have to do a blog post about another blog. I thought I would chose a post that I have been using a lot myself and often in my coaching, namely Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero at 43 folders.

I get around a 100 emails a day and it is not uncommon to find my inbox with nearly a 1,000 emails, particularly if I have been traveling in wireless-less parts of the world or have been on holiday without my laptop. Managing this level of email and still getting useful stuff done has always been a challenge and this is often a huge problem for many of the people I develop and coach. David Allen's "Getting Things Done" is a great framework for generally increasing productivity but last year Merlin Mann adapted this specifically to email and developed his idea of "Inbox Zero".

The video at the link above explains the concept and how to put it into practice but in essence it falls down to three principles:

1) Don't use your inbox as a storage space

This used to be my undoing as I would skim my inbox, deal with anything urgent and leave the other emails "till later". The net effect of this is that the inbox becomes a morrass of emails which needs to be searched several times a day for "that key important email". So how do you do this?

2) Deal with any email that takes less than 2 minutes to process immediately

The first step is to go through the inbox and deal with any email that takes less than 2 minutes to process. For most this involves deleting, moving to various filing folders or quick one- or two-sentence replies. I find that 95% of my emails can be processed this way.

3) Process any email that will take more than 2 minutes to process into a specific folder and decide what action needs doing with this

The remaining emails then need to be put into a specific action folder (@Telephone for people I need to ring, @Office for things I need to print out or write letters for, @BringForward for emails I need to look at next month, @Online for emails that need to be connected to the web to process).

Using this approach gives me a clear empty inbox at least twice a week and a tremendous feeling of accomplishment! Thanks Merlin :)

8 Podcasts to make you a better web entrepreneur

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:55:00 -0700

As an avid podcast listener and somewhat sporadic podcaster, I thought it would be useful to share the top 10 podcasts that I think will make you a better web entrepreneur.

1) This Week In Tech

The original and the best! I have been following Leo Laporte and the gang since Episode 5 and they are now on Episode 189 nearly 3 years later. What is good about TWIT is that not only is it hugely entertaining but it keeps me abreast of all the key developments in internet technology every week. It introduced me to Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, Digg, Spotify, iTunesU, etc months before they appeared in any of the mainstream media and discusses not only the technology itself but also its implications and potential. This is the only podcast that I really miss whenever Leo publishes it a few days late and meeting Leo is one of my life ambitions! You can find out more at TWIT TV.

2) MacBreak Weekly

This is done by the same people who do TWIT but focusses on Mac and Apple technology. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a Mac but I have found Mac technology much easier to use when developing and deploying web solutions, whether it is podcasts, blogs, websites, e-learning, etc. You can find out more at Macbreak Weekly.

3) Boagworld

Of all the web design and web development podcasts I have listened to, this one is the most informative and the most entertaining. Paul and Marcus do a great job covering all the main issues that web developers and web designers need to know and some shows are aimed at beginner level, some at intermediate level and some at expert level, with a particular focus on accessibility. You can find out more at Boagworld.

4) Harvard Business Ideas Podcast

The first 3 podcasts are very much focussed on technology and this one is from Harvard looking at business ideas and opportunities. This is a good podcast for generating business ideas as well at looking at some of the cutting edge developments around business and entrepreneurship. The feed is at RSS feed.

5) Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

In a similar vein is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader podcast, this one is from Stamford looking at entrepreneurism and particularly entrepreneurship in technology. The site is at Stanford University podcasts.

6) Venture Hacks

Almost all web entrepreneurs will need investment and this relative newcomer to podcasting is by far and away the best podcast on raising venture capital on the web. It is developed by the people behind Venture Hacks and gives a real insight into venture capital, business angels and raising start-up finance as well as some really practical tips. The site is at Venture Hacks.

7) MacBreak Tech

The final two are Pixelcorps podcasts and very much Mac podcasts. If you don't have a Mac, these are of limited use. MacBreak Tech is a fairly hardcore Mac technology podcast that shows you how to get the most out of your Mac as well as troubleshooting common issues and problems. The feed is at Pixelcorps RSS.

8) MacBreak Work

Finally a new podcast from the Pixelcorps aimed at using business software on the Mac, covering software like Keynote, Pages, etc. The feed is at Pixelcorps RSS.

These are very much my own personal podcasting preferences and provide me with a good 7-9 hours of audio learning every week. I would like to hear what podcasts you use and what your thoughts are on this list

31 days to build a better blog

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:46:00 -0700

As the more observant of you will have noticed, I have only written one post in the last 5 months. As part of doing something about this (as well as giving myself a psychological Kick-up-the-butt), I have enrolled in the ProBlogger "31 Days to Build a Better Blog" challenge at ProBlogger

Let's see what impact this has :)

Blog makeover

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 1 Dec 2008 10:23:00 -0800

As you may have noticed, I haven't been posting very regularly and I think the blog was also looking a little tired. So firstly I have done a spring clean, courtesy of a new template from dzelque at www.ourblogtemplates.com. It is a bit lazy but I did really like this look and would welcome any comments on it. I have also produced a number of new podcasts which should be published over the next few weeks and a raft of new virtual seminars. So (touch wood), Christmas and beyond should be a hive of activity for the site and the blog.

How to get NHS proposals funded - or confessions of an ex-commissioner

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 6 Oct 2008 14:44:00 -0700

This is based on a presentation I recently gave on how to get services commissioned by the NHS.

Firstly a number of observations:

1) Most NHS funding streams are still process-based rather than outcomes-based so it is much easier to get funding to improve a process than improve an outcome
2) Most NHS funding sources are oversubscribed by a factor of at least 10
3) Most pilot projects are not given mainstream funding at the end of the pilot

Health initiatives tend to impact in one of the following 2 areas:

a) Quality improvements - Improving the quality of the patient experience or outcome (e.g. improved symptom management, more information, greater convenience, improved morbidity, improved mortality, etc)
b) Process improvements - Changing the process of healthcare delivery (e.g. reducing the need for outpatient or inpatient activity, increasing the number of patients a healthcare professional can support, remote monitoring of conditions, etc).

In my 7 years' experience in NHS commissioning, they are likely to get funded according to the following priorities:

1. Process improvements with a proven reduction in expenditure
2. Process improvements with a possible reduction in expenditure or a proven improvement in key performance targets
3. Process improvements with a possible improvement in key performance targets
4. Quality improvements with a proven impact on mortality or morbidity
5. Quality improvements with a possible impact on mortality or morbidity
6. Quality improvements or Process improvements with increased user satisfaction

Where this talks about proven, this needs to be based on evidence collected during the pilot stage and ideally:

• Using a commonly accepted measurement technique (e.g. health economic evaluation such as QALYs, marginal or full cost pricing, etc)
• Performed by an independent 3rd party, ideally a University department
• Using measures which have a historic record of success with the target commissioner (i.e. look at what they have funded in the past and why)

Firestarter Podcast 14 - Part 5 of Creating a Nurse-led Social Enterprise in Health

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:27:00 -0700

This is the Firestarter Podcast which is the world's first podcast for social enterprises in health. This podcast is the first of a 5-part workshop on "How to create a nurse-led social enterprise in health" run by Dave Dawes from Entreprenurses Community Interest Company. If you would like to attend future versions of this free course, please click here.

The podcast covers:

Money is important but it isn't worth focussing all your attention on
If you plan carefully, you can have a business collapse and keep your house and start a new social enterprise
The fear and the risk is manageable and you get the chance to save the world
Getting in touch with real quality of life
For some people the risk is so great they are too afraid to make the leap
Explaining the change and innovation curve:

a) Innovators (about 2.5%)
b) Early adopters (about 10%)
c) Early majority (about 37%)
d) Late majority (about 37%)
e) Laggards (about 12.5%)

Your first paying clients will be innovators and you should market to them through personal contact
You move to early adopters through their contacts with innovators and by proving that your service works
You shouldn't use mass media or traditional advertising until you are at the early majority stage
There are lots of potential NHS commissioners - much more than just your local PCT
You need to be careful when you are planning your escape

Podcast 14 - This can be downloaded here (32 Mb)

The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Firestarter Podcast 13 - Part 4 of Creating a Nurse-led Social Enterprise in Health

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:16:00 -0700

This is the Firestarter Podcast which is the world's first podcast for social enterprises in health. This podcast is the fourth of a 5-part workshop on "How to create a nurse-led social enterprise in health" run by Dave Dawes from Entreprenurses Community Interest Company. If you would like to attend future versions of this free course, please click here.

The podcast covers:

Introduction to marketing
Why marketing isn't just advertising and public relations
How to work out your start-up capital from your market information
How to pick your co-founders and why they need to be as dedicated to the business as you
The Napkin Business Plan

a) What is it you will do?
b) What is the market and demand?
c) Who are your competitors?
d) What is your pricing?
e) How much will you make?
f) How much will it cost?
g) Who is your founding team?
h) How much start up capital do you need?

It is rare to set up a social enterprise without using 1 or 2 as start-up fundin
If you run a social enterprise you risk losing your house
Why your house is still at risk even with a company limited by shares or guarantees
Why you will almost certainly need to personally guarantee any business loans or overdrafts
Sources of start-up funding (from easiest to hardest to get):

1) Your money (savings or personal loan)
2) Borrowing from friends and family
3) Banks (overdrafts and loans)
4) Grants
5) Equity

It is rare to set up a social enterprise without using 1 or 2 as start-up funding
Dealing with £95,000 of personal debt
There isn't a risk-free way of keeping your house whether you are an entrepreneur or not
Dealing with fear and guilt
Why you want to be very very fussy about who your bank manager is
The smaller you start your social enterprise, the easier it is to raise money and the easier it is to learn quickly from mistakes.

Podcast 13 - This can be downloaded here (21 Mb)

The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Firestarter Podcast 12 - Part 3 of Creating a Nurse-led Social Enterprise in Health

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:10:00 -0700

This is the Firestarter Podcast which is the world's first podcast for social enterprises in health. This podcast is the third of a 5-part workshop on "How to create a nurse-led social enterprise in health" run by Dave Dawes from Entreprenurses Community Interest Company. If you would like to attend future versions of this free course, please click here.

The podcast covers:

Who has the power and control on your social enterprise?
How many directors should you start with?
How members can overturn the decisions of the directors and even remove them - the "Doris the Cleaner" effect
Why founders are sometimes sacked from their own board
Who do you want to be accountable to?
The interesting clauses in Entreprenurses CIC - the "nuclear button"
Fundraising is much much easier as a registered charity (and Dave's 204 rejection letters)
Why social enterprises fail (and 50% of them do in the first 4 years)
The main reasons that social enterprises fail are Cashflow, Tax and VAT issues, Too low profit margins, Keeping unproductive employees and Market shifts
Why cashflow is the number 1 cause of social enterprise failure
Why you need to choose your bank manager very carefully
The most common tax mistakes businesses make
What social firms are
Why most business plans are a load of tosh
The best plans are created between the 1st pint and the 7th pint
The barstool test for your mission statement

Podcast 12 - This can be downloaded here (33 Mb)

The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Firestarter Podcast 11 - Part 2 of Creating a Nurse-led Social Enterprise in Health

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:05:00 -0700

This is the Firestarter Podcast which is the world's first podcast for social enterprises in health. This podcast is the second of a 5-part workshop on "How to create a nurse-led social enterprise in health" run by Dave Dawes from Entreprenurses Community Interest Company. If you would like to attend future versions of this free course, please click here.

The podcast covers:

Pros and cons of different legal structures of social enterprises
Setting up a company can be quick an easy
Guide to Community Interest Companies and asset locks
The key difference between "limited by shares" and "limited by guarantee"
How equity investment works and why it won't work with some company structures
There is no perfect model and how to judge your legal adviser
How to judge a business advisor
Why most directors get struck off

Podcast 11 - This can be downloaded here (31 Mb)

The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Firestarter Podcast 10 - Part 1 of Creating a Nurse-led Social Enterprise in Health

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:50:00 -0700

What is a social enterprise?
Definitions of social enterprise and how it is different from the public and private sector
What is your underlying business model?
The difference between corporate social responsibility and social enterprise
Finding profitable areas to work in
Are social enterprises competing unfairly with the private sector?
Will the NHS support a long-term profit-based model?
The problem with being commissioned by only one organisation (monopsony)
The economics of fair trade and social enterprises
How do you measure your social good?

Podcast 10 - This can be downloaded here (34 Mb)

The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Meeting Bob Geldof at the Nesta Innovation conference

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Tue, 20 May 2008 06:40:00 -0700

Well what can I say? Meeting Bob Geldof has always been one of my life's ambitions and today I managed to do it :)

Anyway, I am getting a bit ahead of myself. I have been at the Nesta Innovation Conference all day and they have had Tim Berners Lee (inventor of the internet), Gordon Brown (some politician) and Bob Geldof as keynote speakers. Although they did play U2 as he walked onstage which makes me suspect that the organisers are not as fimiliar as I am with his discography (Best album - "Deep in the heart of nowhere" althpough not much of a commercial success).

Bob has been a hero of mine for many years primarily because of what he acheived at Live Aid and Live8 but more because of the way he acheived it. His autobiography "Is that it" covers this in a lot of detail but in a nutshell he (and the original team) acheived some amazing things through just keeping going, breaking lots of rules, innovating on a shoestring and sheer bloody-minded arrogance.

Anyway his speech was really good and the video of it is at this site and he came up with the best quote of the whole conference from George Bernard Shaw:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man."

The highlight for me though was the chance to meet one of my inspirational heroes and so I worked out the route between the stage and the speakers area and strategically placed myself. I thought this is just a timing thing - what can go wrong?

Well a full bladder from too much coffee went wrong. After his speech there was a round table discussion for 90 minutes and with 30 minutes to go, I knew I wouldn't make iit. But then I saw a photographer pop out through a nearby door and I thought "I'll follow him". So I nipped out and tried to return thoroughly relieved. Then this petite cute security guard said "you can't go through those doors, you need to go in at the back". I had come this close and I wasn't going to lose my prized spot through overzealous security, so I simply went past her fast enough that she couldn't grab me before I got inside (by which time she gave up). It was an interesting scenario with this girl telling me I can't go through a door, me telling her it will be fine and all the time walking through the door.

Then 20 minutes later, the session ended and Bob walked offstage following my predicted route (I would have made a great stalker) and he then found a smiling social entrepreneur standing in front of him with an outstreched hand. He shook my hand, I told him how he had inspired me as a social entrepreneur, we spoke for a few moments and then he went offstage and I wandered around grinning like someone who has finally met one of his lifetime heroes.

Days don't get much better than this :)

Note: Photographer: Rob Kennard

A new framework for analysing social enterprises

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:45:00 -0700

I have been looking at various frameworks for categorising social enterprises and have noticed that a lot of them distinguish between grant and contract income. I think there are flaws with models which only look at whether funding is trading or grants in terms of public sector commissioners. Many of these commissioners (whether they are Primary Care Trusts, Strategic Health Authorities or Local Authorities) often use terms like contracts and grants interchangeably in terms of the third sector and often for varying political motivations. For example, a Local Authority may specify some outputs for a piece of funding and regard this is a contract. Even though the funding rarely covers the full cost of those outcomes and so is not really a true contract but a grant towards running costs, many social enterprises describe this as contract-funding to differentiate themselves from more charity-like third sector organisations which are dependent on grants and fundraising.

I have developed a different framework (called Funding Base Analaysis) which doesn’t differentiate between grants and contracts but the source of that funding. This is particularly useful in looking at social enterprises which work in areas such as health, social care, transport, regeneration and other areas with a high public sector presence. The model looks at the percentage of turnover that an organisation receives from public sector commissioners compared with organisations and individuals who are not public sector commissioners. This is plotted on the horizontal axis and is then compared with the percentage of profit of turnover on the vertical axis. In this way, organisations are allocated to one of size quadrants as in the following diagram.

Using this framework, the characteristics of the 6 quadrants are as follows:
A – this tends to be where the commissioner-funded third sector organisations operate. They receive most of their funding from public sector commissioners but generate little or no surpluses or profits.
B – is similar to A but generating reasonable profits.
C – is similar to A but generating high profits.
D – this tends to be where the publically funded charities and voluntary sector organisations operate and social enterprises that trade directly with the public and/or other enterprises (social and private). They receive little or no funding from public sector commissioners but generate little or no surpluses or profits.
E – is similar to D but generating reasonable profits.
F – is similar to D but generating high profits.

D, E and F have tended to be the areas where Fair Trade organisations have tended to operate historically whereas the majority of social enterprises appear to be in the A, B and C quadrants. One of the interesting aspects of this framework is that where organisations are has nothing to do with aspiration or perception but simply financial variables which can be externally monitored and verified (the profit:turnover ration and the percentage of turnover from the public sector).

The usefulness of this framework is that it predicts organisational behaviour, success factors and sources of competition. A, B and C organisations depend for their success on the patronage of public sector commissioners who are rarely recipients of the service. Their focus tends to be on delivering outcomes that commissioners want and measuring performance indicators that are important to commissioners and if there is a conflict between what the recipients of the service want and the commissioners, the commissioners will tend to win. D, E and F organisations on the other hand depend for their success on the satisfaction of the customers who receive their services or products. Their focus tends to be on making the customer happy and they measure performance indicators that are important to the customer as well as to internal benchmarks. A and D organisations operate in a relatively uncompetitive market as there is little to attract an outside organisation into this market. C and F organisations operate in a highly competitive market as outside organisations (particularly private sector ones) see these areas as high profit opportunities.

Firestarter Podcast 9 - Social entrepreneur bloggers

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sat, 17 May 2008 11:29:00 -0700

This is the Firestarter Podcast which is the world's first podcast for social enterprises in health.

This is an impromptu podcast from the Shine Unconference Last weekend. It features a host of social entrepreneur blogger, including:

Dave Dawes - entreprenurses.blogspot.com
Nic Temple - sse.org.uk/blog
Greg Villalobos - blogcreator.co.uk
Rob Greenland - thesocialbusiness.co.uk
Rachel Slade - unltdworld.com
Darragh Doyle - darraghdoyle.com
Ben Matthews - puddingrelations.blogspot.com
Maureen Bowes - weinspireothers.com & peopleintelligence.com
Nicola Jones - unltdworld.com

The podcast covers:

Meeting and networking with people via their blog
Making time for creating and following blogs
How blogs can raise the profile of your social enterprise
The role of blog comments and blog readership
Corporate vs personal/informal blogging styles
How to start blogging (typepad, wordpress, etc)
The pros and cons of Twitter (the scary world of microblogging)
Is mobile blogging the next evolution?
Finding out that lots more people read your blog than you thought
Dealing with information overload and using blogreaders and RSS feeds
Using blogs to share ideas, develop ideas and create collaborations
How UnLtdworld works
Why some people like blogs, other like podcats, others like forums, others like twitter - the role of people's personality preference and learning style

Podcast 9 - This can be downloaded here (35 Mb)

The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Shine 2008 Day Three

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:23:00 -0700

I think I am starting to get the hang of the buidling now and there is now a very relaxed somewhat chaotic feel to the event :)

What seems to be happening now is that embryonic conversations that started on day one are now feeding off each other and I am collecting a bunch of "back burner ideas" such as "could we run free healthcare that has nothing to do with the NHS", "what if Mecca was run a social enterprise", "are all co-ops social enterprise or does it depend on who the members and community are", "can you monetise your content through web-based models", "is the traditional capitalist growth model flawed" (e.g. should you growth or find a good size niche and stay at a sustainable level.

(Pause for lunch)

I have just come out of a really cool session on web 2.0 and had a really interesting and really passionate discussion with a load of people with cool ideas. Hopefully we will carry this on on the blog they are setting up and I will signpost it from here next week. We covered issues like ownership, authenticity, the relationship between business and their customers/users and generated equal amounts of heat and light. I met David Wilcox at the event who is a fellow ENTP and blogger/podcaster/social reporter etc and we had a really great thrash though about whether Web 2.0 is real or whether we are all being "blown off by the technorati" :)

I am now in one of those surreal workshops that I ended up whilst looking for a coffee that is a talkoake session??? So now I am being videod while I am blogging about what the guy with the video camera is talking about. It is all far too self-referential for a sunny sunday afternoon. I love the looks I get when I am blogging in sessions and I do find this much more comfortable on my mac than on my blackberry, although I think I might get into mobile blogging and even maybe Twitter (which does like the crack cocaine of the web 2.0 world).

Overall the 3 days have been really cool and wonderfully anarchic and unstructured (I keep expecting a "free hugs" campaign to break out any any time). There have been some amazing conversations in a very weird building and my head is full of ideas. I think I need to spend some time is a nice quiet introverted space to put some of these thoughts together and trying to move some of these into reality. There is a bit of me that wishes this hadn't been a weekend conference as I think I am going to be pretty knackered tonight and tomorrow and I have got work to do :(

As an aside, I have now decided that Rowena Young does not exist. I think she is like Godot in the Beckett play "Waiting for Godot". Everyone talks about her (and how bright and amazing she is) but I have been to a number of events recently where people say "you've just missed her" or "she is around here somewhere". I wonder if she is some form of social construct or even a mass delusion. I might put "being in the same room as Rowena" on my bucket list (things to do before you die!). I don't think I will post again until a few days after and I have followed up all the wonderful contacts that I have made, put the podcast up and added comments to all the blogs of bloggers that I have met.

Shine 2008 Day Two

dave@nursingleadership.org.uk (Dave Dawes) — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:25:00 -0700

So here we are on day two of this fascinating event. I had breakfast this morning so my blood sugar is far healthier even allowing for some late night drinking the night before.

The first workshop was by Siobhan from Nesta who probably thinks I have been stalking her recently. This became a really amazing brainstorming event looking at entrepreneurship and innovation for the elderly. This is currently the most amazing discussion so far and I came away with some really interesting ideas (such as running Mecca as a social enterprise, a not-for-profit nursing home, a social enterprise around incontinence, etc). There were some really sparky people in the room and all our ideas kept building from each other and I just can't spend enough time in environments like that.

I have just wandered into another accidental workshop which seems to happen a lot. Some of the workshops seem to be cancelled and rearranged at short notice and it is frustrating a few of us. So I wandered over to What If (who are being highly recommended) but they had gone for lunch, so I wandered through to Kim's presentation on fundraising from the Foundation of Social Improvement. I had come across her at Voice 08 and this is a really interesting workshop. At the ENLF we botched up our fundraising and I sent out 205 letters and got rejected by 204, most because we weren't a registered charity. It got to the stage where I dreaded opening the post because every day I was getting bucketloads of rejection.

She is presenting a really good 7-stage model which seems really solid and practical. I am not going to replicate it here but I would definitely recommend talking to them or going to their website. I might try and do a podcast with them later although I keep saying that to people all day :(

Once again they are being very tolerant about someone who is typing away on their blackberry and I am sure the person next to me thinks I have a dreadful email addiction. Anyway, I need to go and grab some food in a minute and I hope the pub crawl tonight is a little bit more organised (as I think we lost a few people who couldn't find anyone).