Facilitation and Collaboration

I watched a “professional facilitator” absolutely waste 16 person-hours. The opportunity made me so mad, it took a while to figure out what I think.

Here’s what I think:

Unless you are working by yourself, you need enthusiastic buy-in from your team to get superior performance.

Taking time to get everyone on board is usually well worth the effort, and has often lifted my results beyond anything I understood when we started.

Facilitation is a set of tools and processes, which have little value unless the facilitator has a strong commitment to a result. Someone showing off their process is entertainment.

A facilitator who has a strong commitment to the results is an important part of the team. A facilitator who has an overriding commitment to facilitation is lost.

She who writes the agenda controls the meeting.

What do you think?

Learn about  Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16. 

Best Behavior

Jack and I were wasting time talking about how just when you create an overwhelming advantage, the game changes, rendering your advantage obsolete, from dinosaurs to asynchronous warfare. We looked at various leadership behaviors and the philosophies behind them, The Golden Rule, a little Game Theory, even Seth’s Game Theory.

Seems like the farther these theories get from practice, the more complicated they become. I suspect that is so when they don’t work, the inventor can say, “See, you missed paragraph 124, line 5!” as if that means anything.

We agreed that best behavior had to be small enough to be readily understood, easily applicable when we don’t know all of a situation, and communicable and believable by the winners in the organization.

Can’t be harnessed to a fantastic super-belief, has to make sense to the winners you meet.

Can’t be harnessed to a false ideal that doesn’t pay off regularly.

Can’t favor one side over another.

The success of this behavior has to be self evident to most observers.

Here’s our answer: Always behave as if a superior force is coming into play shortly.

When you have a process that works under those circumstances, you have something worth expanding.

Check out Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16. 

The Real Ruling Class

A couple years ago, I was invited to speak at a law firm about the advantages of blogging. People had questions and I had stories so we were doing pretty well. Finally, one associate who wasn’t getting the answers he wanted, said it was all hopeless. It was not legal for lawyers to blog! Disarray.

After that I worked with a handful of lawyers at other firms who didn’t know blogging was illegal, and they used social media to develop relationships and a lot of business.

A year ago I was working with some investment professionals about the advisability of blogging to improve their businesses. One of the less gruntled (and less successful) professionals couldn’t dissuade his group, so he finally dropped the “L” bomb. Although it had worked previously, this time he was judged a motley fool.

When a lawyer was advising his doctor clients to create an agreement that said patients could not discuss the value of service received using the internet, my car mechanic told me there was a law against that...something about “go take a flying garbled at a rolling donut.”

What started this post was a meeting I attended yesterday where a member of the government gave an impassioned explanation of why intelligence agencies could not benefit from social media tools. Since no one else in the room knew the facts, he was allowed to proceed with his opinion.

Yesterday I overheard a building inspector yelling at a maintenance worker. “Don’t call me until this has been looked at by the elevator man and the electrician!” Now there’s someone committed to providing a good solution.

I’m starting to see how many rules are made up by people who are covering their weakness, uttering magical thinking to hold back new opportunities. These are often middle-of-the-pack functionaries, scrambling to hold a disappearing advantage, who don’t use the tools being considered and don’t intend to figure out how they can best be applied. They have little interest or impact on improving performance. Before computing took over some of the repetitious drone work, they had secure positions. Now they are trying to get that back.

That same day, I was privileged to see Steve Wozniak keynoting at FOSE. The recurring theme I heard was how people develop expertise by making things, often on their own time, to understand how to apply new technologies.

That was the same story I heard five years ago, about the founding and implementation of Intelliwiki, the intelligence community’s collaborative intelligence tool. One of the founders, a green screen mainframe jockey, decided he would invest a free half day every week until he learned how to build and use one social tool. By his second session he had mastered several tools and was ready to launch his prototype.

Our previous computing era was “enterprise.” The current era I guess could be “cloud,” although people on the outside keep calling it “something 2.0.” If you want to provide value in this era, it won’t be by making up rules, withholding permission, or criticizing social tools. You have to build something. 

Learn about  Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16. 

Comments? 

The New Normal – Asynchronous Organizations

Years ago I was 'invited' to a weekly staff meeting at 8:00 AM Monday mornings. Eight people in a room for an hour – the equivalent of a person-day of time invested. Don't get me wrong – the meeting had useful, even important content and we all heard it together (the donuts were fresh too). When done we could carry our coffee cups back to our office and begin the day.

Convenient since we were all in the same location, but unfortunately travel could not begin before 10AM Monday nor could client meetings – almost without regard to the urgency of the need.

As technology improved and costs decreased, the meeting changed a bit to include others not physically present – staff off-site for travel, client meetings, or in other offices (the 5:00 AM West Coaster meeting from home was a classic). However, it continued to occupy all participants simultaneously.

Now in my organization there are 5 key individuals, no staff meetings, and a greater degree of communications, planning, and coordination (volume of donuts, however, is sparse). This is an asynchronous organization – it has no central office, locations in three states, and each individual is strategically engaged and briefed on all projects.

Updates, output, project results, and other such results documents, are copied to all 5 key people when written. As needed a phone call between two of us will cover updates, problem solving, scheduling, idea exploration, and closure on pending items in under an hour. Before lunch notes from the from the meeting – and action items – are distilled and distributed.

The success of the communications is based on the receipt not scheduling, each individual can access and respond when best able to do so. An asynchronous approach.

How does it work in practice? Recently I was suddenly called away for a family emergency and had a presentation scheduled later the same day. With a two minute call on the run to my partner Dick, he could step in with all program resources and the presentation concluded to enthusiastic applause.

Cory Doctorow in his book Makers describes a future world with a much greater degree of coordinated independent activity – a truly asynch environment in which business can successfully operate and thrive. Individuals satisfying consumer needs and getting results individually or in concert with others adding value as well.

The New Normal is being built on this foundation in reality – not as fiction. Look around and you can see the growing evidence.

Do you see it too?

Check out Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16.

School Of Blogging

Fred Wilson of AVC – Musings of a VC In NYC has a great post, The Fred Wilson School of Blogging. He has old truths and new ideas, and details to check to make sure I am doing them.

Then I started to think about my School of Blogging. I’ve convinced a number of smart people to start (and continue) blogging. I think that Fred is more expert, my posse more experimental, discovering and implementing new things with every post.

I don’t think my school requires “rules” as I am already busy with my day job. Targets or milestones are better things for me to measure against, because once I have achieved them, I can go on to other things.

I experienced the awesome power of infrequent blogging during a previous project, and afterward set a goal of two posts per week. That was pure declaration. I didn’t know if I could, or what they would be, but either I could do two a week or I couldn’t. Turns out I have.

Next question was, “What is a blog post?” Early on a reader sent a comment, “I understand your short posts better,” so that became important.

I figure the target is ten sentences/five paragraphs. If I go longer or shorter, fine, but the target is ten and five.

What to write about? That is my biggest challenge. I have ideas all the time, so to harness some, I decided to write all my ideas in my regular notebook, red ink when I have it, so I have an inventory. It’s not uncommon for two or three ideas to come together for one post.

Keith Richards noted how when he admitted to himself he was a song writer, he became a sharper observer of what was around him. Still a player, but now also an observer.

I want to be positive. I proved to myself a long time ago, there is no solution in the negative, or at least I don’t have much interest in being a part of it. I find that when I am upset, if I take some time and look at what I’m upset about, I can often find a positive expression, which often leads to the value of the post. Ted Anderson writes, “Wartime is only, the other side of peacetime”

I also want to write about things that really happened. I can convince myself of way too much theoretically, and if I describe something that occurred, I won’t forget something basic, like gravity, which has been a loud limiter for many theoretical builders.

Finally, I was sitting in the audience at the Web Managers Roundtable when Jim Sterne asked, “Do you want to control the platform or the conversation?” I thought it was an excellent question, along the lines of Dana’s distinction about journalists and publishers. I decided to syndicate off my own platforms to other outlets. I personally choose to emphasize outlets where I have been a member, held office, or performed, so I imagine I’m posting to a familiar audience.

What are some of the targets or milestones you’ve made for your School of Blogging?

Check out Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16.