Category: collaboration

Fish Bowling, Solo Galaxies and Free Writing in Holland

Note: I’m working a back log of “draft posts” that have yet to see the light of day. This is one from my trip to the Netherlands in December!)

Just a quick post from the Netherlands where I’ve been working with the fabulous Marc Coenders on an evaluation project for ICCO and it’s ComPart “project.” It has been lovely to work with the Compart team of Maarten Boers, Pier Adrea Pirani and Pete Cranston (the last two from Euforic Services and old KM4Dev pals.) It was a bit like “old home week” to use an American expression. The work has been fascinating, intense and challenging. The key word that keeps coming to me is fractal. Just when we get to one moment of understanding, things tilt just a bit and a new pattern slips in shifting things again. This is great for meaning making, not so great for finishing an evaluation report! 😉 It reminds us that we are working in a complex environment and if we are to succeed, we have to work with emergence. (See Peggy Holman’s terrific book, Engaging Emergence). We expect to be able to share the evaluation early in 2011 after the team has had time to absorb the findings!

As a little “side benefit,” Maarten Boers of ICCO hosted a borrel, or gathering for the knowledge sharing/KM/social media types in the area at the end of the day, some from my dear old KM4Dev network. It had been a long and intense day of meetings, plus silly me managed to catch quite a bad cold, complete with fever, etc. So I was really pushing my physical limits.

We planned a Fish Bowl for the borrel focusing on the interplay between organiztional change and technology, springing off of the evaluation work at ICCO with their “ComPart way of working.” I was greatful to be able to mostly listen from the outside of the fish bowl and took copious notes, some of which I’ll put below.

But I have to say, there were a few funny, wonderful moments when we, most of whom were working both in a second language and from a very tired state, misheard things and we created something new (and funny) out of it.

  • What about “solo galaxies,” misheard from “solidarity.” Earlier in the day I was taking notes on the flip chart and I thought, hm, what a unique thing. Did that mean someone was really working in isolation, a “one star galaxy?”
  • We have the fish bowl method, but what comes to mind when you say “fish bowling?” Who is bowling? Are the fish the pins? My visual imagination went crazy.
  • Later during the conversation I brought up the concept of “free riding” in networks and communities and how do we distinguish this from legitimate peripheral participation. Some one wanted to know what writing had to do with it and wasn’t free writing good for getting past writer’s block?

I love this stuff.

Anyway, here are the notes — there are some terrific one-liners. I apologize for not catching who said what, nor for having a list of participants. Not such great network weaving on my part!

On December 9th a group of practitioners joined up at ICCO’s headquarters in Utrecht, the Netherlands for an informal borrel (drinks) and conversation about the interaction between organizational change and technology. We used a “Samoan circle” variation of the fishbowl process, starting with ICCO’s ComPart team (originators of a new way of working and a wiki-centric platform of tools) sitting with evaluator and learning consultant, Marc Coenders. As the other evaluator, I (Nancy White) started on the outside and took very random notes… these are far from complete or fully accurate, but reflect the things that caught my interest. And of course the notes reflect nothing I said when I stepped into the fish bowl. Heh!

  • Disruption <–> Opportunity
  • ComPart’s original motivation – learning networking, but that wasn’t actually where things went
  • Learning can bring discomfort (my question, do we make that discomfort visible and discussable?)
  • “It is good if you like a lovely, really rocky ride” Pete Cranston
  • Introducing a suite of web 2 tools is different than when we introduced email into our organizations. yet both changed our organizations.  With Compart and web2, tools are always/quickly evolving. Faster, more complex vortex of change as tools impact organizations and organizations shape tools.
  • Some teams took to the ComPart way – “just flew” – others did not (Why?)
  • Start with need or start with tool exposure and find needs? (or both?)
  • “No one is waiting for tools” and “everyone is waiting for a solution” and “if you don’t know what a wiki is and how to use it, you won’t ask for it.”
  • Finding the balance between the polarity of “demand” and “offer.”
  • The organizational level is too big and generalized to be the locus for focus. (Locus focus? Hocus pocas? Yes, I was tired.)
  • The beginning of ComPart showed possibilities more broadly. Now need to narrow.
  • What are the cost/benefits with respect to tool and process adoption?
  • People like to ask a colleague how to use a new tool.
  • Impact of new tools and processes spread beyond the actual users
    • what is the ‘ripple’ impact?
    • is this a form of ‘legitimate peripheral participation?’
    • is this a form of free riding? (Tragedy of the commons)
    • what does technological peripheral participation look like? Do for people?
    • is this related to the problem of “you do this for me” or “we do this for us”?
    • what is obligation of employer?
  • Point to ODI’s six functions of a network.
  • How do we take into account the expense/value of facilitation (budget)?
    • rhythm of pumping the “knowledge heart beat”
    • mandate (which people resist) and voluntary (which people deprioritise)
    • is “particpation” just more jargon these days?
  • To take seriously, and to seriously involve.
  • Mandatory stuff –> unconcious, power politics, fragmentation
  • Face the truth sooner when things are/aren’t working and respond versus sticking to your plan.
    • Do NGOs do this less often than businesses?
  • Go where there is interest.
  • Role of leadership – walk the talk, model collaboration. If leadership does not have comfort wading into new tools and practices, not likely organization will fully move tere.
  • Lack of clarity of what our “partners” really need or want, all the while we talk about putting them i the center.
    • In the ComPart learning history, it was noted that in the early days it was difficult to even get names of partners to contact.
    • Negotiating with internal/external boundaries is tricky
  • How do we relate internal learning networks to external related networks?
    • tap into existing communities before creating own
    • intrinsic value of both inside and outside communities, but caution of overload and overlap
  • Individuals often have their own “eccentric” routings to get to knowledge that are useful for them, but foreign to others and hard to share w/ others.
    • how they negotiate boundaries is also individual
  • What is the role here for network weaving?
  • “Empherality is ok”
  • personal and professional motivation
  • What if ICCO celebrated the learning that came from the “inssurection” of ComPart?
    • “inovation always starts bottom up” (the guy in the blue sweater)
    • sooner or later management gets involved for positive or negative reasons
    • that’s how organizations learn
  • How to recognize when we are “in over our heads” and not make wrong headed moves
  • Watch for experiments that are “too high risk”
  • “Most ICT programs fail due to lack of user participation and lack of WIFM (whats in it for me)/motivation

What Suzie and I Learned (or what a puppet can teach you!)

You never know what life will bring you. The trick is to say “yes,” and then hold on tight for the ride.

This post started in October when I was at  the CommunityMatters conference. I was running a super short Twitter workshop when Vicki Eibner piped up with a challenge. She herself wasn’t so interested in using Twitter, but there was someone important in her life that might be a match. In fact, this person’s friends were pleading for updates. Suzie. Suzie is pink, with big beautiful eyes and a colorful, ever changing wardrobe. Yes, Suzie is a puppet. (She may disagree, though, so don’t be surprised.)

Suzie, it seems, has a global network that cares about what she’s up to. As a bright pink puppet, age 7 (which is, I learned, 29 in puppet years) people are drawn to her like the proverbial moths to a flame (or me to chocolate!). Suzie’s friends are online and want updates. But Vicki hadn’t crossed that threshold– not so sure she was ready to help. Her question was right in line with the close of the Twitter session – do a small, time delimited experiment with a new tool, debrief it half way and adjust, then at the end, decide what to keep doing and what to chuck out. And most important, have a purpose in mind. I offered to sit down with Vicki and Suzie and think through such an experiment and get Suzie’s account set up. All this was done in three voices, Vicki’s, mine and Suzie’s.I said, let’s do a little peer coaching session and get Suzie signed up. Vicki said, “I’ll go get her out of the car.” And so we began.

So what do you do when you offer to teach social media to a pink puppet named Suzie? I had no idea, but an hour later, Suzie on her lap, Vicki, Suzie and I began.Suzie and I hit it off right away. A spirit of playfulness, dropping of self consciousness and some balancing of laptops and puppets and away we went.Vicki and I did the initial set up – taking care of account validation, but then we got to the interesting stuff. What does one tweet to the world? What was useful to others, to weaving a network? What was of little value or even inappropriate in the wide open medium of unprotected text?

Suzie found and added some of the people she knew into her Twitter account. We had so much fun, we actually decided to do a second session and video tape it as a simple introduction to Twitter. I can’t wait until the Orton Foundation folks can get that video up. We watched it and even at a long 15 minutes, it felt pretty fun and flew by. Who’d have “thunkit?”

As always, I walked away with learning as well. When we work for clarity, simplicity and fun, even some of the twisted bits of social media become a little clearer. Ask Suzie, she’ll tell you! Give her a Tweet. She’s been quiet on Twitter, and I think the network can use her energy!

Questions: a thread through current work

Life has been a whirlwind of work. Keynote and workshops for the Girl Scouts of America Leadership and Development Conference,  iterative design work on a bunch of client projects, from planning to post-event evaluation, a large global e-consultation followed by a large face to face decision making meeting, and coming up this week a lovely two day graphic recording/facilitation workshop up in the mountains of Central British Columbia.

While whirlwinds are deep experiential times, they leave little for reflection (including blogging). This morning I took a few moments before ramping up to full production mode and I was skimming my blog feeds.

I love Palojono, the blog of Jono,  a designer who is a great writer and visual thinker.Jono helped me reflect, to see the thread through my current work. My practice right now is very focused on using questions. We have really spent a lot of time designing the questions that sit underneath consultations and meetings. I build questions into my talks. Thank you Jono, and here are some of your tips I’d like to share out and amplify with my network. His are related to giving a talk, but as I read them, I could easily pull them into other contexts.

via palojono: Asking great questions at talks.

Great questions…
1. Build a relationship between you and the speaker
A good question is an effective way of telling someone, yes, I get it, and what’s more this is interesting to me. It allows them to recognize you and increases the chance and ease of meeting up after a talk to discuss in more depth through the common ground created.
2. Let other’s know who you are
Asking a question in a room of strangers is an opportunity to share a little of yourself, what you’re interested in, who you are, and what you know about the subject. On many occasions, strangers have introduced themselves to me after a talk simply because I asked a question. In case you can’t tell, I think great questions are a great networking tool. (Nancy’s Note: relationships, trust, “entry doors…”)
3. Start conversations
In very many talks there is as much to be learned from the audience as the speaker. Asking a great question invites others to chime in and start a natural dialogue that is often more revealing than any prepared presentation. (Nancy’s NoteThen shut up and listen! ListenNote?)
4. Buy others time
There are many times when the bell sounds on a talk and “Any questions?” shoots round the room before I’ve barely had a chance to process the last thing that was said. A first question plays the invaluable role of giving others a little chance to think about what they want to ask once the speaker has finished. Sometimes we just need a little processing time before we’re ready to share. (Nancy’s Note: the basis of improvisation – make the other person look good!)
5. Relate the content to what you care about
Questions beget answers. Many people forget that a question of a speaker really allows you to learn an answer to your situation. When it’s a talented and experienced speaker it’s really an incredible opportunity. A great question plays the useful function of steering the talk towards what’s more relevant to you. (Nancy’s Note: from a communities of practice perspective, this hooks into the importance of finding shared domain!)
6. Force you to engage in the talk
Challenging yourself to think of great questions also forces you to think through the content of the talk and compare it to what you already know. It’s too easy to let a good talk wash over you, and a bad talk not even enter. I typically write a big question mark in the corner of my page at the start of a talk and use it as the seed for a question mindmap. Setting myself the responsibility of asking a great question means I not only have to pay attention, but I have to think critically about the talk all the way through. What a great cheap way to max out your value.

Suggested Readings in Complexity and Systems Thinking?

A couple of weeks ago I shared the link to Donella Meadow’s seminal essay, Places to Intervene in a System. This was in the context of moving our perspective of some work from a linear progression to something complex.

She found the essay useful and asked “what basic readings would you suggest to follow up  learning about complexity.”

Well, I know enough to be dangerous in this area, rather than useful. So I turned to my network and asked for recommendations for suggested readings in complexity and systems thinking. I created a simple Google form that feeds into a Google spreadsheet. Then I tweeted out the request. Today there are over 25 entries, books both familiar and new to me. And from people who care about this topic.

First, I want to thank all the people who have and who continue to add to this resource:

If you want to see or add to the resource, Suggested Readings in Complexity and Systems Thinking takes you to the spreadsheet to view. Below is the form to fill in if you have a suggestion. (Edit – just a screen shot. I forgot WP does not allow iframe! To fill out the form please go  here.) If you leave me a comment, I can also add you to edit the spreadsheet directly if you would like.

Now my next step is to create a reading path through these, to build, and expand versus overwhelm us, the readers! Ideas? How would you navigate and why?

Later PS: Just saw this Tweet from Alice and it is sooo relevant: