I’ve often seen my work passed off as someone else’s, on the flip side I’ve always tried to give credit where credit is due.

Sometimes I’m sure that people have passed my work off as theirs for self-serving reasons, on most occasions I’m sure that they don’t do it deliberately (at least that’s what I tell myself).

The way that I feel about different pieces of work varies. Some pieces of work are derivatives of someone else’s work and I’m not overly protective of my part in it; other pieces require a significant amount of effort and I’d like to be rewarded for the effort by, at least, being recognised for it.

Within the organisation in which I work there really isn’t a framework for marking the difference between the types of work. What I think I want is something similar to Creative Commons Licensing, but run at a personal or team level within the organisation.

There are some things I would like to mark as “Share Alike”, but there are other elements that I would prefer “Attribution” for, and yet others where I would like to define a “No Derivatives Work” label.

I’m not talking about a legal framework here, I’m talking about internal recognition. If each piece of work was labelled in this way we would be able to glean all sorts off value from a piece of work beyond what we can currently. As an example, we would know what it genesis was and who the thinkers were behind it.

What do you think?

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three separate conversations with people about the phases of team development.

These conversations have mostly been within the context of teams that are virtual.

In one particular case the conversation was about a team that is clearly in the “storming” phase. When I said this people looked at me blank, so I went on to explain the process of team development. Once I’d done that people started to understand what needed to be done.

I work across a number of virtual team, quite often these teams get to a phase where they don’t progress, and nothing gets resolved, they get stuck in “storming”.

The main reason for this, in my opinion, is because the technology we use to support such teams is particularly poor during this phase. It’s very difficult to work through the conflicts of a storming phase on a teleconference, if not impossible. People tend to do one of two things; they are either over-aggressive, or passive, neither of which actually resolve the issues. Teams, therefore, languish in the “storming” phase and never get to “norming”.

Another reason is that people don’t understand that they need to go through these phases, because they don’t know that the phases exist. So here’s my summary:

• Forming – Everyone is on their best behaviour, no-one wants to be the one to step out of line, but neither do people get anything of any real value done.
• Storming – The first conflict arrives and the team members show their true colours.
• Norming – Members are getting to know each other. People start to make allowances for each other and realising where everyone’s skills are.
• Performing – The team runs like clock-work, the leaders don’t have much to do because everyone knows what they are doing.

I have rarely been in a team that is truly “performing”, it takes time and effort to get there.

It’s interesting to note that when I get together with the members of one of the teams that did get to “performing” we quickly move to “norming” with only the minimum of “forming” and “storming”. It’s also interesting to note that one of the teams where we got to “performing” became regarded as a threat by managers and was actively shut down. It’s not always, necessarily, in everyone’s best interest to have a high performance team.

These things are never precise, but I’ve found it a useful model for understanding situations.

Some more information:

• Wikipedia
• the encyclopaedia of informal education
• BusinessBalls

It looks like it will be a really tidy little application for blogging those ideas that are on my mind and need to be written there and then.

The problem with those ideas is that they aren’t, on consideration, normally that good.

I could have presented my material (I think I knew most of the answers) and told them my opinion. But I wanted a bit of engagement and I find that people don’t engage with presented material, they become passive, sit back and just receive.

Why did I want engagement? The main reason was that I wanted them to start to own the things that we were talking about.

My solution was simple, but the impact was profound – I got A1 sized print-outs of uncompleted slides and asked everyone to get involved. Rather than starting with a completely blank piece of paper we had somewhere to start from, but there was still plenty to do.

Straight away people were engaged, they were so engaged that it took us a good 15 minutes to explain what we were doing. From the start the discussion was about “we” not “you” – “What are we doing?” Everyone was hooked in right from the beginning.

Armed with the A1 sized pieces of paper and a pen we went on to fill in the information with everyone contributing as we went along, even arguing vehemently about the content. Different people added value and it became a team effort with everyone contributing.

I don’t think that anything was put on the paper that I wouldn’t have put on the slides beforehand. What was different was the commentary that went with it, different people stating one opinion over another. I’m sure that each person who left that session learned something that they wouldn’t have done with a presentation.

The material wasn’t any different, only the media.

I’m not suggesting that we should do all sessions this way but what I am saying is that we still have a lot to understand about interactivity.

• How would this session have turned out if we had used a 3D world?
• What if the material had focussed on scenarios?
• Was it the paper that made it interactive?
• Was the interactivity partly because the set-up was a bit like a school classroom?
• Would the session have been the same if we had interacted with a virtual piece of paper?
• When are you best to simply present?
• What does art have to teach us?
• What does journalism have to teach us?

I still have a lot to learn.

Some of those communities are inside the organisation that I work for, a good deal of this expression, like this blog, is done outside the organisation.

I wrote the other day about all of the ways in which I could waste my time, I did this as a bit of a joke. Truth is that all of the places of expression take time, but there are lots of other challenges to working this way. Here’s my top 10:

1. Am I repeating myself? – it’s difficult to know what I have said where, sometimes I have to check, sometimes I’ve got it wrong.
2. Am I saying the right thing? – there are different audiences so I need to make sure that what I say is relevant and doesn’t reference something I said somewhere else.
3. Am I breaking confidence? – I can say things inside the organisation that I can’t say outside.
4. Am I giving people the attention that they deserved? – I’m not writing very often on this blog because I’m spending so much time writing inside the organisation. Am I being disrespectful to my external audience, and does it matter?
5. Are my comments relevant? – Comments are a particular challenge. If I comment inside the organisation I shouldn’t expect people to know about me outside the organisation and the same is true the other way around.
6. Where do I aggregate information? – If I send my Twitter updates to Facebook are they relevant in Facebook?
7. Some people will see more than others – some read only one thing that I write, others read a lot of things.
8. Does the real me come across in a single stream? – If someone only read my Facebook what impression would it give? If they only read my blog would the impression be different?
9. Should I consolidate? – It’s always better to do one thing well. Would I be better dropping Twitter, Blog, etc.
10. How do I prioritise? – Is inside more valuable than outside? Is the number of readers significant?

In summary; I sometime feel like I’m in the middle of a social experiment; an experiment that will radically change the way we work over coming years.

1. Check your corporate email for unread items.
2. Read the first two emails by which time you should be bored
3. Wonder what is happening on Twitter.
4. Browse through the fresh set of updated. It is essential that you are following enough people to guarantee a fresh crop of tweets every time you look. This is easily done by following a number of news accounts.
5. Once bored of tweets skip over to your RSS reader to see if there are any updates. Like twitter it is vital to be following a whole stack of feeds. The syndicated and group blogs are the best for guaranteeing updates on every visit, LifeHacker and BetaNews are good examples.
6. Read posts until bored. The key is to never get to the end of your unread list ensuring that return visits result in further reading.
7. Continuing the blog theme jump over to your Wordpress Dashboard. This is the first of many information sources that you are convinced give you important information each time you visit.
8. From your Wordpress dashboard take particular interest in one or maybe two vital statistics justifying your next stop – Google Analytics.
9. Google Analytics will highlight some interesting searches that have reached your site – it always does. Justify to yourself a quick trip to Google Webmaster Tools for further information.
10. If there is any danger of you getting to the end of the statistics before you have successfully wasted enough of your valuable time you can also skip through the Bing Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Webmaster tools. Three search tools are normally enough, but if you want to waste even more time other search engines are available.
11. Your next stop is your personal email – again, read a few posts but never get to the end of the unread items available.
12. Hopefully your personal email will highlight some justification for going to Facebook, but if it doesn’t just go there anyway. Don’t waste your time on applications or silly games – that would be a real waste of time. Spend time reading status updates and looking at photos of people you have never met.
13. It’s time now to graze through some of the corporate tools that you have available. Portals and dashboards provide more information than you could possible consume. This can soon be justified as work even when you are only mooching around. Justifiable time wasting is the best form.
14. The next activity that is vital to your time wasting credibility is your ability to browse around new sites. The BBC is particularly good for this there are endless possibilities in news and Sport.

If you are in danger of having to do some real work, by getting to the end of the list, you can, at any point, return to the top of the list.

If you have followed the guidelines correctly there should always be something to do.

Also, remember that you can carry on these same distractions when away from the office by use of a SmartPhone or other such device. Location should not be an inhibitor.

Following this recipe should ensure that you always look busy and avoid unnecessary activities that may result in something being produced. Alternatively, you could just redefine these activities as work and then you will have completed everything there is to complete.

Working through this kind of distraction reaction process is what I’m sure many people do and will do, but it isn’t good for you, or for your brain. Being able to cope with the lure of these attention giving sirens will be a defining feature of the future workforce.

The bit after the credits is definitely the best bit – “That’s not what iPhone was made for – I’m loaded with technology”.

(Hat tip to One Man’s Blog)

But, in certain circumstance, Clip Art can be your friend, but there are conditions.

The first thing you need to know about Clip Art is that Clip Art is created in styles. You should NEVER use Clip Art from more than one style in a diagram, or set of diagrams.

Using more that one style creates diagrams that would look better if you had cut everything out of Hello and PC Magazine and stuck them on to a piece of paper with Prit Stick.

Styles are essential but how do you find items of the same style. Office online helps here, they show you the style and let you search on it.

If you do a Clip Art search on office.microsoft.com and find something that you like the style of and then open that drawing you get a dialogue similar to the one below:

Notice the style number down the right-hand side. The style in this case is 1540  which you can simply click on to get other items in that style:

Being of the same style these items go together in a diagram without looking like the diagram was drawn by a 2 year old with the aid of Crayola.

If you are looking for something specific you can obviously update the search terms rather than browsing through all of the items.

I’m showing style 1540 because I quite like it. It’s diagram Clip Art with items that are icon type representations of things that work well in the conceptual diagrams that I draw.

The other thing that I do is to put the icons that I am going to use in a messy set in the last slide, this is useful for quick reference.

There is another thing that I wish more people would do with Clip Art and that is to maintain the aspect ratio. The items look OK when they are the same height and width as the original. Shrinking items down should be done with your finger on the Ctrl key, that way the items don’t look squashed. A professional artist has spent some time making this Clip Art look right, squashing it makes it look wrong, as simple as that.

And while I’m on the subject, the items should all be the same size or a small number of different sizes. Again this is quite simple, select a number of objects and set the size to be the same using the menu. If you are using PowerPoint 2007 it’s in the Format menu.

The next thing that you need to know about Clip Art is that less is more. Like most design – simpler is normally better. Don’t try and fill the diagram with Clip Art, use it sparingly. If a box is the right thing to use – use a box, don’t use Clip Art of a box. Remember white space is your friend. Leave room for the diagram to breath.

And finally, if it should be a photograph (rather than Clip Art) please make it a photograph, there are loads of places where you can find the right picture for your diagram.

Sometime the negotiations can feel a bit like this:

Once I get out of the other side of this work I am hoping to be writing a little more often – but you never can know for sure.