Learning Leader

The Psychic Noise of Risk

2009-12-14T12:14:28+00:00

... how I stopped worrying and learned to love risk management ...

As regular readers of the blog will know, I am an admirer of David Allen's work, particularly his Getting Things Done book.

Mr Allen takes a lists-based approach to personal management. I was introduced to mind mapping first, so I was a little snooty about lists, regarding them as a fairly primitive form of making notes. However, I now realise that's silly: mind maps themselves can be radial lists.

However, one phrase gripped me in David Allen's approach where he describes all the uncaptured things we need to do seem to swim around in our heads as "psychic noise", distracting us from being able to focus upon the matter in hand, or what is most important at any given time. "Yes," I thought, "this noise needs to get out of my head and onto paper so that I can have confidence that I will come back to it at a later, more appropriate time." Thus with the item 'parked' on an appropriate list or mind map, I can then focus on the immediate matter in hand.

Continuing the theme in my last post, risk, there is a similar dynamic when it comes to the value of identifying risk. Whatever we may be planning, there will be uncertain threats and opportunities. Simply naming these and working out appropriate responses become enormously 'uncluttering' mentally, as we go about our business planning.

OGC have now built this into their best management practice in projects (PRINCE2), programmes (MSP) and at all levels of the business (M_o_R). It is now standard practice in every business case to list the major risks and factor in the costs of sensible responses to them.

As I practice this more myself in pearcemayfield, I can say this works. I notice that the 'psychic noise' in my head is reducing.

What's the Risk?

2009-12-12T10:56:21+00:00

We travelled to Brighton yesterday, mainly in an unsuccessful attempt to see our gradchildren. It was unsuccessful in that they have both fallen ill with 'Swine Flu'. We didn't go in, lest we get the same; so we traded presents on the doorstep with my son and daughter-in-law. We came away with an endearing orange splodge of painting from our three-year-old granddaughter which she'd created, it seems, "on Tamiflu".

But what was the risk to us really? I thought on this on the journey home. Over the last few months, adjusting for the always-sensationalist bias in the media, it seems that the risk of my probably getting Swine Flu and the impact of it on me if I did contract it have changed markedly. (In fact, some studies suggest that someone of my age and condition may have already had the disease without being aware of it.) And of course, the popular understanding of the word 'pandemic' is an unfairly alarmist one.

But this is all 'par for the course' with Risk. Our assessment of any risk can and should change. Sometimes how probable it is that the risk will occur goes up, sometimes it goes down. Sometimes its impact is considered to be greater, and sometimes the considered impact seems a lot less harmful. With risk this is all quite normal.

Once at a Leadership conference, I heard Bono say this in the context of the Aids pandemic and the apparently hopelessness of changing things:

Life is more malleable than you think, and we must wrest it from the fools.

This is quite profoundly true. Which is why a mature and dynamic approach to risk is so powerful.

Recently we launched our own Management of Risk qualification training. This really does give a positive framework and mindset for people to deal with the malleable reality of risk.

So maybe we should have just gone in and hugged our grandchildren. It's time for a reassessment.

Wii Playback

2009-12-11T11:15:25+00:00

This morning, after completing my gruelling exercise regime on my Wii using EA Sports Active, I noticed that I could now download a version of the BBC iPlayer to my Wii.

Now this has the added value to iPlayer functionality of being able to watch missed programmes in the comfort of the Lounge on a TV, rather than on a PC.

So I did this there and then ... for free.

For an ageing baby boomer like me, this is cutting edge stuff. Now I'm just hoping the other main Freeview TV broadcasters follow suit.

'Tis the Season for Giving

2009-12-10T17:07:28+00:00

Below you will see me presenting a giant cheque this morning to Shirley Latimer, Deputy Manager (Shirley is in centre flanked by her colleagues) at our local Helen & Douglas House Charity shop.

I've never done this cheque presenting thing before, and to be honest it felt a bit awkward ... expecially since I always try to follow Jesus' teaching that when you give, you do it in secret (Matthew 6:1-4), not ostentatiously.

But my colleagues ganged up on me again, and said it was for the good of Helen & Douglas House and, let's admit it, pearcemayfield. It's part of a policy we have adopted over the last few years of donating to charity instead of sending out Christmas cards to clients, partners and friends.

I'm really pleased we chose Helen & Douglas House this year. They do a tremendous work providing terminal and respite care for children, young people and their families. Children can stay at Helen House and young adults can stay at Douglas House, along with their families, for short periods of time for rest and recuperation, treatment of distressing symptoms, end of life care and support.

Please visit their website. Better still, make a donation to their fantastic work ... only maybe in a little less showy way than I did!

Extreme Management

2009-11-28T17:15:55+00:00

We have extreme sports, where people take a sport and push it to the limits for the sake of a 'rush'. I remember seeing a group of hang-gliders launching off the top of Mount Kilimanjaro once. There was a basic skill - flying a hang glider - pushed to extremes by the situation.

Something similar can take place with basic management skills, skills like delegation and meetings management. These are so basic that they are assumed skills. But put managers into extreme situations, then these skills are often found to be pretty weak.

Consider a project. with all the challenges required to manage a cross-functional group of strangers working together sometimes on a one-time-only basis. This is an extreme management situation even thoygh 'project' may be quite a normal mode of execution. Strength in basic management skills such as delegation and meetings management are crucial here. And yet they so often fail.

In the PRINCE2 project management method, management by exception is one of the key principles. It presupposes the ability of senior managers to delegate effectively. When that fails, the principle is not lived and the project itself is likely to flounder.

This week I was with a client where there was a distinct absence of any evidence that senior management could delegate well. In ordinary operational circumstances this would not have been exposed quite so vividly, but here it neutralised the effectiveness of a good project manager. A project requires good delegation skills. To some it can seem like extreme management.

Traffic in India: a self-organising system

2009-11-23T12:45:19+00:00

What happens when:

Everyone disobeys the formal 'rules'?
Everyone observes consistent values?

Answer: you get an unlikely emergent property.

I've just come back from a trip to India, where I was delivering a P3O course to a very agreeable and able group of consultants. (All passed with flying colours.) Since this was my first trip to this fantastic country I was, like most westerners, fascinated by the etiquette in the apparent chaos of traffic. It looks dangerous - and it probably is by our standards - but it seems to work. (See video below.)

'Respect' is a high value in India. Also, there is a pecking order, my driver told me:

Lorries and buses
Cars
Rickshaws
Motorcycles
Pedestrians

There is a sort of precedence according your vehicle 'caste'.

Emergence and emergent property are concepts we try to illustrate in our changement management training. Now I have an excellent example from first hand experience.

Bubble trouble on our web site

2009-11-04T16:12:04+00:00

Recently we began work on restructuring our course catalogue on our website. Part of this was to design a revised graphic navigation for the courses page. Using our mind map approach we publish the diagram shown here, where the use can click on the arrow in each branch bubble and get the list of course hyperlinks to that page.

This morning at our management team meeting we received comments from the office team that the writing in the bubbles was crude and fuzzy; they didn't like it.

We listen carefully to our colleagues, but they are not the most important group - you are. Do let me know what you views of this are by leaving a comment below. I'd really appreciate that.

How to do almost anything with Posterousl

2009-10-28T16:47:08+00:00

How to do almost anything with Posterous

23 comments
By Martin Bryant on August 13, 2009

Online sharing and blogging service Posterous has been getting a lot of attention recently. The development team is adding features regularly and it’s fast becoming the best way to share content with all your different social services while also keeping it all in one place too. The best bit is you can do it all via email.

With so many ways to use Posterous it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Here we’ll take you through everything you need to know about it and suggest a range of ways you can use it to make your online life easier.

The basics

Creating an account

Setting up your own Posterous blog is simple. There are no forms to fill in; you simply send an email to post@posterous.com. Whatever you put in this email becomes the first post for your new blog.

Once the email’s sent, a Posterous blog is set up for you and you’ll get an email straight back inviting you to create an account. This is completely optional; if you don’t create an account anything you send to Posterous from your email address will still be posted to your blog without you ever having to visit the admin panel.

There are advantages to creating an account though – if you want to choose a custom URL and site name you’ll have to go for it. What’s more, most of the features listed below are only available if you have an account. It’s free, so you’ve nothing to lose.

Preparing your posts

There are four ways to post content to Posterous. There’s a blog-style WYSIWYG editor on the site and you can send messages via SMS from your mobile phone, but the two most powerful ways are via email and via the Posterous Bookmarklet.

Via Email: When posting via email, the Subject line is the post’s title and any text or attached files also become part of the post, either embedded or as a download. The way Posterous handles media is seriously impressive. Images will display in the post, for example, while MP3s and videos are playable directly in the page. Even other files, such as PDFs and Word documents, are viewable directly from your blog. It will embed Google Maps as well – just paste the URL into your post.

Posterous accepts any formatting you’ve added to your email. Bold text is bold, links work perfectly and everything looks just as you intended. If you want more control, logging into your account gives you access to a traditional blog text editor with all the tools you’d expect at your fingertips.

You can add tags to posts by adding them to the Subject line in the format ((tag: The Next Web, guide, Posterous)).

Via the Bookmarklet: Alternatively, there’s the Posterous Bookmarklet. This sits in your browser’s bookmarks bar and allows you to select any text, video, music or photos you like from any web page and post it instantly.

Making Posterous work for you

Here are a few ideas for getting the most out of Posterous.

Use it as a blog

If you don’t need the plugins and customisation options of a mature blogging platform like Wordpress, Posterous can easily act as your blog. Being able to easily publish posts with rich media via email from anywhere makes it simple to run a blog without worrying about the admin side of blogging. You can even run it as a multi-author blog by allowing other people’s email addresses to be able to post to your account

If you want to move your existing blog to Posterous, that’s easy too. There’s a simple import option to get all your existing posts ported over. If you already have a domain name, that can be set to point at your Posterous account.

Use it to update your existing blog

If you can’t bring yourself to give up your existing blog, that’s okay. You can use Posterous to easily email posts in to your other blogs. All major blogging platforms are supported.

Use it to post anything almost anywhere

Beyond its easy blogging features, Posterous’ big selling point is that it can share anything via email to a wide range of services. Setting up the services you want to post to is a simple case of entering appropriate details on the Autopost page. Then, by simply sending a photo (for example) to post@posterous.com, or selecting it from a webpage via the Bookmarklet, it could be sent to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and FriendFeed simultaneously, as well as to your Posterous blog. Any tags you added to your post would be picked up by services like Flickr too.

With Autopost to Twitter enabled, it’s easy to use Posterous as an alternative to Twitpic. Many desktop Twitter clients, including Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop, support posting images via Posterous with the added benefit of them going wherever else you’re set up to autopost to.

Of course, sometimes you might only want to post something to one service instead of many. An video might be worth tweeting about but you might not want it on your Youtube account. To handle this, the Bookmarklet has the option to exclude services, while you can specify services you wish to post to via email using different email addresses.

To only post to Twitter, you’d use twitter@posterous.com, for example. To send to a number, but not all, of your services you can use the format twitter+youtube+vimeo@posterous.com to just send to those services. If you have a number of similar accounts, but only want to post to one, that’s covered too. If you have three different blogs but only want to post a picture of a swan to the one called ‘Birdwatching’, you could do that by emailing #birdwatching@posterous.com

To send the picture to only the Birdwatching blog and your Flickr account, you’d use flickr+#birdwatching@posterous.com

Use it to work as a group in private

By setting your Posterous blog as Private and allowing colleagues to post to it, you can use it as a private working environment. Co-workers can use it to email in ideas, images, audio and video for their colleagues to access anywhere and work with. With email subscriptions available, each post can be received by every member of the group without them ever having to log in.

Use it as a podcasting platform

Podcasts can often be difficult to set up. Finding the right host for your audio and uploading each podcast can take a lot of valuable time. With Posterous it’s possible to subscribe to any users’ RSS feed within Apple iTunes. Any audio files you post are then made available as downloadable podcasts.

It can’t get much easier than recording your podcast and sending it as an email attachment. It’s almost certainly the easiest way there is to dip your toe in the world of publishing audio online. The URL you need to subscribe to in iTunes is itpc://YOURUSERNAME.posterous.com/rss

Use it as a ‘Web Scrapbook’

The Bookmarklet makes it really easy to keep a record of things you like from around the web in one place. For example, graphic designers could keep examples of others’ work on their blog (either publicly or privately) as inspiration for the future. Researchers could keep useful articles all in one place. The ability to crosspost these clippings to your Delicious bookmarks adds even more value to this idea.

Keep track of who’s visiting your Posterous blog

Google Analytics is fully supported by Posterous. Just set up a Google Analytics account then head to your account’s set up page to get started.

Conclusion

Posterous is a flexible tool that is developing fast. Customisations via themes and premium features for those willing to pay are among the improvements planned for the future.

This post has given you some of the best examples of what can be achieved with Posterous. Have we missed anything? Are you using it in an innovative way? Let us know by leaving a comment.

You might also be interested in:

Posterous adds autoposting to Picasa, Vimeo, Delicious, Friendfeed, YouTube and more.
How to drive traffic to your own site, social networks and climb up Google rankings with ONE bookmarklet
Posterous’ new iPhone app could make citizen journalism and lifestreaming the norm

Tags: blogging, How to, posterous

--> Martin Bryant Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city's monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he is Digital Content Editor for Marketing Manchester. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Blog, FriendFeed

via thenextweb.com

My sons, Antony (in this blog- http://www.antonymayfield.com/2009/10/03/the-powerful-presence-popping-potential-of-posterous/) Robin, are both adopters of posterous.

Posted via web from Patrick's posterous

Good Change: Relentless or Rhythmical?

2009-10-19T12:50:50+01:00

As a continue to read (and value) John Kotter's latest book, A Sense of Urgency, there is a growing dis-ease that I must set out here. As I noted in an earlier post, Kotter makes a distinction between a true sense of urgency with a false sense of urgency and with complacency. But he goes on to describe this desired state a permanent dynamic:

'It is often believed that people cannot maintain a high sense of urgency over a prolonged period of time, without burnout. Yet with all the alertness, initiative and speed, true urgency doesn't produce dangerous levels of stress, at lest partially because it motivates people to relentlessly look for ways to rid themselves of chores that add little value to their organizations but clog their calendars and slow down needed action. People who are determined to move and win, now, simply do not waste time or add stress by engaging in irrelevant or business-as-usual activities.' (p.9)'

Professor Kotter, you anticipate my objection. It reminds me of another quote, this time from Tom Watson, Founder of IBM:

"IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would like when it was finally done. You might say that I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision - was in place.

“The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason that IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture in place of how IBM would look when the dream was in place, and how such a company would have to act, I then realised that unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realised that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day, we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and at the start of the following day, we set out to make up the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn't do business at IBM, we built one."

But I am still sceptical about living this level of urgency as a business lifestyle. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal , and Dr Jack Groppel in The Corporate Athlete: How to Achieve Maximal Performance in Business and Life , have brought research on improving athletic performance to the business arena. All human systems operate on a stress and recovery cycle. What Loehr, Groppel, et al.
have shown is that by introducing proper, regular disciplines ('rituals') that slightly stress more but allow a rhythm of recovery, individual performance can improve in measurable terms by as much as 20%.

Now, if this is true for individuals, could this also hold true for teams and organisations? I think there may be some carry-through into project or organisational performance. Indeed, I have come across organisations where there have been deliberate practices of planning shorter, high-stress project life cycle bursts, but then following that with a step-down into useful, but restorative recovery patterns of work.

As a Christian I draw on the Jewish tradition of Shabbat ('Sabbath') as one of my spiritual disciplines (rituals), and I can testify to the restorative nature of this practice. Among other things, it breaks the 'Tyranny of the Urgent', as Charles Hummel called it, and helps me to get my head above the weeds and remember what is truly important. It's more than a mere cliche to say that life is a marathon and not a sprint.

So, yes, working on truly urgent/important work as a tempo is energising, but I suspect it is even more productive when it is not chronic, but mixed with cycles of recovery.

A False Sense of Urgency

2009-10-16T16:07:13+01:00

I’m enjoying John Kotter’s latest book, ‘A Sense of Urgency’. For those who know Kotter’s work and his 8-step change model, they will recognise this as the first step in his model.

Kotter suggests that a lot of change initiatives fail at this first step: either the sense of urgency is not high enough, or complacency has not been reduced. Immediately I began to think in terms of Lewin’s force field analysis (see
diagram).

However, he goes further and explores the idea of a false sense of urgency: frenetic activity that is unfocussed and unaligned with strategic issues. I recognise this. I’ve seen this. To my shame, I’ve done this.

In recent years we have seen the rise of portfolio management, and responses to supporting this has been a Portfolio Office as part, perhaps, of a P3O system of support and assurance. One of the keys to practising effective management of a change portfolio is strategic alignment: making sure all the projects and programmes tell, contribute to the war effort as expressed in the organisation’s strategy. If they don’t it simply produces a lot of motion without movement, a lot of busyness without any real and lasting benefit.

I was schooled in Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where in the Habit 'Put First Things First', Covey develops a strong distinction between the 'Urgent' and the 'Important', arguing that many confuse the two. In the 7 Habits analysis we engage with two types of 'Urgent': the non-Important (perhaps other people's important) and the Important Urgent. It seems to me that what John Kotter is describing a false sense of urgency is, in Covey's terms, the Unimportant Urgent, but almost at an organisational level.

So who defines what is 'important' within the organisation. Leaders do. This is a fundamental job of leadership. Leaders clarify meaning, explain what is important to everyone they seek to influence.

I’m getting too old for aimless thrashing about. Now I need to use my energy and the energy of the organisation as a whole wisely. As a leader, I need to make it tell. So I appreciate Kotter's analysis of a false sense of urgency and how to identify the real thing.

I’ll write more on this book shortly.