Influenced by the work of Hargrove, most coaching today fits within one of five categories:

• Expert coaching: building skills, competencies, and knowledge;
• Pattern coaching: revealing old patterns and building new patterns of belief and behavior;
• Transformative coaching: fostering a fundamental shift in point of view, values, and identity;
• Transcendent coaching: comprehending purpose;
• Integrative coaching: blending the depth of personal (inside-out) work with the complexity of external (outside-in) dynamics around team, organizational, marketplace, and societal needs.

Most internal coaching programs in organiztaions deal with Expert Coaching, and many refer to this type of coaching as mentoring. Many external coaches begin and end their level of impact here, as well. Most external coaching resources deal with Expert and Pattern Coaching. An increasing number of coaches do Transformative Coaching, but fewer engage in Transcendent or Integrative Coaching.

Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life Kevin Cashman, 2008

Most of my mentors help me learn more about my purpose—how I fit within the organization, and how I can work through it to achieve shared goals. They also help me integrate the different aspects of my life. =)

I tend to coach people on skills (social media, presentations, etc.). I occasionally and almost accidentally help people shift their points of view. I enjoy helping people see the big picture, but I don’t do that a lot yet. And someday I’d love to help people integrate all these things…

Looking forward to learning more about this!

Good book with lots of reflection questions and worksheets. Worth reading and thinking about.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Five types of coaching

Here’s how we’re thinking of using the raised beds we built. I might interplant some radishes between the tomatoes and strawberries, too.

• Peas: The edamame I grew in a pot could really use more space. We’ll plant sugar snap peas and edamame after we put in some support.
• Tomatoes: Cherry or grape tomatoes, which we’ll trim more aggressively this time instead of letting them take over the yard
• Strawberries: Mmm! I’ve left the strawberries out – I hope they’ll survive winter. They’re supposed to be perennial in this zone. Maybe I should move some indoors for safekeeping…
• Bush beans: Quick and productive. The only thing is that when we planted them last year, they matured just when it was too hot to think about steaming things.
• Carrots: We had mixed results with our purple carrots. They were cute, but small and often nibbled on by other insects/animals.
• Beets: Haven’t tried growing these yet, but if they’re sweet, I’m all for them.
• Lettuce: We’ll give these another try, although I think the squirrels will enjoy them before we do. I want to grow lettuce because buying lettuce usually means wasting a fair bit. Maybe we’ll build a hoop system for our raised bed… If so, I’ll swap this with the parsley from the other box, and plant lettuce in the smaller box.
• Rosemary: Ahh, potato rosemary bread. And pasta. And roasts. Mmm mmm mmm.
• Thyme: For pasta. The creeping thyme I’ve put down in the border might do, if it survives the winter. I wonder if I can grow it in our mulched pathways…
• Oregano: Surprisingly strong and peppery when it’s fresh. Also for pasta. If the oregano plant in the back survives the winter, I may repurpose this space.
• Chives: We tried growing this in a container and it didn’t take, so we’ll try it for real.
• Basil: Mmmmm. Pesto. Yum yum yum. And lots of pasta, too.
• Bok choi: A lady down the street grows lots of bok choi in her front yard. We keep being tempted to pinch some.
• Cilantro: This goes to seed so quickly, but it’s good to have on hand for stirfries.
• Garlic: W-’s parents grow their own garlic, so we’re going to try it too.
• Parsley: Prolific and good for making things look extra-special. I’ll grow a mix of flat-leaf and curled parsley this time. Also, we use it by the handfuls in mussels marinara, and it’s a decent way of bulking up pesto.

There’s also a small section which is not in a raised bed. I’ll probably use that to grow more basil, and I hope the lavender I’ve left out there will come back next year.

No more zucchini. Not only did we not get any un-nibbled zucchini off it, but the plants took over the side of the garden. <laugh> Also no more of those gimmicky hanging planters for strawberries. No more sage unless I trim it mercilessly – we don’t cook sausages nearly enough, and the plant propagates by itself.

Definitely more rosemary and more basil. Good ROI for our kitchen.

I’ll also grow catnip and peppermint in pots, as those are invasive. And if our chili pepper plant will survive the cats’ nibbling (even with the peppers on it!), maybe we’ll plant some more peppers too.

Getting the hang of it, I think!

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Garden plans for 2010

Here are some things I change right away in my Inkscape settings:

1. Double-click on the pencil tool, and choose “Last used style”.
2. Draw something, then click on the fill color box. Choose X for fill.
3. Switch to the Stroke style tab. Select a rounded joint and a rounded cap.
4. Open File > Inkscape Preferences. Click on Transforms. Uncheck “Scale stroke width”.
5. Use View > Snap to turn off snapping to the grid or to guidelines. That way, you can use guidelines, but your strokes will still look natural.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

My Inkscape settings

Yesterday, I gave my Remote Presentations That Rock session at the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange virtual conference. 98 people attended and shared their insights with me through a lively text discussion, lots of whiteboard interaction, and the occasional phone question. It was a high-energy presentation – I poured lots into it, and people gave me lots of energy back. We finished exactly on time thanks to tip #3 (Make time for learning) and tip #6 (Start strong and end strong). One of the organizers said it was one of the best presentations she’d seen.

What worked well

• Snagging a conference room meant that I could turn my energy level up.I had explained my situation to the concierge that morning, and she regretfully informed me that all of the project rooms had been booked. A few minutes before the set-up time for my session, I went to the mobility concierge again to see if there were any areas in the building where I might park myself near a phone and still not bother people. She said that one of the project rooms still hadn’t been claimed, and she was going to release it and give it to me. Whew! This is why you should be on good terms with people… They can save your day unexpectedly.
• Interaction gave me insights. I asked people to use Elluminate’s text and laser pointer tool to let people interact with the slide content – indicating their position on a spectrum of tactical and strategic presentations, the combination of in-person and remote presentations, the reasons why remote presentations fail, their top challenge as a remote presenter, and their underlying reason for that challenge. The results surprised me, and I’m glad I asked those questions instead of just going with my assumptions. There was much more of a spread than I expected. More people made lots of strategic presentations than I thought. People listed the general concerns I thought people would have, and then some more. People’s top challenges (they could pick only one) included practically all the challenges of remote presentations. There seemed to be a fairly even spread between the root causes of these challenges, too – lack of role models, challenges of interest, and lack of time. In fact, people liked interacting with the whiteboard so much, that they interacted and gave me feedback even for slides where I didn’t explicitly ask for feedback, and many continued using the laser pointer tool instead of using the A/B/C polling tool on another slide. And the text chat was fantastic. People were asking and answering questions, sharing tips and ideas, and teaching me a lot about what mattered to people.

  For my next presentation, I’d love to find a way to incorporate more real-time feedback throughout the session. Maybe if I left the whiteboard on and asked them to indicate something (state of understanding?) while listening… Elluminate has tools for indicating some feedback, but it’s displayed in the participant list and therefore mostly out of sight. Visually indicating feedback on the slides themselves would be more engaging, I think.

• The webcam worked out really well. I almost always use a webcam when giving remote presentations, because it makes things just that much more personal. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the project room had a clean and simple teal background, which was a vast improvement over the dimly-lit rooms in 120 Bloor and the cluttered background at home (unless I unfolded the cloth background we have for photo shoots, but propping that up somewhere is difficult). On the webcam, the teal background added a little bit of personality and energy to the image.

  Because of my parents (my dad’s an advertising photographer) and my amateur interest in photography, I knew that good lighting could make a big difference. Although the room’s top-lighting evenly lit the background, it lit my face with high contrast – bad for detail and a feeling of connection! I was thinking of using one of the desk lamps to improve my lighting, but they were clamped to the desks and the power cords were routed within the cubicle dividers, so I couldn’t borrow any of them. Fortunately, I had a hat. (Oh, the many uses of a hat…) The hat brim blocked the light from the top, the room diffused light on my face so that I wasn’t in shadow, the webcam compensated for the brightness levels (and here the teal background helped again; white would have probably been too bright), and we were good to go. The only thing that was missing was a reflector or a secondary light source to provide shaping. I could’ve brought the clamp-lights we have at home, but I didn’t make space for them in my bag. (And I might’ve been tempted to color-gel them too, as they’re daylight-balanced instead of tungsten-balanced… Ah, pickiness! )

  Webcams make a huge difference in terms of communicating energy. People tell me I’m great at sharing my enthusiasm on the phone, but seeing someone be passionate about a topic is even more effective.

  Lesson: Webcams are great. You should definitely have one if you do lots of remote presentations. Also, hats are good for dealing with top lighting. Better yet, plan your remote presentation setup in advance, and bring extra light if you can.

• The combination of hand-written comments and sketches worked out, too. In the process of creating this presentation, discovered that I could draw more than stick figures (yay!). But those sketches felt a bit more polished and formal than my hand-written messages and stick figures, because I’d obviously put a lot of time into it. The tablet I bought made it easy for me to add simple annotations, although the Elluminate pen tool was jaggy and didn’t smooth the curves. People liked the hand-written comments, though, and they felt that it made the presentations more personable. =)
• Picking people’s brains rocks. I love discovering the expertise of people around me. Marc Hood contacted me before the session because he was assigned to record it. I asked him if he’d recorded many sessions before, and I was delighted to hear that he’d done thousands. Knowing that, I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask him what characterized the best presentations he’d seen so far. He ended up sharing lots of tips with me on the importance of conversational intimacy, comfort with video, and other things he’d picked up in his experience as a videographer, and I’m going to keep picking his brain about what great presenters are like.

(Yes, I think about these things.)

I think the key thing I’d like to do even better next time is to collect real-time feedback throughout the session. That would be cool, particularly if I end up with interesting data after that.

One of the best things about doing presentations with plenty of time for Q&A is that the resulting discussion helps me think about fascinating topics. For example, one of the participants asked about the advice I gave on encouraging interaction and planning plenty of time for questions. He pointed out that this involved different group mechanics.

As I thought about that change in group mechanics, I realized that I really do flip the “expert-audience” dynamic on its head. When I present, I’m not an all-knowing, all-powerful expert, and I’m not just talking to silent listeners in a darkened auditorium. My mental model of a presentation is that of a well-lit circle of participants. I might be there to share what I’ve learned, but other people also bring a lot of questions, experiences and insights. My work as a speaker is to set the stage for a conversation and get people to think and talk. Sometimes, in quieter cultures, that reflection and conversation happens outside my session, and that’s okay. More and more, though, people really step up to that challenge. They share terrific thoughts during the Q&A, and I learn so much more than what I would have if I had come in “knowing everything”.

I can see how this flip might be difficult or unexpected. In many cultures, the idea of active speaker and passive listener is strong. Traditional education is structured that way. Hierarchical organizations work that way. So it might not always work as perfectly as it did yesterday, but it’s worth it. It might need a little more introduction to encourage people to participate. It might require several attempts before people see it’s okay. It might also be that people may not have the conversation right there with you, but they’ll think about it and talk about it afterwards, and that’s great too.

Adapting is challenging, but the benefits of the approach are so compelling that I don’t want to give presentations any other way. Even in a real-life keynote where I can’t have that two-way communication going on in the background, I try to expand the conversation both before and after the presentation.

Now that I think about it, I can see how the same theme of experimenting with the power dynamic runs through other aspects of my life. I’m relatively new to IBM, having joined it right after grad school. I read books and talk to people about great management and leadership (and many other things). I influence the way people feel about the organization, and how they see their connection to the big picture. I haven’t waited for someone to give me a job position or title that reflects that, because the opportunities to make a difference are all around me, and I want to help others see those opportunities for themselves too.

Even when I was growing up, I thought about dynamics. I read parenting books, getting a better understanding of what my parents were thinking about. I realized that they’re not all-knowing and that they’re also figuring some things out for the first time (despite raising two other kids).

I’d like to keep playing with dynamics as I grow older. If I manage people, I’d like to be the kind of manager focused on serving people and making sure they have what they need to excel. If I follow the executive career path, I’d like to be the kind of executive who values listening to people from all over the organization and outside it. If I build a business, I’d like it to be the kind of business that looks for a problem and solves it instead of making a solution in search of a problem.

I’m sure I’ll revisit this topic and the other ideas shared in that session. I suspect it’ll be well worth the time I spent preparing and delivering the session, and reflecting on the results. This, too, is work: gaining a little more understanding, changing the way we work just a little bit more, and sharing my experiences with others.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Thoughts from “Remote Presentations That Rock”, changing dynamics

One of the hidden gems in David Gillespie’s Digital Strangelove: or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Internet is a hat-tip to Compfight, a Flickr search engine. I like the search interface more than Flickr’s built-in Advanced Search, because you can continuously scroll through the thumbnails instead of paging through the results.

More Creative Commons search options would be nice. =)

What I really want is an advanced search engine that lets me specify subject position and dominant color, like Stockxpert’s. Someday!

Thanks to Suzanne for the link!

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Compfight: Search Flickr for CC-licensed images

I misplace things when I get distracted. I absentmindedly tuck things into bag pockets or place them on the nearest horizontal surface. I lose time looking for things, and my stress level goes up too. It’s usually my iPod Touch that gets forgotten when I need free hands, and I can’t ring it to find it. (I could barrage it with mail or calendar events, I suppose). At least I know that it’s at home. I’ve gotten better at looking behind me before I leave a place, and haven’t lost things outside the house in a while. Misplacing things remains my bane.

The best way to solve this is to have a place for everything, and everything in its place. I’m working on that. I’m getting better at hanging my work badge and my keys near the door, keeping my bicycle lock in my bag, and putting key items (emergency kit, wallet, notebook, pen, iPod, and phone) into a home-made purse organizer. Most of the time, that works. Sometimes, I forget and I put the iPod down somewhere. I’m getting better at retracing my steps, but that only takes me so far.

So here’s where I think my system failed this morning:

1. I hadn’t taken care of packing everything when I was alert and awake the night before. As a result, I forgot to keep track of the iPod when I was shuffling various gadgets around and shining my shoes in my half-zombie state.
2. I needed free hands, and I didn’t have a roomy pocket to put the iPod into. I refer to the iPod a lot around the house (tracking how I spend my time, looking up websites, checking my task list), but I occasionally need two free hands, so I end up putting things down. Most of the time, I slow down and fix the location in my head, repeating it while I do the other task. When I’m sleepy or distracted, I sometimes forget to pay attention to that.
3. I tend to tuck things into bag pockets. I distinctly remember tucking my phone into a bag pocket (and finding it again), but I wasn’t sure if I’d tucked the iPod into a hidden compartment of my bag. (I’d misplaced my wireless mouse for a week or two that way.)

How can I work on getting better at keeping track of small things like my iPod?

1. I can simplify my morning routine even further. Ten minutes of preparation the night before is more valuable than ten minutes of zombie time in the morning.
2. I can try using a belt bag or half-apron at home, to corral things like that. This is also good for carrying things from room to room, when tidying up. Project time!
3. I can make sure I have a place for everything that commonly gets moved between bags, which means sticking to the purse organizer.
4. Maybe visually and verbally fixing the locations (repeating to myself, “I’m putting the iPod down on the kitchen table”?) will let me use other forms of memory, too. That might sound weird, though.
5. I can also slow down and pay more attention to each moment when I’m at the most risk of being absent-minded, such as early in the morning. It really wouldn’t have taken me a lot of time to walk to the One Place I should put something down on, and it would’ve saved me all that searching. This is probably the best way to do it, and it’s good for practising being present.

I’m sure I’ll find it later, and it’ll be a good excuse to tidy up.

Working on doing things better, one day at a time…

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Working on not misplacing things

Was it really only less than two years ago that I shifted from my venerable Planner-based wiki/blog to my Wordpress-powered one after experimenting with syndicating my entries into Wordpress?

I miss writing in wiki markup on Emacs and knowing that publishing would Just Work. I miss being able to dynamically expand entries from my address book in a way that automatically links to people’s blogs. (Or Twitter accounts, if I were going to do this now.) ScribeFire is a pain on my Eee (needs more horizontal screen space), and I have a hard time marking up the occasional bit of HTML in weblogger.el. Windows Live Writer is pretty slick (particularly with the SnagIt Screen Capture plugin and the Amazon Book Linker), but I can live without it. Or maybe I can resurrect that Wordpress Emacs client Ashish mentioned.

Let me think about the differences in experiences.

• I wanted to support comments, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time hacking on some custom commenting system. This was a big issue for me. I found some commenting scripts, but dealing with spam was a pain, so I switched to Wordpress. If I switched back to Emacs for my blog, I’d probably use something like Disqus to handle the conversation, and just find some way of backing up the comments regularly.
• I wanted to make it easy to navigate posts. I modified Planner to generate a more browsable blog index, but it’s still not as slick as what you’d see with Wordpress. On this Wordpress blog, I like offering people random blog posts (good for me too – great way to rediscover old posts and make serendipitous connections!), related posts, and posts on the same day. I can do posts on the same day in Planner with a custom hook, but the others would require some hacking. Also, Planner is very much day-based, while Wordpress lists N posts per page and has good category lists.
• I wanted to make it easy to edit posts. In my Emacs-based system, I published to RSS when I saved a note in the Remember window. I had a hack that made it possible to propagate changes from an already-published post to my Wordpress blog, but it wasn’t completely reliable.
• Scheduling posts is handy, too. I hadn’t gotten around to figuring out how to build a post scheduler for Emacs. I suppose if I wasn’t picky about the time it went out, I could simply write posts on different days and then publish notes conditionally, plus have some kind of hook to notice if any of the current page’s posts should be published in the RSS feed, plus some way to handle previous days, plus maybe a server-friendly way to do this for the times when I’m not going to be online every day. Right.

That said, I miss automatically sharing some details of what I’m working on (with details deleted before publishing so that they’re available offline), publicly crossing off tasks, and other cool things.

Planner’s model for task planning isn’t quite compatible with Org’s model, and I’ve been using Org + Toodledo more these days.

What am I really looking for here?

• A quick, reliable way to post from a text editor, so that I can do it from the Eee. Hmm, the WP Postie plugin will probably do the trick.
• Easy way to share/review tasks: Toodledo export of week’s tasks?
• And maybe a custom plugin for weekly displays, org agendas, that sort of thing.

Hmm….

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Thinking about Planner/EmacsWiki versus Wordpress

The best talent embodies the five core values and has the right combination of aptitude, skill, judgment, passion, and drive. Such people’s curiosity and openness to new experience are as important as their pedigree. They require deep understanding to garner respect, a sense of infectious excitement to rally the organization around them, and an almost compulsive drive to tinker. “What we always looked for were people who were born with soldering irons in their hands,” says Jon Rubinstein. “People with a passion for products, for the creation process, and for technology itself.” (p30-31)

Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy Judy Estrin, 2009

Among other reasons, I read business books in order to collect role models, finding descriptions that resonate with the kind of person I want to grow into.

Other quotes from the book are relevant to my work:

People who naturally play the role of knowledge connectors are critical when building relationships across communities, disciplines, or divisions, facilitating communication between disparate groups. The best connectors can quickly synthesize information across a broad range of topics, communicate well, and bring the right people together, while having no overriding agenda of their own. (p134)

We’re building a training program for connectors, and I’m learning a lot in the process.

For companies with advanced technology groups, it’s best to create networks of complete teams, as opposed to just offshoring a piece of the development. Companies that farm out all of their entry-level jobs or the production tasks that were traditionally allotted to junior employees may eventually discover that they have offshored their next generation of leaders. (p138)

I think it would be fantastic to have more global leaders, making sure we also don’t sacrifice the capabilities and leadership pipelines of the developed countries.

The book itself draws on an intimate knowledge of Silicon Valley, and provides a useful historical perspective on the changes.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Book: Closing the Innovation Gap

Plans from last week:

• Work
  • From plans:
    • Facilitate idea lab
    • Develop more training material. Slow going; have been working on Idea Lab things. 
    • Connect with people throughout the organization
  • Also:
    • Filled in more details for my personal business commitments review
    • Reviewed the report for a conference I helped organize
    • Did some SecondLife training for an upcoming
    • Did some awesome LotusScript + analytics hacking
    • Attended Dan Roam’s terrific Back of the Napkin teleconference at IBM
    • Renewed my social insurance number
    • Did some preliminary analysis of Idea Lab results
• Relationships
  • From plans:
    • Organize lunches with friends Two lunches planned for next week, semi-work-related
    • Practice reaching out to my network Sent e-mail updates out to some people based on conversations
  • Also:
    • Helped J- with her costume
    • Handed out candy for Halloween
    • Got a great e-mail from my mom regarding small dreams
• Life
  • From plans:
    • Finish my skirt Almost there. Pinning up a hem took ages!
    • Delegate flyer review and menu planning http://sachachua.com/delegator/c/sacha/grocery
    • Create a simple animation Bought a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch, looking forward to drawing at work
  • Also:
    • Got back into the swing of reading and blogging (yay routines)
    • Learned that I probably just need to get a business bank account if I want to do business under my own name
    • Turned up the intensity of my biking to make it more exercise-y, yay

Plans for next week:

• Work
  • Give talk on “Remote Presentations That Rock” (if you’re in IBM, ping me for details)
  • Get my visa application sorted out
  • Create community guide for training
  • Organize handouts for training
• Relationships
  • Tidy house and prepare lots of meals
  • Help make house routines even smoother
• Life
  • Finish my skirt and start on pants
  • Clean up the back yard
  • Wake up before 6 every day

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Weekly review: Week ending November 1, 2009

We headed out for taco salads and soup at the Easy Restaurant on King Street after our last class of improv comedy. My three classmates and the teacher were all deeply into the Toronto improv and sketch comedy scene. I was the lone non-comedian, and I got a fascinating glimpse into that world.

They talked about the awkwardness of telling non-comedians about your interests. When the conversation turns to what people do, they feel that people who are outside the comedy scene just don’t get it, saying: “Oh, you’re a comedian? Tell me a joke.” One of my classmates said that this was probably why practically all her friends are also in the comedy scene. I wonder if they also have problems with the echo chamber effect that we see online, when people end up talking only to people like them.

They talked about the challenges facing the Toronto comedy scene. There are lots of stand-up rooms in Toronto where people can practise their material, but attendance is hit-or-miss. If you liked a specific comedian, it was hard to find out when and where they’d perform next. Shows were better publicized, but individuals were hard to track. I asked them if it was a matter of marketing. To me, it seemed obvious: if you were starting out as a stand-up comedian or an improv comedy performer, why not make it easier for people to find out when you’d be performing next, and share your adventures along the way?

They reacted strongly against the idea of self-promotion. To them, the idea of an amateur having business cards, a website, or a Facebook fanpage smacked of pretentiousness. It was okay if you’d done a number of well-received shows, or had some kind of national profile. If you were just starting out, you needed to know your place.

I found that really interesting because we run into the same social norms against self-promotion in different business cultures, and it can get in the way of connecting.

I think people do want to keep an eye out for teams and people they like. Facebook’s use of “Fan” might turn people off, so they’d need a more neutral space that can keep track of teams, individuals, shows, and locations. It would be a natural fit for Facebook integration, calendar exports, RSS feeds, and mailing lists. You could probably build the whole thing using out-of-the-box Drupal and the Content Creation Kit. Data entry would have to be done manually for a while (listings from Now Toronto and from the major venues?), but it might eventually grow into something that people can update on their own.

I don’t see people paying to use a service like this, but it might be supported by advertising (and perhaps a share of ticket sales, if you have an e-commerce system tied into venues’ ticketing).

In terms of marketing, you’d probably approach venues that don’t have event lists, as well as teams and individuals. Teams and individuals would be your primary channel for marketing. You could also offer a badge for venues, teams, and individuals in order to advertise upcoming shows, and pre-designed flyers (like what Meetup now does), and provide webpages for people who don’t have their personal sites set up yet. Posters near established comedy venues would be good, too, and hand-outs given to people in line. Business cards might be interesting too.

A business idea for someone who’s really interested in the comedy scene, perhaps! =)

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Comedy and self-promotion

In our conversation last Wednesday, Lesley shared how social network analysis has helped her team and the other teams she works with. The analysis showed which people were connected to everyone else (and who could either be bottlenecks or brokers), and which people were outliers.

This network knowledge is typically not a surprise. Lesley told me how she had shown her team the unlabeled graph, and they guessed right away who corresponded to which nodes. But the graph is a good way to get the idea out there so that you can start discussing it and changing it. Do people on the periphery need to connect better? How can you lighten the load on the hubs? How do you help people eliminate middlemen and communicate more effectively?

Lesley shared some of the ways she has adapted to her informal role. When she helps people answer questions, she connects people so that they can talk to each other without needing to go through her all the time. She keeps as complete a mail archive as she can, because people ask her about projects she long since left. She helps her team members learn more about effective e-mail communication and other workplace skills.

Lesley's like many of the connectors that I meet within IBM. There are a lot of boundary-spanners who connect different parts of the organization (and different parts of their team, who need connecting as well!). They recognize the value of doing so, and other people do too. In fact, they often serve as the go-to people for others. They want to make their knowledge part of the organizational memory, but it's hard to capture.

I'm growing into one of those people, and I'd like to scale up even more. I'm one of an increasing number of Web 2.0 connectors who work as publicly as possible, sharing on our internal social networking platform. I want to build organizational memory in the process of doing actual work. I want to develop organizational connective tissue in the process of reaching out.

I document as much as I can of the work that I do, and I try to do it as close to action as possible. For example, one of my ideas helped us double our community sign-up rate, so I spent some time writing it up and sharing it with others. I could probably speed through my task list if I didn't balance doing with writing about it. But sharing deepens my understanding and gives me time to think about other "What if?"s. It helps other people work more effectively. It gives them something to build on, and I get to learn from the improvements that other people share. It helps me scale up connecting, too.

I suspect this sharing is the key reason why I can help connect the dots even as a relatively new employee. Experienced connectors tell me of the trust and the relationships they've built from decades of project work in different countries. I don't have that yet, but blogs and public speaking do interesting things in terms of connections. It'll be interesting to see where we can take this, and what other people can do with these ideas.

I'm passionately curious about how connectors can be even more effective, and I think that social tools can make a huge difference.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Connecting in a large organization

Our neighbors are really, really into Halloween. This is their front yard. They just loved scaring the heck out of the trick-or-treaters, and they did it quite effectively by jumping at them when the kids least expected it. Young kids they generally left alone (or apologized to after the kids started crying from fright), but any teenagers trick-or-treating were fair game. <laugh>

We gave them permission to decorate our front yard as well. Here’s one of the props they added:

In Canada, even the zombie babies need to keep their ears warm.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Halloween

We shop according to what’s on sale at the supermarket so that we can stock up on staples and fill our freezer. =)

Here are the sales for the week:

Metro

• Extra lean ground beef, $2.99/lb – lasagna
• Clementines, $4.99

No Frills – 1/2 price event

• Chicken breast (skinless, bone-in club pack), $1.87/lb – Chicken Maryland

Loblaws – $1, $2, $3

• Italpasta, $1
• Chicken drumsticks or thighs, $2/lb – curry
• Lean ground beef, $2.99/lb – lasagna (see Metro)
• Marc Angelo dinner sausage, $2.99 – pasta
• Clementines, $4.99/lb (same as Metro)
• Schneiders Lunchmate Stackers, $2

Sobeys

• Lean ground beef, $1.99/lb – lasagna (see Loblaws and Metro)
• Maple Leaf bacon $2.99
• Live mussels $3.99 – mussels marinara

Price Chopper, $1 sale

• Campbell’s soup: chunky / ready to enjoy, $1
• 5kglb bag of carrots or onions $1

So it looks like we’re going to do lasagna today, and Chicken Maryland and lots of curry tomorrow, plus restocking Campbells. That means passing by Loblaws and picking up everything from there on my way back from improv, assuming that their price for chicken breasts isn’t exorbitant. And if it is, we’ll just cook something else. =)

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Grocery round-up: Toronto

J-'s social studies lesson included two flowcharts. W- asked if the flowcharts had diamonds indicating conditionals. Apparently not, so we seized the Teachable Moment and started teaching J- (she's 11) about flowcharts and logic.

In related news, decision trees and flowcharts are awesome when they involve cats. Will sketch some when I get my new tablet.

(In quite tangential news, I'm thinking of picking up the Wacom Bamboo pen and multitouch tablet. It'd be way cool if I can figure out how to use it for presentations. Maybe next next year, I'll save up for a proper tablet PC.)

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Flowcharts and drawing

As a foreigner working in Canada, I have to deal with lots of paperwork. The three documents I stress out about the most (and therefore remember to renew) are my work permit, my passport, and my temporary resident visa. Without a valid work permit, I’d be an illegal alien. Without my passport, I can’t travel. Without my visa, I can’t come back into the country.

Ah, paperwork.

Because there are big consequences if I don’t get things like that sorted out (possibly getting kicked out of the country? having to answer yes to awkward questions on future visa applications? getting stuck on the wrong side of the immigration counter?), I haven’t needed long-term reminders.

Renewing my social insurance number, which I really only dig up during tax time and when opening new accounts? That apparently gets me every time. This is the second time I’ve pulled out my SIN card and realized it had expired.

So here’s a checklist for other folks on work permits, if you ever need to renew your passport:

1. Renew your work permit, which was probably issued with the same validity as your old passport.
2. Renew your social insurance number record, which was probably issued with the same validity as your work permit. The process is very fast, but you’ll need your passport and your work permit.
3. Renew your temporary resident visa. This involves sending your passport in the mail, and you should do it after #2 to avoid the wait.

Something like this happens when my task management system fails. I’m getting better at not letting things fall through the cracks, so little failures like this are instructive. I much prefer testing my task management now rather than later, when it might Really Matter.

So, where had it failed?

1. When I received my previous SIN card, I didn’t make a long-term reminder. I briefly mentioned it on my blog before I renewed my work permit, but (a) I didn’t create a WAITING-FOR task, and (b) I didn’t stop and think about it when I received the card. Either action would’ve caught this, although a good WAITING-FOR system is better. I didn’t have an electronic task in Toodledo, which I’ve gone back to using for my day-to-day tasks. (Emacs stores my long-term goals, and I fill Toodledo tasks in based on that.) I didn’t store anything in my then-not-yet-set-up tickler file. This lack of task recognition was the key point of failure. Action: Record WAITING tasks and add them to my weekly review.
2. I didn’t have one place to put my SIN card. I checked three places and two folders (Employment, Identification) for my card. I found a SIN card in the first place I checked (one of my drawers), but because it had expired and I remembered being in this situation before, I thought I must have another SIN card. Also, the drawer was the wrong place to put it – I should’ve moved it to the Identification folder when I set up my filing system. ACTION: Tidy up this weekend and file things that are out of place. 
3. I didn’t have a good action log. Back when I published my full task list, I could easily find out when I last renewed my SIN. I thought I’d renewed it later than that, but apparently I didn’t. So my confusion resulted in maybe five minutes of looking around for a possibly newer SIN card, just in case I happened to have two. Although I suspected that I turned in my expired SIN card during the renewal, it was good to check anyway. ACTION: Get back to posting my task list. I do something like that in my weekly review, but it might not be granular enough.

Slowly figuring things out!

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Learning from failure

Here are some of my favourite presentation books:

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Garr Reynolds

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations Nancy Duarte

Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action Nick Morgan

The How of WOW: A Guide to Giving a Speech That Will Positively Blow 'Em Away Tony Carlson

Rainmaking Presentations: How to Grow Your Business by Leveraging Your Expertise Joseph Sommerville

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

The “Remote Presentations That Rock” reading list

Inspired by Dan Roam’s annotated-in-real-time presentation, I picked up a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch drawing tablet for portable use. I’ve got an upcoming talk (“Remote Presentations That Rock”) and I’ll need to deliver it from 3600 because of other appointments, so I can’t use my ever-so-wonderful Cintiq 12WX. I decided to spring for the multitouch tablet because I thought the extra buttons and multi-touch gestures would help me work as smoothly as I work on the Cintiq.

After some driver hassles, I got the new tablet working with drivers downloaded from Wacom’s website. The multitouch works better than expected, and I’ve been using it to scroll through webpages in Firefox. Zooming in and out worked with Inkscape, as does scrolling vertically, but scrolling horizontally or rotating don’t work.

I’m still getting used to looking at one surface while drawing on another, but that’s something I can pick up with practice.

Although a tablet PC would probably be an even more efficient way to handle all of this, I think my decision to explore the in-between steps was good. This way, I can add drawing capabilities to any of the computers.

Looking forward to sharing my experiences with you!

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

New Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch!

What do you do during boring teleconference calls?

Redesign other people's presentations, if you're Lesley. That's how she keeps herself interested in a call. She corrects typos, makes fonts and colours more readable, adds diagrams and animation, and generally experiments with how to make presentations better. She often sends the presentation to the original speakers so that they can take advantage of her work.

Want to try that during your next call?

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

What to do during boring teleconference calls

It's a small world, particularly for those who work to make it smaller.

I helped organize a two-day brainstorming conversation across the organization. One of the participants recognized my name from conversations with his other mentors. He reached out through e-mail and told me how my name had also come up in a conversation with Jeff Muzzerall, the assistant director of the career center for the Rotman School of Management. He wanted to know how I met Jeff.

I told her that it's a good story. In fact, I was surprised that I couldn't find a blog post about it in my archives. Perhaps I hadn't gotten around to telling that story yet. But it's a good story about stepping forward, so I'll tell it now.

It was September 30, 2008. Daniel Pink was about to give a talk on "The Adventures on Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need." I arrived early and took the front-center seat (best seats in the house!). I like watching speakers' pre-talk rituals; I learn a lot from them. I also like seeing if I can sneak myself into get-togethers with speakers. (It worked once, and that means it might work again!)

Daniel Pink was talking to the organizer. As I was conveniently standing around near the front (it's funny how that works), I heard how the organizer was interested in helping his MBA students prepare for the real world. I volunteered to send a link to Garr Reynolds' (Presentation Zen) excellent visual summary of Daniel Pink's talk. So that's how I got to meet Jeff Muzzerall.

Lesson: Sit up front, and look for ways to give value.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

How I met Jeff Muzzerall

On the way home from work yesterday, I realized that big dreams and small dreams can co-exist.

I've struggled with that idea for a while. Ever since grade school, people have told me that I have great potential. I distinguished myself early through programming, went to a high school for geeks, and continued to do pretty cool things in university. Once I'd gotten past class essays, I discovered the joy of writing and presenting.

Big dreams were easy for me to find. My parents often reminded me that to whom much is given, much is expected. Whether I was focusing on open source, computer science education, or even something as esoteric as Emacs, I could find the big picture and see the difference I wanted to make.

Big dreams have their own tyrannies. I heard stories of younger people doing more incredible things, and I felt that I had been wasting time. I read studies of women in the workplace, and I worried that having relationships or raising a family would stop me from being able to do what I want to do. (The numbers are pretty scary.) Choices felt like compromises in a zero-sum game. Time spent doing one thing could not be spent building skills in another.

Something changed, and I'm starting to figure out how to express it.

Yesterday, I realized that big dreams and small dreams can co-exist. I have big dreams that require decades, such as helping build truly global organizations. And I have dreams about the minutiae of everyday.

I used to feel embarrassed by my small dreams. I'm slowly giving myself permission to admit that yes, I do want to know the pleasures of harvesting from a garden. I want to know what it's like to build a small business–not a billion-dollar one, just something that teaches me how to take business risks and create value. And who knows, maybe someday we might raise a family. (The preview I have from watching W- raise J- is pretty encouraging.)

The previous paragraph still feels a little odd. I half-expect my parents to chime in here and tell me it's too early to think about these things, or coworkers to shush me because confessing interests outside the workplace may hurt my chances of promotion, or former teachers who might say, "I can't believe you're settling down! You could do so much more than this."

But small dreams are also okay. It's good for me to know that I have them, and for me to nurture them just as I do my big dreams.

It's good to talk about them, too. We hide our small dreams because we think they make us small. We fear they'll limit our big dreams. As a result, we miss out on the kinship of small dreams and the joy of everyday things.

So what triggered this epiphany that big dreams and small dreams can co-exist?

Yesterday, one of my little experiments at work started paying off. A small program I'd written helped me learn a lot more about helping communities connect. I realized that even where I am right now–a recent hire, a relative beginner–I can help make my big dreams happen. More than that, I realized that my big dreams are amazingly flexible. To follow my big dreams, I don't need to wait for the right job title, salary, or situation. I can contribute from right here. I can work with others. I can start from scratch if I need to.

That realization is incredibly liberating, because it means that I don't have to worry about falling short of my potential as long as I do my best with each step.

It seems that the key fear people have about life decisions is that if they make the wrong one, they can fall off the fast track. Promotion in organizations is like a tournament where losses have far more impact than you might guess. People re-entering the workforce after an extended break can be at a significant disadvantage compared to people who have stayed in. Even backing the wrong project or the wrong leader can scuttle one's hopes.

But if my success isn't determined by external factors such as position, pay, or prestige, then possibilities open up. I was successful yesterday because I had helped make things better. I can be successful again and again. The better I get at understanding success, the better I'll be at creating opportunities for myself and others.

That ability to create opportunities for my big dreams means that I can explore my small dreams without worrying that I'll mess up my life. =) Based on my experiences so far, I can follow my intuition and my curiosity, trusting that the different threads of my life will come together in surprisingly useful ways. Having small dreams doesn't mean I care less about my big ones. The small dreams round me out, coax me to grow, and give me a kaleidoscope of raw material that will help me help make my big dreams happen.

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Big dreams and small dreams can coexist