Stories in the Workplace
September 30, 2008My friend Gillian is hosting one of the world’s top storytellers and teachers of the art of storytelling, Ashley Ramsden. Ashley is the founding director of the School of Storytelling, the longest established centre of its kind in the United Kingdom and co-founder of Storytelling in Organisations, a pioneering consultancy in the application of story in leadership and change management.
Ashley will be in Melbourne in November for performances and a one-off workshop on the skillful use of stories in the workplace. The ‘Stories in the Workplace‘ workshop will be on Monday, 17th November 2008 at the Abbotsford Convent. This is a fantastic opportunity if you’re interested in the use of narrative and storytelling in organisations. You’ll need to book promptly as places are strictly limited.
For further details and booking procedure contact Gillian directly.
Looking at Online Discussion Forums
September 28, 2008I haven’t spend a lot of time in online discussion forums. As I mentioned at the start the Facilitating Online Communities course, I find it difficult to follow threaded conversations online. I find them too volumous and over-bearing. I’ve also avoided them because I sense (and based on second-hand anecdotes), that there is quite a bit of postulating and oneupmanship. Perhaps a result of poor facilitation? Nevertheless, it is off-putting. I don’t have the desire to become embroiled in meaningless debates and arguments over semantics.
One of the lists I do subscribe to is the Australasian Facilitators Network discussion forum. The current archive is only available to the list members, although membership and the ’structure’ of the ”organisation’ is loose and informal.
The list is, in my opinion, brilliantly moderated by Bob Dick. He is a very good communicator – clear and concise; provides very good instructions on list management issues; and is mostly invisible as a faciliator, but very diplomatic and open when dealing with any issues that arise.
Is it a community? Using McMillan and Chavis (1986) well-regarded conceptualization of a sense of Community [1], I believe that it is. To varying degrees, I’m sure that there are:
- Feelings of membership – feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community;
- Feelings of influence – feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community;
- Integration and fulfillment of needs – feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them; and
- Shared emotional connection – feelings of relationships, shared history, and a “spirit” of community.
But I don’t think the list IS the community – a community has built around the list. It’s like Nancy said in her comments on my previous post: “the network holds the set of loose ties that allow community to emerge”. This has manifested in a number of ways for me.
I have built relationships with people I met at face-to-face events that are held regularly (State-based networks). Some of those people have become close business associates and dear friends. I’ve also done further training and personal development as a result of attending these meetings and understanding the pitfalls and personalities involved.
I am very much looking forward to attending the annual conference organised and attended by list participants and strengthening that sense of belonging to this community.
How the forum might benefit from facilitation services?
This is a tricky one to answer. Paradoxically, other facilitators can be difficult to facilitate. I think the community would benefit though, by having more co-ordinated events around particilar topics of interest or issues – perhaps in the form of an online conference or phone conference format. I know that there are currently shared resources, but I also think that the community would benefit from developing these further and developing a habit of referring to them and keeping them current – a wiki would provide a good platform.
1. Cited in Blogs as Virtual Communities by Anita Blanchard.
Blogging in a Fishbowl?
September 25, 2008A Personal Reflection on my Blog Network
I plan to divert a little from the assigned topic on blog networks for Week 7 of FOC08. This post will be a little longer than usual too. Please indulge me.
I’ve been blogging on an off since April, 2005. When contemplating this task, I began to reflect on my own experiences over the last three and a half years, and wonder whether my own blog is insular or part of some wider network.
In one sense, I feel that it’s quite insular – a lone voice in the ether where I add tid-bits of information and collect random thoughts. I wouldn’t be the first blogger to wonder: if a blog falls in the forest …
I’ve received only just more than a handful comments over this time. My blog doesn’t receive a lot of traffic – somewhere in the vicinity of 350 page views per month. And from what I can tell, there are just a few repeat visitors – mostly from some of my ‘real life’ friends like Nick and Marty. I guess this is in itself a small network or blogging community. It allows me to keep tabs on Nick as he is bobbing across the Atlantic and still feel someway connected to him. It also let’s me discover what delicious vegetarian recipes Marty has concocted and how his running is going.
On the other hand, I keenly feel how connected my blog has allowed me to be in a much wider network and community. As a direct result of blogging I have formed a number of significant relationships and joined a number of new networks.
Before I started blogging, I was following another of my ‘real-life’ friends Tony. He is friends with Johnnie and Hugh. From there, I started following other blogs and following threads that interested me. A lot of these are listed in my blogroll.
As a consequence of following, reading, absorbing, learning – I began to reorient my career towards the things I was becoming more interested in – the intersection of technology and the human side of business.
From Johnnie’s blog, I discovered Anecdote and
after reading and responding to a post on their blog, I ended up working with them. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think the Anecdote blog is one of the best examples of a niche business blog on the web. I witnessed first hand the power of building a community around that blog and the brand. I have learnt a great deal from reading it and from Shawn and Mark who write it.
My work with Anecdote extended my network and connections with other bloggers – like Nancy White, Patrick Lambe, James Robertson and Matt Moore whose work (and blogs) I admire a lot.
I was fortunate to be able catch up with Johnnie in person when he visited Melbourne on holidays recently. With Tony, we enjoyed a casual lunch by the river and chatted for a long while.
That meeting felt like a fateful event – like I’d come full circle and connected some loose ends.
Johnnie commented (I’m para-phrasing here and hopefully not talking out of step) that he also sensed a ‘community’ of like-minded people that share similar values about their work that have managed to make connections across the blogosphere. Relationships and connections which are complex, multi-dimensional, intertwined and have manifested in many different ways.
What we have by definition is the same social network: a social structure made of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, friendship etc.
I also find Downes’ argument compelling, and a useful way of describing the phenomenon that I’m trying to explain:
The community is the network. There is no centralized place that constitutes community, there are only people, and resources, that are distributed, that are all acting on their own behalf and in their own interests … where the network consists of a set of self-selected relations using a variety of contextual information … to establish meaning, and where this meaning not only defines the community but emerges from the community.
I also belong to the Melbourne blogging community. I use the term quite loosely here, but by following other local bloggers such as Cameron, Michael and others, I’ve ended up at a number of face-to-face meetings organised by other Melbourne bloggers and digital media folks and have met a lot of great people. Regular ‘community’ events take place, and I maintain contact with a number of people I’ve met through this network.
Of course, I also belong to a very big network or community of people who choose to blog – the
blogosphere. Getting philosophical: can we not agree as people, to be part of the whole? Quantumly aren’t we all related?
Blogging has also lead to my interest in using other tools and social media, del.icio.us, flickr, podcasts, facebook, twitter – each of which has increased the number of loose connections or weak ties that I have in my network. In turn, there have been many instances where these links have lead to participation in social events, conferences and work collaborations. Most importantly it has created interesting conversations.
When I pause to think about this, I find it quite amazing.
Buddha said: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
Through blogging, I guess I have made my own world. It has lead me to make fundamental changes to the work I do and the approach I take to it. It has also extended my personal and social network beyond the boundaries of where I was once comfortable. I am grateful for the opportunities it has afforded me and for the meaning it has created.
My Photo on Schmap
September 24, 2008Another one of my photos has been included in the newly released fifth edition of the Schmap Hobart Guide. It’s a picture of Eaglehawk Neck taken from the nearby lookout on our trip to Tasmania in Nov-2006. The original photo is on my flickr page. The other photo included is Adventure Bay.
I really get a kick out of seeing my photos included in stuff like this and the feeling that I’m contributing ‘value’ by being a producer rather than just a ‘consumer’ online.
My photos are released under a Creative Commons license, so people are free to use them with attribution.
Podcast on the Productivity Show
September 15, 2008It’s been a while coming, but the podcast I recorded with Tony way back in June is finally up!
In this episode, regular host of the Productivity Show Tony Goodson is in the hot seat! This was my first attempt on this side of the mic. Despite a nervous start where I sound like I’m on speed and a few mixed metaphors towards the end, I’m quite pleased with it – and really enjoyed doing it.
Download here. Show notes here.
Enjoy.
