Open Space eBook

This morning I read “Living Peace: the open space of our lives.” edited by Raffi Aftandelian.

This eBook is Raffi’s attempt to look at the question: what have we as Open Space Technology facilitators learned about living in Open Space? It’s a wonderful collection of heart-felt anecdotes and honest reflections of OS practitioners from around the world. In typical open space style - he has trusted the resources of the group (contributors) to get the work done in the time and space available.

In terms of presentation and style it chops and changes from narrative form to poems, to lengthy reflections on practice, to the short missive. But that adds to the sense of the emergent nature of the editorial process and trusting that whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

What strikes me most about the book is the extent to which practitioners are really ‘living open space’, rather than simply using it as a facilitating tool. The more I learn about facilitation the more I realise that it is yourself that you must facilitate first.

Sincerest thanks to Raffi and to all of the contributors.

You can now download the e-book here.

[ 0 comments ] [permalink] [ books - facilitation ]

Forget Bullet Points - Tell Stories

Convincing people of the power of narrative and encouraging them to tell stories rather than use bullet points in their presentations is often quite difficult. Trust me, it’s harder than it sounds.

In a podcast interview with Elliott Masie, Dan Pink gives a great example that shows it is quite natural and makes perfect sense: When you come home from work and are asked “… how was your day?”, do you get out a series of power points? No. You narrate!

[ 0 comments ] [permalink] [ business - creativity ]

Do you love your work?

If you were to hazard a guess, what percentage of people do you think truly love what they are currently doing at work? I’m not sure where the statistics come from, but according to Steve Denning …

It’s a miserable 6%! That means 94% of people are in various stages of disinterest, disillusion or despair as to how they are spending most of their waking time on this planet.

[ 1 comment ] [permalink] [ business - entrepreneurship - quotes ]

Embracing Procrastination

Apparently, in Ancient Egyptian there are two hieroglyphs that effectively translate to ‘procrastinate’.

The first translates to mean: “laziness in completing a task“, which is how most of us typically use the term today. The second–more interestingly–means something like: “the useful habit of avoiding unecessary work and effort“.

Procrastination a useful habit? On the surface, that seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. But having thought about it further, procrastination can also be seen as a valid form of reduction, leaving you with things:

• that need to be done;
• that you want to do; and
• that others will help you complete (or partially complete).

In other words, a bit of procrastination saves your energy for the vital things!

Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it for the moment. I’m going to embrace it, rather than force myself to do things I’m not really up for.

[ 2 comments ] [permalink] [ productivity ]

Enterprise 2.0 and Employee Engagement

I was at Michael Specht’s unconference session at PubCamp last night. He’s right, unfortunately, the conversation was dominated by too few. But I’m glad he’s written a summary. I was particularly interested in some of the statistics quoted from the Watson & Wyatt research report:

A further 2007/2008 Watson & Wyatt research report on communication best practices found that organisations with a “most effective” communication programs provided a 91% total return to shareholders from 2002-2006 compared to 62% for least effective. Improved communication effectiveness is associated with a 15.7% increase in market value. While finally organisations with “most effective” communication had an employee engagement level 4 times that of “least effective”.

I agree with Michael’s argument that communication & customer focus are areas that Enterprise 2.0 can help. But I’m concerned that these discussions always seem to focus on technology being the answer — the silver bullet — to solving organisational problems. I’m not saying that it doesn’t play a role, but I believe that Enterprise 2.0 is more about creating a culture of participation and collaboration. Technology can be an enabler of that, but on it’s own, it’s not going to work.

There are plenty of things we can do in organisations to improve employee engagement without getting embroiled in debates about whether or not people could or should access social tools inside/outside the firewall. Here’s an idea: why not encourage people to walk from their desks and actually talk to someone (yes, a real human) instead of sending an email? Why not arrange a brown bag session and invite some like-minded folks to join you? How about some well facilitated meetings to help people have conversations and learn how to collaborate?

There are many, many small things you can do that will make a big difference. I’ll use an example from last night (although this does relate to technology). Someone — I think it might have been Alison Young — decided that it would be a good idea to write her twitter handle on her name tag. And everyone followed suit. This led to some interesting connections and conversations. Simple idea - big impact. Be a positive deviant (shout-out to Matt Moore for this link).

What other simple things like this could you do in your workplace that might make a huge difference? Oh — and borrowing an idea from the 2020 summit — make sure some of your ideas have a no cost option - they’re a much easier sell!

[ 1 comment ] [permalink] [ business - events ]