Category: facilitation

From Addis Ababa to Las Vegas (catching up on trip reports!)

I started drafting this post on May 12th and here it is the 10th of July. But as you can see, this week is my “catch up on my bloggin” week. So be warned! What follows is my very  brief “catch up and report” on my Ethiopia trip. I’ll do a separate post on the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas that happened as the second leg of the trip.  You will notice that the text reads as  if it was written in May. Much of it was. Grin.

After a great week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I’m back in the USA (after 28 hours of travel!!) and in Las Vegas at Community 2.0 Conference . Talk about culture shock. From the streets of Addis, where the smell of Ethiopian coffee floats out across streets filled with people who are alternately desperately poor and begging, or part of the emerging middle class, to the surreal neon and hype of Las Vegas, my head is totally confused. Here is the Ethiopia part of the story.

The week in Addis was wonderful. I was there to co facilitate a face to face follow up workshop on Knowledges Sharing for the CGIAR. This came after a four week online workshop. Simone Stagier blogged a lot of the workshop sessions here.  Lots of pictures here.

I arrived on Saturday night on the same flight as one of our workshop participants, Pete Shelton. We had a brief stopover in Khartoum – wow, a dessert town in every sense of the word. Photos here. Then on to Addis. After a long wait for visa and passport control, we headed to the ILRI campus, our home for the next week. Ah, sleep.

Sunday Pete and I  went into town to the National Museum, the home of “Lucy” the oldest known human skeleton. We followed up with our first Ethiopian food (I now love Injera – in Ethiopia it has a tangier, sour-dough taste. I understand in US restaurants not everyone uses the teff grain) which was a great way to start the trip.

On Monday I met up with my co-facilitators, Simone Stagier and Petr Kosina  to do our prep. We decided to check and find out who had arrived and we had a little surprise. Three of our participants had also come in early and since they had to leave early, we created an impromptu session Monday afternoon. It is always good to remain flexible.

On Tuesday the workshop officially kicked off with a World Cafe, capturing the highlights of what we learned in the first online phase (4 weeks). In the room were 21 people passionate about knowledge sharing in international agricultural research. From Africa, Europe, Asia and the US, we spent the next three days working, eating, learning and playing together. As I always find, going from online to F2F totally jump starts both the personal interactions and the work. Plus being able to stay and meet on the campus created a great container for social interaction – for me a key to learning.

We covered a lot of territory on knowledge sharing tools and methods and each person worked to plan a knowledge sharing project at their home institution. As each person did and shared a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) on their projects, it was interesting to see that the most shared challenges were technical (connectivity in many of the countries where people are doing their work) and social (getting engagement in KS, especially in a research based culture that rewards formal publishing). It was a perfect reminder that we need to pay attention to both areas and that neither the implementation of a new tool, or the presentation of an opportunity easily triggers knowledge sharing.

Despite little connectivity during the workshop, we tried to share our collective learnings about tools. At the end of the workshop on the “still want to learn” list of many was “more tools.” We were told in advance that people in the networks we were targeting were not so interested in tools, but clearly this group was. We also used a variety of knowledge sharing methods and spent a lot of time talking about the social processes of tools, so I think we did a pretty good job keeping a “holistic” view of knowledge sharing.

Nancy and NadiaOn Saturday one of our local hosts, Nadia and her husband David took three of us out into town – a little sightseeing, coffee sipping and of course, some shopping. Thank goodness there are no ATMS and no credit cards, or I would have gotten carried away with beautiful jewelry, fabrics and lots of very cool rural farming artifacts (grain baskets, dairy gourds, etc). As it was, I was happy to contribute to the local economy.

As I left Addis that Saturday night, I was again reminded of the power of travel to open our eyes to new experiences and to help us see more clearly our own identity. Ethiopia is the fourth country in Africa I have visited, and a reminder of the diversity of the continent, something we American’s often lump together as “Africa.” From the high mountain geography, to the distinct Ethiopian culture, to the impact of colonialism from Italy and the Soviet Union, to the unique taste of the teff-based Injera.

Then there was Las Vegas. Mamma mia…

The World Cafe Community – Virtual Cafes?

There is a very interesting conversation buzzing around in various locations online about how to do World Cafes online. I am feeling tortured, because I’d like to be fully participating, but due to the “to do list” I’m watching from the side. I think there is much more here than looking at how to do World Cafe gatherings online, but in a larger sense, how do we best utilize convening methods from our F2F practices in a distributed environment – and all the juicy questions that go along with it. For me, some of the key questions include:

  • What methods can “translate” into an online space – why or why not? What do we even mean by “translate?”
  • Are we being strategic and clear about what method to use when – online or off. In other words, lets not do the “move our dysfunctional offline meetings into the online space.” The bottom line is creating interactions that matter – online or off.
  • What are the social implications?
  • What are the technical implications? Existing and potential tools (especially free or low cost tools)?

The main thread about virtual World Cafe’s is on the World Cafe’s community space here –> The World Cafe Community – Virtual Cafes?. Some other side shoots and resources:

Truly, I’d love a month to research this sort of thing and things like useful patterns and practices in online events… and so many other things. Maybe in December…. 🙂

Lessons from failure

A couple of months ago I got a call from Lisa Junker at the ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership. She wanted to interview me about failing as a learning strategy. Out of that comes this brief article ….Lessons from failure: Unexpected Impact – Associations Now Magazine /a>. The story referenced in the article is one I have blogged about here
 and here.

More on community management (part 3 or “what’s in a name”)

Otto's ear
Creative Commons License photo credit: os♥to
I hate titling these blog posts with the words “community management.” After writing post 1 and post 2 on this topic (triggered by Chris Brogan), the words just feel wrong. But because this is the label that has been floating across our blog conversations, I’m keeping it in as “connective tissue.” I was actually thinking about “The Giant Ear!”

So why am I writing a third post in three days on community management? (Instead of going for a walk this morning. Uh oh.) It is “in the air.” For those who have had a baby, it’s like once you get pregnant, all of a sudden you notice all the other pregnant women walking around town! Once you start putting blogging your ideas on something, you notice others who have thought/said/tickled around the same thing. The waves of blogging conversations about community management seem to be washing on the shore closer together these days.

While catching up on some feeds, I saw Matt Moore’s bit on
chief conversation officer.

Organisations need Social Media Relations people. And because of the participatory nature of the social media, these people will have to blog. And comment on other blogs. And Twitter. And all that other stuff. They will encourage, advise and look out for bloggers and social media headz in their own organisations. And they will have to believe in what their organisations do (be it curing cancer or causing it) or else they will get found out.

Everyone wants to be Chief Talking Officer. Who wants to be Chief Conversation Officer?

Hm. Matt is talking about something different than this animal we’ve been calling community manager, but some of the functions he lists hearken back to Chris’s list. But do you feel the dissonance that I do? Just the title “officer” shows us the polarities that we activate when trying to reconcile a network activity with a corporate structure.

Control <–> Emergence
Talking <–> Listening
Planned <–> Evolving
Being in charge <–> Being able to be an effective network actor

We are recognizing these polarities or tensions. (YAY!) They are showing up in thousands of blog posts and creeping into books. They emerge from deep roots and cannot be ignored or wished away. Yet it seems to be hard to talk about them within organizations and even the “job descriptions” we see more of every day. (Check the listing of online community manager blogs on Forum One’s site or on Jake McKee’s.)

Let’s make them discussable, and we can discover the way forward. Let’s discuss them — with every boss and leader who will listen. Let’s encourage the network around organizations to tell them how they feel about being managed – or listened to. Let’s find a way to use the power of the network for our organizations, and with it, the multiplied, nested power of the communities that live in and spring from the network. (Oh heck, I’m getting all riled up and haven’t even had a cup of tea this morning!)

To circle back to this idea of “community manager,” and what it is becoming in a network age, the first thing is to be brave enough discuss the idea that it may be “management” in the frame of business structures and some “older ways” of doing things, but in terms of the action in the network, it is not management as we know it. It is is about being connective tissue between an organization and the world/network it lives within. It is about activation, listening, pattern seeking and then bringing that back into the current context of the organization – at whatever stage that organization is in becoming a network organization. It is about reconciling that businesses, in their interaction with the world (customer, vendors, regulators) have opened the door to a new way of being in the system that requires more than management. More than measurable data. More than targets and goals. It requires intuition, intellect and heart.

Heart? Community Managers and HEART she says? INTUITION???

Yes. Heart and intuition, but not in the absence of intellect. Because systems include that beautiful, irrational, impulsive part of human life – emotion. “Community” and “network” both imply human beings. The person you entrust to guide and represent and help your organization learn – this person we have been calling the “community manager” – is your person who stewards your connection to both hearts and minds. Who listens with every available channel, including intuition. How do you measure your ROI on intuition? On heart? I’d ask, what are you losing every day by ignoring them.

So what would you call that role? Magician? The Giant Ear? Elder? I’m currently stumped.

(edited later for a silly typo)

Building a collaborative workplace (or community… or network)

rgg_20080315_134928
Creative Commons License photo credit: rgordon

A while back my friend and colleague Shawn Callahan asked me to pitch in with him and fellow Anecdote-ite Mark Schenk to write a paper on collaboration. It is out today on the Anecdote site –> Anecdote – Whitepapers – Building a collaborative workplace. From the introduction:

Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless.

Our challenge doesn’t stop there. An organisation’s ability to support collaboration is highly dependent on its own organisational culture. Some cultures foster collaboration while others stop it dead in its tracks.

To make matters worse, technology providers have convinced many organisations that they only need to purchase collaboration software to foster collaboration. There are many large organisations that have bought enterprise licences for products like IBM’s Collaboration Suite or Microsoft’s Solutions for Collaboration who are not getting good value for money, simply because people don’t know how to collaborate effectively or because their culture works against collaboration.

Of course technology plays an important role in effective collaboration. We are not anti-technology. Rather we want to help redress the balance and shift the emphasis from merely thinking about collaboration technology to thinking about collaboration skills, practices, technology and supporting culture. Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen.

This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay out a series of steps for developing a collaboration capability. We finish the paper with a simple test of your current collaboration capability.

I think the issue is beyond building a collaborative workplace. It applies to our communities and networks. But heck, starting with organizations is always worth a try, eh? 😉

While we were co-writing (using a Google doc) I started reading more about the differences between collaboration and cooperation – which we don’t address in the paper, but which are important. So I’ve noted that for future writing. If you are interested in Cooperation, don’t miss Howard Rheingold’s work on this.